The recent Massachusetts Educator Evaluation Regulations (CMR 35.00) articulates goals that include growth and improved performance by teachers. Despite this stated goal, however, it is unclear if the policy is consistent with transformational leadership, which has shown correlation with growth and performance. In fact, the policy may instead bring about unintended consequences associated by some with evaluations in general, such as promoting “inspectional and fault finding supervision . . . [that] has serious consequences for the improvement of teaching and student achievement” (Glanz, 2005, p. 3). Through a discursive analysis of the Educator Evaluation Regulations (CMR 35.00) and semi-structured interviews with teachers and school leaders, this qualitative study investigates the alignment of transformational leadership theory to the evaluation regulations as written and as understood by teachers and educational leaders. In addition, drawing from the disciplines of psychology, communications, and organizational theory, a new transformational leadership model is presented. The conceptualization of transformational leadership theory serves as both an analytical framework for this study and responds to calls made by prominent transformational leadership theoreticians such as Bass and Riggio (2006) and Burns (1978) to explicate the theory’s inner mechanisms
