Paper presented at a AERA funded conference at University of Canberra on "Cross-national explorations of principals' time use: patterns, casuses and effects" (01 August 2016).

1. Social Media and your
research profile
Dr Scott Eacott
Office of Educational Leadership
School of Education
The University of New South Wales
Theoretical notes on a relational approach to principals’ time use
Scott Eacott

2. Introduction
• A temporal turn in the social sciences
• Taylorism | Fordist models of management
• Beyond substantialist to relational
@ScottEacott

3. OUR RELATIONS WITH TIME
Ontological complicity
@ScottEacott

4. Eacott (2013)
What we have come to know as the school
and the administration of schooling is
constituted through the operationalization
and privileging of clock time. The temporal
rules of schooling construct the school day,
terms, semesters, the school year, class
schedules and the notion of progression
based on time. (p.96)
@ScottEacott

5. My intervention
• The current problems with principals’ time
use concern a crisis of temporality
• The relational research program provides
the resources to help us understand this
crisis of temporality
@ScottEacott

6. FROM TIME TO TEMPORALITY
Problematizing foundations
@ScottEacott

7. Grissom, Loeb & Matini (2015)
@ScottEacott
… principals must make decisions about how to
allocate their time among competing job
demands. These time-use decisions are
important for effective leadership, as evidenced
by the relationship between principal time use
and school outcomes (e.g., Grissom et al., 2013;
Horng et al., 2010). (p. 774)

8. SPATIO-TEMPORAL
CONDITIONS
Locating trajectories
@ScottEacott

9. Grissom, Loeb & Master (2013)
@ScottEacott
The time-use and survey measures that we may
use indicate that the allocation of principal
instructional time matters, but it is possible that
these measures are proxies for the skills and
behaviors that different principals bring to the
tale when trying to support teachers
instructionally. It may be these differences in
skills and not the time use that actually cause
the school outcomes observed. (p. 442)

10. Re-thinking “context”
1. Context (social structure) → practice
2. Practice (agency) → context (social structures)
3. Practice (agency) ↔ context (social structures)
4. Context (social structures) → (+/-) practice
(agency) → transformed or reproduced
@ScottEacott

11. To overcome the epistemic imperialism of a
Western version of temporality, a cross-national
exploration of principals’ time use would need to
balance the particular experiences of the
temporal without assuming one version and a
consistency in data generation.
@ScottEacott

12. Conclusion
• An absence of theoretical crisis
• Embrace the temporal
• An alternative to clock time
• Privilege how principals experience the
temporal
@ScottEacott

13. Dialogue and Debate
Paper presented to:
AERA Funded Conference
Cross-national explorations of principals’ time use: patterns,
causes and effects
Ann Harding Conference Centre
University of Canberra
ACT AUSTRALIA
01 August 2016
@ScottEacott

14. Contact Details
Dr Scott Eacott
PhD MLMEd GradCertPTT BTeach/BSocSci FACEL
Director, Office of Educational Leadership
School of Education
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW AUSTRALIA 2052
P: +61 2 9385 0704
T: @ScottEacott
E: s.eacott@unsw.edu.au
W: http://scotteacott.com
@ScottEacott