Inside My Doctoral Research: How Alberta School Principals Make Difficult Decisions

Publication overview. This post introduces the original doctoral study and its research contributions. For the complete research design, findings, and scholarly context, consult the dissertation in University of Saskatchewan HARVEST.

Principals are often expected to be confident decision-makers. They are asked to interpret policy, respond to families, support staff, protect students, balance resources, and provide a direction when the right answer is anything but obvious.

Yet much conventional advice about leadership decisions makes the process look remarkably tidy. Gather information. Consider alternatives. Select the best option. Implement. Evaluate.

That sequence can be useful, but it does not fully explain what happens when each available option carries a moral or relational consequence, when the context changes while you are deciding, or when the people who must implement the decision are already operating at their limit.

Those realities motivated my doctoral inquiry. Rather than beginning with the assumption that effective decision-making follows a single universal process, I wanted to understand how principals actually make meaning of the work.

Why this question mattered

If a school principal is asked to explain an important decision after the fact, the explanation can sound more orderly than the experience itself. An event occurred, information was collected, a policy was consulted, and a response followed. The account may be accurate as far as it goes. But it can omit the hesitation, competing obligations, informal conversations, uncertainty, and emotional responsibility that surrounded the decision before an answer became visible.

This difference between the official explanation and the lived process is important. Principals do not work with detached, abstract problems. They work with people. A staffing question involves colleagues and relationships. A student-support issue involves families, professional judgment, and confidentiality. A division initiative can be both educationally promising and difficult to implement within the capacity of a school. The action ultimately chosen may be only one small part of a much larger leadership experience.

The research therefore began with a concern about what conventional descriptions of decision-making might leave out. Rational or technical approaches can clarify responsibilities and make decisions accountable, but they risk oversimplifying situations where there are several reasonable interpretations and no consequence-free response. The study sought a richer account of how principals understand that complexity while making real decisions inside a public education system.

That focus also has implications for the way we prepare school leaders. If professional learning emphasizes only the visible choice, we may fail to develop the judgment, relational awareness, and capacity needed to carry it through. Studying the process underneath a decision helps us ask better questions about the work of leadership itself.

The research question behind the study

The study examined the decision-making process of Alberta public school principals. Its central interest was not whether an external observer would rank one principal’s choice above another’s, but how leaders themselves interpret competing responsibilities, constraints, expectations, and consequences.

That distinction matters. The aim was not to build a test that predicts the ‘correct’ decision. It was to understand a complex professional experience from the perspective of people doing the work.

Understanding the principalship as a particular context

The Alberta public school principalship is an important setting for this inquiry because the principal sits at the intersection of organizational direction and local school life. School divisions set expectations, allocate resources, and interpret system priorities. Teachers and support staff translate those expectations into daily practice. Families and communities bring expectations shaped by their own experiences. Students experience the consequences, often without seeing the decisions that produced them.

The principal’s position within that ecology means a decision may be judged by several audiences using different standards. A system might ask whether requirements were met. A staff member might ask whether the workload is realistic. A family might ask whether their child was treated fairly. The principal may have to consider all three questions, even when none provides a complete answer.

This was not a study of the principal as an isolated heroic decision-maker. It was an inquiry into professional judgment situated inside relationships, institutional responsibilities, and changing circumstances. The aim was to understand the realities described by participants, not to prescribe how every principal should behave.

Who participated, and how the research was conducted

Twelve public school principals participated, representing all six College of Alberta School Superintendents zones. Participants came from two experience brackets: those with one to five years as a principal and those with ten or more years.

The study used a qualitative single-case design informed by constructivist and interpretive perspectives. Data generation took place in three stages.

• Mind maps: Participants represented how they understood decision-making and the relationships among the forces affecting it.
• Semi-structured interviews: Individual conversations offered opportunities to explore experiences, tensions, judgments, and meaning in more depth.
• Focus group: A follow-up group conversation supported interpretive resonance testing and further discussion as the analysis developed.

The data were examined through reflexive thematic analysis, with iterative engagement with participants’ accounts and the patterns that emerged. The resulting five themes are interpretive findings from this case study, not measurements of how much weight every principal gives to a particular influence.

