Learning on The Job: School Principal’s Tacit Knowledge for Leadership

The study addressed leadership knowledge sharing among elementary school principals. School principals’ comments regarding difficulty sharing what they have learned on the job about leadership gave impetus to investigating components of leadership that are not readily shared. Their comments implied both limited opportunities and limited language for sharing an implicit component of their leadership knowledge. Educational parlance apparently did not adequately reflect experientially-based leadership strategies valued by practitioners. Drawing from the knowledge management literature, we applied theoretical concepts of tacit knowledge for leadership to sixteen elementary school principal’s narrative accounts of leadership strategies learned on the job for achieving educational goals. Scrutiny of the narrative accounts yielded sixty-seven examples of principal’s tacit leadership knowledge, coded into a common format for sharing with peers. Cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling yielded five clusters of tacit leadership knowledge, represented in visual maps to illustrate the clusters. The study reported evidence that elementary school principals were learning on the job how to (1) Promote Schoolwide Practices, (2) Diminish Conflict and Build Trust, (3) Employ Student Data to Improve Student Outcomes, (4) Set and Support Expectations That All Children Can Learn and (5) Adopt Promising Practices. Examples of principal’s tacit leadership thinking and practical actions were recorded for each cluster. The study was limited by a narrow scope, absence of longitudinal perspective and a demonstrated link between tacit knowledge and student outcomes. The study offered a pathway for principals to share leadership knowledge and for organizations to share local leadership knowledge among communities of professionals.