Distributed leadership is a dynamic process and reciprocal interaction of the leader, the subordinates and the situation. This research was inspired by the theoretical framework of Spillane in order to contextualize distributed leadership and compare the variations using the Teaching and Learning International Survey 2013 data. The two-level structural equation model utilized the school contextual variables and staff characteristics as exogenous and endogenous variables simultaneously in order to investigate the reciprocal effects of these variables on each other, and the ultimate influences on the extent to which leadership is distributed. The results suggest mutual respect among staff, funding resource of the school, together with principal's gender and employment status, are critically important factors with regard to the extent of distributed leadership in a school.
Research on educational leadership and management has resulted in the accumulation of increasingly persuasive findings concerning the impact school leadership can have on school performance. Indeed, there is a growing consensus that there exists a generic set of leadership practices (e.g. goal setting, developing people) which must be adapted to meet the needs and constraints that describe different school contexts. However, to date, researchers have yet to develop a theory or report comprehensive findings on this challenge. This paper explores several types of school contexts (institutional, community, socio-cultural, political, economic, school improvement) and what we have learned about how they shape school leadership practice. The analysis leads to several conclusions and recommendations. First, it affirms, elaborates and extends the assertion made by scholars of the importance of examining leadership in context. Second, the need to contextualize leadership highlights deficiencies in modal research methods that focus on mean effects and either ignore context effects or relegate them to the shadows. Finally, the field needs to refine current research methods and explore new approaches that enable us to better study how successful leadership responds and adapts to different contexts.
There is developing interest in how professional identity can support educational leaders’ management of change. This article explores the conceptualisation and interplay of identity formation with adaptive and contingent forms of educational leadership. The article draws on qualitative data obtained from two New Zealand school principals and significant others, as each principal negotiated their way through the beginnings of a second principalship and associated change processes. Findings from this first year of a three-year study identified influential factors within each principal’s personal, and professional identities. A comparison of findings with the respective literatures revealed a potential fusion between identity formation and concepts within the broad fields of adaptive and values-based contingency leadership.
In England, further education college and sixth form college governing bodies are required to appoint a clerk to administer and advise on governing procedure and practice. In this article we report research which aimed to understand and theorise about the role and the associated responsibilities. We analysed the relevant literatures, carried out a national survey of clerks and held seven regional focus group meetings. The role in relation to board matters is significant in institutionalising the governing body and thereby promoting legitimate governance. The clerk’s practices entail communicating the requirements of second-order governance which frame the everyday actions of first-order governance. The context for the role is potentially highly dynamic and clerks’ accountabilities to their boards can be complex. Clerks may have within-college governance responsibilities where their work may be similar to that of a company secretary. These responsibilities can expose clerks to role conflict and complicate accountability relationships, but can also bring benefits to their work with the board. The role, as experienced by clerks, is accorded insufficient status and under-valued, which can affect their authority. We conclude that a role promoting legitimate governance in the English further education sector and in other educational settings is crucial.
The study of context-based leadership practices has gained currency during the last decade. This study aims to complement the recent efforts of researchers in identifying the context-based leadership practices of successful school leaders, and deliberating how these practices are enacted within their own unique contexts. An in-depth case study was conducted in a successful school in northern Malaysia using a combination of case study methods and grounded theory. Case study methods were used for data collection from multiple sources, employing a semi-structured interview protocol derived from the one used in several studies conducted under the International Successful School Principalship Project. The findings of the case study reveal that strong interpersonal skills, people-centered leadership, clear communication of vision and goal, focus on academic achievement, co-curricular activities, developing people and creating a positive work environment are all vital constituents of successful leadership. The findings will attempt to add to the scant literature on context-based leadership practices from Malaysia. Implications for practice can be drawn for policymakers, who must resist overreliance on borrowed leadership models, while practitioners need to prioritize their practices based upon the contextual requirements to succeed.