---

Why the research used three connected stages

Beginning with what principals could represent visually

Mind maps offered participants a way to represent the process before they were asked to describe it in a conventional interview format. A map can surface connections, loops, and clusters that a chronological story may conceal. For example, policy and relationships may appear together rather than as separate stages. A principal might revisit a value repeatedly rather than consider it only at the beginning.

The maps were not interpreted as quantitative scores or perfect replicas of participants’ thinking. Their value came from opening a different window onto the connections principals perceived. They created a basis for further inquiry into the decisions and pressures that mattered to them.

Using interviews to explore meaning and experience

Semi-structured interviews created space to ask what the mapped connections meant in lived practice. They allowed the inquiry to move beyond the names of factors into the significance of those factors: what a principal noticed, how the situation was interpreted, what changed, and where the moral or relational weight was carried.

The semi-structured approach offered direction without requiring every participant’s account to fit an identical sequence of answers. That matters in interpretive research because the complexity of one leader’s experience may not be visible in another’s terms. The method was intended to deepen understanding, not standardize each account into a numerical profile.

Returning to participants through a focus group

The follow-up focus group offered an opportunity to discuss the emerging interpretations and assess their resonance with the professional realities participants understood. This is better described as interpretive resonance testing than as an assertion that a focus group objectively proves a theme to be true.

Group discussion also reflects an important feature of leadership learning: a person’s interpretation may become clearer, or more complicated, when placed beside someone else’s account. Differences need not be treated as failures in the analysis. They can illuminate how context, experience, and perspective shape the meanings people give to decisions.

How patterns became themes

The analysis used reflexive thematic analysis alongside iterative first- and second-cycle coding structures informed by Saldaña. Coding supported engagement with the data, but the eventual themes were not simply the five most frequently mentioned words or the results of an automated tally.

The researcher makes interpretive judgments about what patterns mean and how they connect to the research question. A reflexive approach acknowledges that analysis is an active process requiring careful attention to evidence, context, and one’s own assumptions. The five themes are therefore developed interpretations of the case, not a claim that every participant used the same language or reached identical conclusions.

Taken together, the three stages helped create a more layered account: how principals initially represented decision-making, how they described particular experiences, and how the developing interpretation resonated in further discussion.

Five interconnected findings

How to read the five themes

The five findings should not be read as steps, personality types, or five independent causes that can be added together. They describe interconnected dimensions of decision-making. A single moment may involve several at once. The balance can change as relationships shift, deadlines approach, and new information emerges.

A further distinction matters: the study identified patterns in participants’ accounts. The questions that follow each theme are my practical translations for leaders who want to reflect on their own work. Those questions are not items from a scientifically validated inventory, and the hypothetical situations below are not disguised accounts of participants.

01. Moral labour: decisions carry ethical and emotional weight

Principals can be accountable to several legitimate obligations at once: the wellbeing of students, responsibilities to staff, relationships with families, organizational requirements, and their own professional commitments. Some choices create a residue of concern even when the action is procedurally justified.

The theme of moral labour helps explain why leading cannot be reduced to executing policy. The decision-maker may still have to live with what could not be protected.

Consider a principal deciding how to respond to a situation where a student’s needs, a teacher’s professional judgment, and a parent’s expectations all matter. The principal may be able to identify a procedurally defensible response, yet still feel uneasy about whose needs cannot be fully addressed. The lingering unease should not automatically be interpreted as poor judgment. It can be part of the moral work of acknowledging that the situation involves real people and imperfect options.

A useful way to apply this finding is to separate two questions that are often collapsed: Is the action permitted or required? and What ethical responsibilities remain even after that question has been answered? The second question keeps the leader attentive to dignity, explanation, repair, and follow-through.

This also complicates the idea that experienced principals should always become emotionally unaffected by difficult choices. Emotional awareness and professional responsibility can coexist. The goal is not to romanticize distress, but to recognize that leaders may need support and reflection when they carry decisions with moral consequences.

02. Relational legitimacy: authority is not the same as trust

Formal position can authorize a decision. Relationships strongly shape whether people understand it as fair, credible, and worthy of engagement.

A principal may need to consider not only what action to take, but also who has been heard, how the reasoning will be communicated, and what will happen to trust afterward. This relational dimension does not disappear simply because the procedure was followed.

