Principals' Learning Mechanisms: Exploring an Emerging Construct

This exploration of principal learning mechanisms (PLM) to support a learning-centered school aimed to develop, field-test, and validate a PLM-measuring instrument. Following exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of items to examine factorial validity, the developed scale was correlated with other work-related established constructs (e.g., principal's instructional leadership, teacher's organizational commitment). Findings revealed that the four-factor model (Storing and retrieving, Receiving, Disseminating, and Analyzing) was the best fit between the empirical results and the conceptual formulation. The PLM may prove an efficient tool for principals to assess how to promote learning in and by the organization.