This article is based on the findings of an externally funded, mixed-methods research project conducted at one English university. This small-scale project aimed to examine leadership, barriers to becoming a leader and the support needed to overcome them, from the perspectives of disabled staff. An online questionnaire was sent to all 66 members of staff who had disclosed their disabled status to the university and 22 responses were received. Twelve participants were then interviewed as two focus groups to discuss their views on leadership and its relation to their role. Six more respondents opted for individual face-to-face/telephone interviews. The findings indicated that over half of the respondents were already engaged in ‘formal’ leadership and even more exercised ‘informal’ leadership. This key finding seems to contradict the under-representation of disabled academics in leadership reported in the literature. Despite their engagement in leadership, disabled staff faced several institutional and personal barriers. The findings suggest that having an impairment per se might not necessarily deter disabled staff from exercising leadership. A number of support strategies are recommended to facilitate their participation in (formal) leadership.
A continuing challenge for the education system is how to evaluate the wider outcomes of schools. Wider measures of success – such as citizenship or lifelong learning – influence each other and emerge over time from complex interactions between students, teachers and leaders, and the wider community. Unless methods are found to evaluate these broader outcomes, which are able to do justice to learning and achievement as emergent properties of the learner’s engagement with his or her world the education system will continue to focus on narrow measures of school effectiveness which do not properly account for complexity. In this article we describe the rationale and methodology underpinning a pilot research project that applied hierarchical process modelling to a group of schools as complex living systems, using software developed by engineers at the University of Bristol, called Perimeta. The aim was to generate a stakeholder owned systems design which was better able to account for the full range of outcomes valued by each school, and for the complex processes which facilitate or inhibit them, thus providing a more nuanced leadership decision-making analytic. The project involved three academies in the UK.
This article reviews the literature and explores the institutional and systemic factors that help and/or hinder change and innovation across school systems, with a focus on evidence from England. A number of authors have argued that schools and school systems need to become more innovative and adaptive if they are to meet the needs of 21st-century societies and economies. Quasi-market models premised on school autonomy, parental choice and vertical accountability have been seen as the best way to secure innovation, but the evidence of success remains thin. The article analyses four examples of change and finds that system-wide change is possible, but requires strong and sustained political support and capacity building within a values-based framework that allows for local agency and adaptation. It concludes by drawing out three implications: the need to prioritise ‘professional’ as well as ‘structural’ autonomy; the potential for vertical accountability frameworks to condition the ways in which parents perceive and value innovation; and the need to enhance the legitimacy of innovation in the eyes of education’s key stakeholders.
This paper explores different conceptions of responsibility within and beyond neoliberal frames. Such exploration draws on the experiences and accounts of ‘Ashleigh’, a head teacher at a primary school in outer London that is part of an academy chain. Ashleigh and her school were key participants in a study that explored matters of accountability, performativity and equity. Through the presentation of interview data gathered from Ashleigh and six of her staff, the paper theorises ways of being a head teacher as aligning with the responsible neoliberal subject – a self-determined and rational actor who readily takes up the modes of regulation and measurement expected of them. It also highlights how this subjectivity sits within and alongside relations of care and concern for the welfare of students and teachers. The paper critically examines the implications of these different conceptions of responsibility in their production of different versions of professionalism. It also seeks to broaden current scholarly understandings of the responsible neoliberal subject and provide a counter-story to the tendency within public and political discourse for responsibility to be constructed in largely neoliberal terms.
The goal of this study was to explore the mediating role of ‘absenteeism acceptance’ between different leadership styles and school ethical climate (SEC) on organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) and voluntary absence among Israeli teachers. 304 teachers were randomly selected from 304 different mainstream and special-education schools. The model was analyzed using AMOS 18.0 software. We found that ‘absenteeism acceptance’ partially mediated the relationship between transactional leadership, SEC and OCB, and also found that SEC and transactional leadership positively predict OCB. The theoretical contribution of this study is rooted in its integrative approach. While most previous studies focused on a single leadership style, this study focused on the role of ‘absenteeism acceptance’ as a mediator between ethical aspects such as: SEC; leadership styles; and teachers’ behaviors like voluntary absence and OCB. The practical contribution may include developing school principals’ training programs, focusing on transactional leadership and SEC in order to increase teachers’ OCB in schools.