Imagine a school initiative that is clearly authorized and aligned with division expectations. Staff may still hesitate because previous changes were introduced without sufficient consultation. A principal could technically implement the initiative on schedule while losing the confidence needed to make it work. The problem is not only communication after the decision. It is the relationship between the way a decision is reached and how it is experienced.

Relational legitimacy therefore calls for more than asking people whether they agree. Leaders also need to consider the quality of engagement, whether concerns can influence implementation, and whether those who disagree can see the decision as reasoned rather than arbitrary.

Trust does not mean universal approval, and consultation does not mean surrendering every decision to consensus. Rather, this theme draws attention to how listening, consistency, fairness, explanation, and accountability shape the conditions in which difficult choices become possible.

03. Nonlinear sensemaking: interpretation changes as the situation unfolds

The principals’ accounts challenged a strictly linear model of decision-making. Information shifts, assumptions are revisited, and new conversations can change how the problem is understood.

Nonlinear sensemaking does not mean a leader cannot be decisive. It means that good judgment may require returning to an earlier interpretation when the context warrants it.

A principal may enter a meeting believing a problem is primarily about staffing, only to discover that the underlying concern is trust. Another may view resistance as opposition to change, then learn that the resistance stems from insufficient time and prior experiences of overload. These shifts in interpretation change which responses become sensible.

The nonlinear theme challenges the picture of decision-making as a straight path from problem definition to implementation. Context can alter the definition of the problem itself. Timing matters because a conversation held before an announcement may have a different meaning from the same conversation held after it.

For a leader, the practical discipline is not endless reconsideration. It is making room to identify what evidence could change the current interpretation, checking whether assumptions are still defensible, and recognizing when an emerging issue requires a different question rather than a faster answer.

04. Systemic constraint: decisions occur inside institutions

Principals exercise leadership within legal, policy, financial, staffing, and organizational boundaries. They also mediate expectations between the division, the school, and the community.

A real challenge for leaders is learning to distinguish non-negotiable requirements from spaces where professional discretion remains available, while recognizing how organizational pressures affect people.

A school leader can be asked to implement a directive that is reasonable in intent yet difficult in the specific conditions of the school. The principal may have to explain a requirement to staff, translate feedback to division leadership, and find a workable local path without misrepresenting what can and cannot change.

This is where the image of the principal as a buffer or translator becomes especially helpful. The leader is not simply transmitting instructions downward. They may be interpreting system intent, absorbing conflicting demands, conveying local realities upward, and trying to preserve a coherent environment for students and staff.

Recognizing systemic constraint is not the same as denying principal agency. It asks a more realistic question: where does agency remain, and what must happen when the conditions required for good implementation are not present? The answer may involve negotiating a timeline, identifying a necessary support, clarifying policy, or making a difficult limitation visible.

An implication for system leaders is that the distance between a policy’s design and a school’s implementation context should be treated as a leadership concern, not merely as a compliance problem.

05. Sustainability as a decision criterion: the human cost matters

A decision that resolves a problem immediately may create unintended costs when it is implemented. New work has to be carried by real people with limited time, energy, and resources.

This final theme invites leaders to evaluate more than the short-term outcome. What is being asked of staff, students, and families? What demands are being added, and what capacity exists to sustain them?

Suppose a principal approves an initiative with a promising short-term outcome. The announcement is well received, and the initial implementation appears successful. But the new process requires regular meetings, documentation, specialized training, and sustained follow-up that were never accounted for in the existing workload.

The sustainability theme asks leaders to evaluate those requirements before the announcement, not just after staff begin experiencing them. Capacity is not an unlimited reserve of goodwill. It includes available time, skills, attention, staffing, and emotional energy. A plan can be admirable and still depend on people doing more than they can reasonably sustain.

This finding can also help explain why a solution that works in one school may not transfer unchanged to another. Local resources, previous initiatives, staffing conditions, and the strength of relationships influence what can actually be carried out. The question becomes not only whether the plan is desirable, but whether the conditions for its success can be established.

Seen this way, concern for capacity is not an argument against improvement. It is a criterion for responsible improvement: what must be protected, resourced, or removed so that the desired change can last?

The findings belong together

These themes are deeply connected. A system-level requirement may intensify moral tension. Limited capacity may make a relational conversation more urgent. New information may require a leader to reconsider an earlier decision. Trust can determine whether a difficult but necessary change is possible.

