School Implementation Leadership Scale (SILS)
Category: Teacher and Leader Development
Over the past decade, reforms to principal evaluation systems have sought to incorporate formal feedback structures as a lever for principal improvement. However, we know little about the feedback that principals receive. Using statewide administrative data from Tennessee, including principals’ written feedback from evaluators, we use sentiment analysis to uncover the affective language, or tone, of principals’ feedback, and examine differences in affective language based on principal gender and race. We find that the affective language of refinement feedback (constructive feedback) largely resembles that of reinforcement feedback (affirmative feedback) and that female principals receive reinforcement feedback with less positive affective language relative to observably similar male principals. We also find some suggestive evidence that Black principals receive refinement feedback that is less positive in tone than the feedback to their white peers. We conclude with implications for policy and practice and suggestions for future work.
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/hb5n-me49
