Abstract
Purpose. The purpose of this single-case study was to explore principals' perceptions of self-efficacy beliefs as effective instructional leaders during a period of educational transition in a semiurban, unified school district in Southern California. Methodology. The researcher used exploratory case study, conducting semistructured, open-ended, interviews in private settings, eliciting principals' self-efficacy perceptions. The researcher interviewed eight principals, elementary through high school, using a social constructivist interpretive framework. Findings. The theoretical framework was Bandura's theories of agency, efficacy, and alignment to The Wallace Foundation's research of effective leadership practices. The following eight broad areas indicate how principals' self-efficacy impacts student achievement and how environment influences principals' self-efficacy: This is significant change, having a process will help, collaborate to get the best ideas, data informs and has many formats, everything is new, principals need support too, principals maintain a vision, and determining meaningful feedback. Conclusions. This study led to recommendations supporting principal efficacy and aligning to The Wallace Foundation's research on effective leadership practices, revealing the need for improving data-informed decision making, defining evidence-based classroom practices with monitoring and support, establishing external-internal teams to build leadership around effective practices, creating intradistrict principal networks fostering collaboration and growth, and developing multisource feedback instruments for evaluation and leadership development. Recommendations. Principal efficacy remains important based on the conclusions. Future research should explore structured principal learning networks' impact on efficacy, relationships between new accountability models and principals' self-efficacy, longitudinal impact on professional standards for educational leaders on efficacy, and relationships between efficacy and multisource evaluative feedback assessments.