The National Norms and Standards for School Funding policy was adopted by the government to address equity in South African public schools. This pro-poor funding policy compels the state to progressively fund schools based on a quintile ranking system. Schools lacking in infrastructure, physical and financial resources and usually located within poor socio-economic environments are ranked quintiles 1 and 2. These schools are referred to as no-fee schools and are provided with far more state funding than well-resourced schools, ranked quintiles 4 and 5. More recently, quintile 3 schools, serving middle-of-the-range communities, have also been declared no-fee schools. Most of the school governing bodies and principals serving no-fee schools experience numerous challenges in effectively managing their schools’ funds. Using a quantitative research approach, the study aimed to determine the views of teachers and school management team members of how no-fee schools manage the funds received from the state and other fundraising initiatives. The findings revealed that governing bodies of no-fee schools lacked the necessary financial and entrepreneurial skills and, therefore, experienced great difficulty in preparing budgets and cash flow projection statements that could enable them to effectively manage the schools’ funds.
Although scholars have acknowledged the role of collaborative relationships of teachers in improving the quality of instruction, teacher collective efficacy continues to be a neglected construct in educational research. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relations between transformational school leadership, teacher self-efficacy and perceived collective teacher efficacy, using a sample of 120 permanent secondary-school teachers in Serbia, whose average age was 42.5. The results of the hierarchical regression analysis showed that transformational school leadership and teacher self-efficacy were independent predictors of teacher collective efficacy. The research findings also showed that individually-focused transformational leadership contributed significantly to an explanation of collective efficiency after controlling specific predictor effects of group-focused dimensions of transformational leadership. It is argued that the results have a double meaning. First, this study expanded the understanding of the relationship between different dimensions of transformational school leadership and collective teacher efficacy. Second, a contribution of teacher self-efficacy to collective efficacy beliefs was established, confirming the assumptions of social cognitive theory on reciprocal causality between two types of perceived efficacy: individual and collective.
Internationally, there is increasing emphasis on teacher leadership of professional development. This provides opportunities for teachers to initiate and facilitate professional learning activities beyond their own schools. There is a need for theoretical tools to analyse their leadership activity and how to support it. Constructs from complexity leadership theory and the concept of teacher system leadership are used to develop a framework to analyse the purposes and practices of teacher professional development leaders supported by a national programme for mathematics teacher professional development in England. I argue that the teachers’ activities constitute a form of adaptive leadership involving innovating and organising professional development within arenas of leadership, through the processes of mobilising, brokering and the creation of networks. This required engaging in ‘system work’ to fulfil purposes connected to both local and system-wide concerns. The teachers were supported by the enabling leadership of headteachers and by national warrants for exercising leadership. The study demonstrates the value of the analytical framework and indicates that a cadre of teacher system leaders can be developed by attending to the interplay of professional development leadership and a wider system-orientated professional identity and by specific support to develop adaptive leadership capacities and skills.
This paper examines the preparation of school principals in Malaysia, and the aspiration of the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013–2025 to ensure high-performing school leaders in every school. It reports on the principal preparatory programme, the National Professional Qualification for Educational Leaders, which is mandatory to those who aspire to be school principals. Documentary analysis was undertaken on materials used for leadership training programmes by the National Institute of Educational Management and Leadership or Institut Aminuddin Baki (IAB), which is the country’s main leadership training and development centre, equivalent to the National College for Teaching and Leadership in England. Eight primary and secondary schools, chosen by stratified purposive sampling, were selected for the study. Interviews were conducted with principals and assistant principals of the eight schools, to establish how they were selected and prepared for their leadership roles. Interviews with Ministry of Education and IAB officials offered a provider perspective while an interview with an education minister clarified the policy and political contexts of the study. The findings of the study draw attention to the need to refine the selection criteria, with a focus on higher entry standards to ensure excellent leadership in schools, an emphasis on instructional leadership to improve student learning in schools, the conflict between central direction and the importance of situational leadership, and the political imperative for programme outcomes.
To what extent can heads use an inclusive values-led approach to school development in the face of pressures from Ofsted and their Local Authority to focus almost exclusively on attainment outcomes? We explore leadership of school improvement in a qualitative study of 10 head teachers in the English county of ‘Preshire’, who worked with the third edition of the Index for Inclusion, (Booth and Ainscow 2011), a guide to values-led school improvement. We situate the study within a review of conflicting research advice about the characteristics of successful heads and how ‘values’, seen as motives for action, affect the recommendations from research.
