Digital instructional leadership and teaching practices in an emergency context: Evidence from Italy

With the COVID-19 pandemic, students around the world faced a disruption of unprecedented intensity. In Italy as in many other countries, for several months emergency remote teaching was the only possible form of schooling. The impacts of the COVID-19 on student achievement could be heterogeneous, depending notably on teachers’ digital instructional practices. Moreover, it was also possible that school principals’ approach to digital instructional leadership would have an impact on student outcomes. In this article, we explore these impacts using a two-level latent class analysis on a representative survey of primary and middle schools at the national level. We begin by analyzing how teachers and principals can be grouped on the basis of their instructional approach and practices during the pandemic, and examine the interaction between the two roles within schools. In the second step, by linking our survey to INVALSI standardized test scores in 2021, we analyze teachers’ and principals’ practices during the emergency on student academic performance. Our results highlight that teachers who were particularly involved in relations and communication with staff and students were (a) more likely to have highly involved principals and (b) associated with better student performance in mathematics one year later.