Special educators serving students with emotional/behavioral disorders (EBD) depend on their principals’ support, yet prior research has not explored principals’ roles in supporting these programs. Using constructivist grounded theory methods, we analyzed interviews with five elementary school principals about their roles in supporting self-contained programs for students with EBD. Principals held widely varying conceptions of students with EBD, visions for their program, and understandings of their own roles and responsibilities for their programs; collectively, interactions among these gave rise to principals’ senses of agency, both for the program’s capacity to be a causal agent in promoting student growth and their own capacity, as leaders, to improve the program. Our findings indicate the centrality of principals’ conceptions of EBD for how they support self-contained programs for students with EBD, which has important implications for future research and practice regarding principal leadership for special education.

中文翻译：

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校长对于支持有情绪/行为障碍的学生的独立项目的角色的看法

为患有情绪/行为障碍 (EBD) 的学生提供服务的特殊教育工作者依赖于校长的支持，但之前的研究尚未探讨校长在支持这些项目中的作用。我们使用建构主义扎根理论方法，分析了对五位小学校长的采访，了解他们在支持 EBD 学生独立项目方面的作用。校长们对 EBD 学生的看法、对项目的愿景以及对自己项目角色和责任的理解存在很大差异；总的来说，这些因素之间的相互作用产生了校长的代理意识，既因为该项目有能力成为促进学生成长的因果代理人，也因为他们自己作为领导者有能力改进该项目。我们的研究结果表明，校长的 EBD 概念对于如何支持 EBD 学生的独立项目至关重要，这对未来有关特殊教育校长领导力的研究和实践具有重要意义。