We found that the heads were able to use shared inclusive values to accomplish, with their staff, a degree of control over the way their schools are improved. To an extent they were able to resist extreme local pressures to engage in short term strategies to force up attainments. By making their inclusive values explicit they showed courage rather than compliance. To varying degrees they used ‘the Index’ to create inclusive, democratic and sustainable school improvement plans while conforming to Ofsted requirements. We consider the possibilities for more widespread implementation of school development led by inclusive values.
Research on school principals’ behaviours that affect teachers’ emotional states is limited. Currently, the focus is primarily on extreme manifestations of mistreatment and emotional abuse; normative daily behaviours, such as emotionally manipulative ones, have yet to be explored. The purpose of the present study is to investigate primary school principals’ manipulative behaviours, that is, principals’ actions aimed at enlisting others to advance their goals by stimulating emotions. Based on the self-report scale of Austin et al. (2007), we developed a modified other-report scale to explore principals’ emotionally manipulative behaviours with both negative and positive orientations. The scale was used in a cross-sectional field survey, in which teachers rated their principals’ manipulative behaviours. We found support for the prevalence of both types of principals’ emotionally manipulative behaviours and of their effects on teachers’ negative and positive emotions arising from interactions with the principals. We also found that principals who ranked higher in negative and positive emotionally manipulative behaviours self-reported having greater controlling tendencies. The findings and their implications are discussed.
The purpose of this study is to reveal the extent to which different leadership models in education are studied, including the change in the trends of research on each model over time, the most prominent scholars working on each model, and the countries in which the articles are based. The analysis of the related literature was conducted by first employing a bibliometric analysis of the research and review papers indexed in the Web of Science database between 1980 and 2014. Then, a more in-depth analysis of selected papers was done using the content analysis method. The results showed that there has been increasing interest in leadership models in educational research over time. Distributed leadership, instructional leadership, teacher leadership, and transformational leadership are the most studied leadership models in educational research. It was also found that related research increasingly focuses on the effects of leaders on organizational behaviors/conditions and on student achievement. Accordingly, usage of quantitative methodology has significantly increased during the last decade. Possible reasons for these changes, implications, and recommendations for future research are also discussed.
What does it mean to be and to act like a school leader online? Although many school leaders might be comfortable navigating issues of identity in face-to-face environments, online environments may present new and unprecedented challenges. These challenges may range from concerns about privacy and surveillance to questions about how best to leverage social media for professional or school aims. Accordingly, the present study draws upon interview and tweet data to explore administrators’ performance of identity on Twitter. Findings describe how administrators enacted two distinct identities: one relating to instructional leadership and the other relating to school public relations. Administrators were reticent about revealing other, more personal identities. This was seen as a way to maintain and gain followers. Implications for identity research, online professional learning, and public school relations are discussed.
This study examines the relationship between school autonomy gap, principal leadership, school climate, teacher psychological factors, teachers’ job satisfaction and organizational commitment under the context of school autonomy reform. A path model has been developed to define the relationships between principal leadership and teachers’ outcomes via mediating variables. Multiple-group comparison was used to explore the effect of school autonomy gap in this process. We collected the data through a survey carried out in 26 senior secondary schools in China. In total 528 teachers and 59 principals and assistant principals participated. The results suggest a significant influence of instructional and transformational leadership on teachers’ job satisfaction and organizational commitment, mediated by the indirect impact of school climate and teachers’ self-efficacy. School autonomy gap, which is closely related to principal leadership, emerged as an important influence in the path model.
In this paper, I explore the relationship of democracy to educational leadership; more specifically, to the notion of distributed leadership as it unfolds within policy-mandated multi-site school collaboratives, with particular reference to practices in Malta. Under the policy framework ‘For All Children To Succeed’ introduced in Malta in 2005, Maltese primary and secondary state schools embarked on the process of being organized into networks, legally termed ‘colleges’. I explore leadership distribution among the leaders constituting the college and the subsequent inherent tensions within this educational scenario. The notion of distributed leadership as perceived by the leaders is examined, and especially the leaders’ reception of its presentation in the policy document as the leadership discourse; and its eventual (non-)enactment at both school and college level. A Foucauldian theoretical framework, specifically Foucault’s concepts of power relations, governmentality, discourse, and subjectification, is used to carry out a case study of a Maltese college, collecting data via semi-structured, in-depth interviews, participant observation and documentary analysis. Narrative is both the phenomenon under study and the method of analysis. The policy discourse does not unfold in a participatory democratic manner in practice, resulting in an organizational paradox where leadership enactment in a Maltese college is ‘directed’ from above, rather than ‘distributed’. These findings may be significant for educational practice, policy and theory in terms of the generation of problematization which may lead to further research on this contested topic.