For that reason, the five themes are best understood as an explanatory framework for the ecology of a decision, not as a five-step algorithm.

The decision is never simply the decision. It is also the people, relationships, constraints, interpretations, and future capacity surrounding it.

A leadership dilemma viewed through the five lenses

Imagine a principal being told that a new student-support process should be introduced across the school in six weeks. Families have been asking for greater consistency, the division wants an observable response, and staff have recently implemented several other changes. Some teachers are enthusiastic about the initiative. Others worry that the additional documentation and meetings will stretch an already difficult term.

This is a fictional teaching scenario, not an account from a research participant. Its purpose is to show how the interpretive themes can help a leader examine the same situation from different directions.

First lens: what is morally owed?

The principal has responsibilities to students who need support and to staff whose professional capacity matters. Delaying might allow an unmet need to continue; rushing might compromise the quality of the eventual support. A responsible choice must acknowledge that there may be no entirely painless path.

Second lens: who needs the process to be credible?

Families may need to understand how students will benefit and when they can expect changes. Teachers may need meaningful involvement in how the process operates. The leader’s authority can establish a requirement, but trust may depend on transparent reasoning and genuine opportunities to shape implementation.

Third lens: what is still being interpreted?

The principal may discover that resistance is concentrated around one administrative requirement rather than the entire initiative. Or perhaps the most urgent family concern can be addressed immediately while the wider implementation proceeds in stages. New information could lead to a revised course without abandoning the original purpose.

Fourth lens: what can the system actually change?

The division’s timeline might be firm, partly flexible, or based on assumptions that have not been questioned. The principal needs to determine what is truly required and what resources, adjustments, or explanations can be requested. Local leadership involves working intelligently within constraints and making unworkable conditions visible.

Fifth lens: what will make the plan sustainable?

If the change adds meetings, training, and documentation, something else may need to be simplified or removed. A successful announcement is not the same as an enduring practice. The principal should be able to describe how workload, supports, monitoring, and future adjustments will be handled.

The five lenses do not generate one universally correct answer. Depending on the context, a leader might proceed, stage the rollout, negotiate conditions, or create a short interim response while the larger process is prepared. What matters is that the reasoning accounts for more than the appearance of decisiveness.

A responsible decision is not made stronger by hiding its competing pressures. It is made clearer by recognizing them.

Why the findings matter beyond one study

For principal preparation, the findings suggest a need to rehearse ambiguous situations rather than focus only on procedural competence. Emerging leaders can benefit from examining competing obligations and the emotional realities of carrying a decision.

For professional learning, the study strengthens the case for reflection, trusted dialogue, and shared sensemaking. A leader can become more aware of their assumptions when they encounter another leader’s perspective.

For school systems, the implications include paying closer attention to implementation demands, local context, and sustainability. Organizational expectations can be well-intended while still creating pressure that principals must translate and buffer.

The study does not establish that the five themes apply in precisely the same way to every school, principal, or province. It provides an in-depth, situated interpretation of a particular Alberta case, with transferable questions readers can consider in their own contexts.

What this study asks of leadership preparation and school systems

Principal preparation: practise ambiguity, not just procedure

Aspiring leaders can learn legal obligations, policy requirements, and organizational procedures and still feel unprepared for the moments when legitimate responsibilities collide. Preparation programs can use complex cases to help leaders practise naming competing duties, identifying assumptions, anticipating relational consequences, and deciding what deserves further consultation.

This does not reduce the importance of procedural knowledge. It places that knowledge in the context of real judgment. A principal needs to know what the rules require while also recognizing how to implement them in a way that is ethically attentive and practically sustainable.

Mentorship and professional learning: make reflection a normal practice

Leadership conversations are often structured around quick problem-solving: tell me the issue, and I will suggest what worked in my school. There can be value in practical advice, but the five themes encourage a different kind of dialogue as well. A colleague might first ask which obligations are in tension, who has not been heard, or what constraints are being assumed rather than verified.

Such dialogue can make professional judgment more explicit. It can also remind leaders that uncertainty is not always evidence of incompetence. A trusted professional community can be a place to examine complex decisions without expecting every difficulty to have a neat formula.

