Michelle Cumming

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.

High-quality systematic literature reviews provide a systematic process for identifying, synthesizing, and critiquing multiple studies and, in turn, inform theory, research, practice, and policy. With a focus on special education systematic reviews, we propose four core principles (i.e., coherence, contextualization, generativity, and transparency) to guide scholars in conducting meta-analyses, systematic narrative reviews, and qualitative meta-syntheses. Specifically, we articulate how scholars can promote each of these principles at each stage of the review process to enhance the rigor, relevance, and credibility of their systematic review: (a) framing the problem and research questions; (b) planning procedures to identify, analyze, and synthesize studies; and (c) presenting and interpreting results. Last, we discuss future directions in light of issues of equity and approaches to bridge synthesis findings and practice and policy.