In an effort to enhance the quality of teachers and teaching, and to lead internal curriculum development in primary schools, the Hong Kong Education Bureau created a new curriculum leader post entitled primary school master/mistress (curriculum development) or PSMCD for short. The main purpose of the study was to examine the perceptions of these curriculum leaders on their competence in leading the primary school reform. Using a stratified random sampling technique, 125 curriculum leaders were chosen to participate in the current study. Survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were conducted. The findings of the study suggest that PSMCDs in general supported the goals and the rationale of the reform. In addition, they also agreed that moderate progress had been made in implementing the curriculum reform in their school. Though progress had been made in many areas, our findings have highlighted several key challenges that these PSMCDs faced in performing their roles. These challenges include heavy workload, learner diversity in the classrooms, the use of diversified modes for assessment, and having too many reforms at the same time. Implications and recommendations are discussed.
This article presents research undertaken with female headteachers in UK primary schools and explores several influential discourses in relation to female headteachers’ identities. It considers themes inherent in women’s narratives as they reflect upon their professional lives and discusses various identities inhabited by female leaders which emerge from the data. It also explores dominant discourses related to the masculine construction of leadership, women’s domestic responsibilities and women as enablers, which have a significant impact on women’s professional lives and upon the ways in which they are positioned. It notes that women’s narratives are shot through with ambiguity as they may inhabit several contradictory identities revealing qualities, characteristics and leadership styles which diverge from socially prescribed gender-appropriate behaviours. The article suggests that although there may appear to be a variety of identities from which women may select, there are limits to agency. It concludes that powerful discourses exist which constrain or facilitate ways of being, so impacting on leadership work and the professional lives of female headteachers. Consequently, the complex negotiations of women as they take up leadership roles in schools should be acknowledged.
This paper examines emotional expression experienced by female principals in the Arab school system in Israel over their managerial careers – role-related emotions that they choose to express or repress before others. I employed narrative methodology, interviewing nine female principals from the Arab school system to investigate expression of emotions in professional life stories that they narrated. Findings indicate that the principals’ emotional expressions differ according to career stage; on induction into principalship, they are stressed, feel threatened, distressed and challenged. As they establish themselves in their role they are calmer, use more humour and more ‘correct’ facial expressions. At a more advanced career stage, they express empathy and compassion, and concern for the maintenance of educational achievements. Understanding principals’ emotional expression at different career stages contributes to the quality of principal-teacher relations in the school.
Educational Collaborative Networks (ECNs) aim to achieve educational goals at the community level and base their actions on collaborative partnering between schools and community organizations. These approaches are an emergent and innovative leadership and policy strategy being used increasingly across the globe, given the interconnected and pervasive nature of issues facing education. The enthusiasm and promise of such community-based initiatives are accompanied by concerns related to its leadership. This paper describes the insights of networked leadership as a driver, which facilitates ECN outcome achievement. This article examines the experience of leaders involved in the current leadership of 18 high-performing ECNs in Barcelona (Spain). The results stress that networked leadership may become a key driver of change in educational contexts, capable of building a collaborative culture to optimize the educational performance in every specific community.
Systems thinking is a holistic approach that puts the study of wholes before that of parts. This study explores systems thinking among school middle leaders – teachers who have management responsibility for a team of teachers or for an aspect of the school’s work. Interviews were held with 93 school coordinators, among them year heads, heads of departments, evaluation coordinators, instruction coordinators, and information and communications technology coordinators. Data analysis revealed that systems thinking among school middle leaders consists of four characteristics: (1) seeing wholes; (2) using a multidimensional view; (3) influencing indirectly; and (4) assessing significance. The findings of this study expand the existing knowledge on systems thinking in school leadership, discussing practical implications as well as further research avenues.