Division leadership: treat implementation capacity as part of policy quality

An initiative may be educationally compelling at the system level while creating an unreasonable combination of demands at a particular school. The sustainability theme invites system leaders to consider the full cost of implementing a requirement, not only its immediate intention or measurable completion date.

This can mean asking what existing work will be displaced, what support principals can access, how local context will be interpreted, and how concerns can move upward before implementation problems become entrenched. It can also mean recognizing the principal’s role in translating policy into local practice, rather than treating principals as passive conduits.

School teams: distinguish a shared commitment from a shared capacity

A group may genuinely believe in a change without possessing the time or resources to carry it out. Collaborative planning should therefore make room for questions about workload, sequencing, clarity, and what will be stopped as well as what will be started. When those considerations are addressed openly, trust and sustainability can reinforce each other.

These are implications I draw from the interpreted findings, not experimental findings showing that any single program or intervention will produce better outcomes. They offer directions for professional dialogue, leadership education, and future inquiry.

From the dissertation to an interactive leadership experience

Publishing the dissertation was not the end of the inquiry for me. A central question remained: how could the findings become accessible to practitioners without flattening their complexity?

The interactive research experience explores the study, the five themes, and their relationships through an original visual presentation and a fictional decision scenario. The Decision Ecology Method offers a structured way to use those lenses in reflection and conversation.

Neither experience replaces the dissertation or claims to validate a diagnostic tool. They are practical adaptations designed to make the research easier to discuss, question, and apply.

What the research can and cannot claim

A qualitative single-case study provides depth and context rather than a statistical estimate of every principal’s behaviour. Twelve principals across six Alberta CASS zones offer a meaningful basis for exploring this particular case, but the sample should not be treated as representative of every school leader in Alberta, Canada, or elsewhere.

The five themes should not be converted into a numerical assessment or a ranking of who is most ethical, relational, decisive, or sustainable. They were developed through interpretive engagement with participants’ accounts, not through experimental comparison or psychometric validation.

Likewise, the study does not determine which decision a principal should make in a specific confidential case. Real decisions may require legal advice, policy interpretation, consultation, and additional expertise. The framework is a way to enrich reflection, not to replace professional accountability.

Future research could explore how these interpretations resonate in other jurisdictions, with assistant principals and division leaders, or in contexts with different resources and organizational structures. It could also examine how teams use structured reflection over time. Those are possibilities for further inquiry rather than outcomes demonstrated by this study.

Five questions to discuss with a leadership team

One way to use this research in a professional learning session is to choose a fictional leadership dilemma and ask a team to examine it from several perspectives before considering a response. Protect confidentiality, especially when discussing students or staff, and keep the conversation focused on principles rather than identifying individuals.

• Moral labour: Which legitimate obligations compete, and what might remain unresolved after the decision?
• Relational legitimacy: Who needs to be heard, and what would a fair process look like to someone who disagrees?
• Nonlinear sensemaking: Which assumption is most consequential, and what new information would change the interpretation?
• Systemic constraint: What is required, what is negotiable, and what context does the wider system need to understand?
• Sustainability: Who will carry the consequences, and what support or trade-off would make implementation responsible?

After the discussion, ask participants to identify the next responsible move. That may be a decision, a conversation, a clarification, a change in timeline, or a request for support. The learning comes from making the reasoning and pressures visible, not from arriving at one rehearsed ‘correct’ answer.

A question to bring back to your next decision

If you lead a school or team, consider a decision you are currently facing. Without including identifying student or staff information, ask yourself: Which moral obligations are competing? Whose trust matters? What information might change your interpretation? What constraints are fixed? What must the people involved be able to sustain?

The purpose is not to make every decision slower. It is to see the full reality of the decision more clearly.

Research reference: Comeau, T. (2026). Understanding the decision-making process: A case of Alberta school principals [Doctoral dissertation, University of Saskatchewan]. University of Saskatchewan HARVEST.

Research scope: This article summarizes the author’s doctoral study. The interpretive themes come from the research; practitioner prompts and examples are educational translations rather than participant quotations or validated scoring rules.

THE ELEMENTAL EDUCATOR / STAY CONNECTED

Keep the conversation going.

Follow new podcast conversations, leadership reflections, and ideas that deserve to travel beyond the page.