Globally, there is increasing pressure on schools to enact change, and the literature indicates that transformational leadership is positively associated with school leaders’ effectiveness at implementing positive reforms. Here, we report on a study conducted in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) within the current context of intense educational restructuring in the K–12 system. The purpose was to investigate whether school principals in the UAE practise transformational leadership, and whether they and their teachers perceived principals’ leadership styles differently to their western counterparts. This study adopted a mixed methodology, and revealed variation in perceptions between principals and teachers related to whether principals were practising transformational leadership. However, when analysed using Hofstede’s cultural framework, this variation may be related to cultural differences between the western orientation of the leadership model adapted by Emirati principals and the Islamic orientation of the population. Therefore, a new model of transformational leadership is proposed, based on a paradigm that may be more appropriate for Middle Eastern/Islamic contexts. This Modified Transformational Model may be useful to those leaders who wish to adopt transformational leadership with cultural accommodations.
In recent years, a principal supply shortage crisis has emerged in the USA. This problem has been exacerbated by an increase in principal departures, which has been found to be negatively related to school outcomes. While research exists on several determinants of principal turnover, any examination of the relationship between principals’ affective reaction to pay relative to their intent to leave their position at a particular school is missing from the literature. This research seeks to fill this void by examining the association between California (USA) high school principals’ pay satisfaction and turnover intentions (n=156). The importance of potential referent sources (i.e., teachers within the school districts, other high school principals within the school district, and other high school principals in different school districts) for pay satisfaction and the relationship between achievement and turnover intentions were also examined. This study uses a two-stage structural equation modelling approach and finds evidence to suggest that high school principals’ pay satisfaction is influenced by the salaries of comparative peers and is negatively associated with principals’ intention to turnover. Achievement was not found to be related to turnover intentions. Policy implications and future research recommendations are discussed.
This article explores qualitative shadowing as an interpretivist methodology, and explains how two researchers participating simultaneously in data collection using a video recorder, contextual interviews and video-stimulated recall interviews, conducted a qualitative shadowing study at six early childhood centres in Norway. This paper emerged through the discussion of this experience with another researcher, who had shared interests in early childhood leadership, about the benefits of this research methodology in studying leadership practices in early childhood centres. We argue that qualitative shadowing methodology is a powerful resource that can enrich leadership, learning and development within the early childhood sector. By facilitating reflective engagement between practitioners and researchers through qualitative shadowing, it is possible to enhance the exploration of complex phenomenon such as early childhood leadership practice.
There is an emerging global consensus that the knowledge base in educational leadership and management must offer a deeper examination of leadership practice across a more diverse set of national contexts. Nonetheless, a recent review of the literature in this field concluded that this challenge has yet to be adequately addressed with respect to research in Asia. This study was an in-depth, qualitative examination of how the decision-making practices of Vietnamese school principals respond to their socio-cultural context. The study employed Hofstede’s ‘dimensions of national culture’ to aid in this analysis of Vietnamese school leadership. Qualitative data were used to construct case studies of principal decision-making in three Vietnamese schools. The findings highlight the strong influence of power distance and collectivism on the decision making of Vietnamese school principals. The results illuminate the value of adopting an ‘indigenous perspective’ on school leadership. Our description of how socio-cultural values shape the practice of school leadership in Vietnam offers a useful contrast with descriptions from mainstream research on educational leadership and management.
Effective education reform depends on its successful realization by the school leadership carrying out the reform. School principals and middle leaders in the 21st century re-examine their traditional role so as to understand complexities and ambiguities characterizing their various responsibilities within the context of school reform. As critical change agents and system players, formal leaders interpret reform demands and translate them into school practices through a process of sense-making. Though sense-making is an ongoing process that school leaders undergo personally and collectively during policy reforms, little attention has been paid to the role principals and middle leaders perform as sense-makers. This literature review article explores sense-making in school leadership through a holistic approach. It demonstrates how sense-making is framed in both theoretical and empirical studies as well as suggests implications and avenues for future research.
The necessity for schools to implement human resources management (HRM) is increasingly acknowledged. Specifically, HRM holds the potential of increasing student outcomes through the increased involvement, empowerment and motivation of teachers. In educational literature, however, little empirical attention is paid to the ways in which different HRM practices could be bundled into a comprehensive HRM system (content) and how HRM could best be implemented to attain positive teacher and student outcomes (process). Regarding the content, and following the ‘AMO theory of performance’, it is argued that HRM systems should comprise (A) ability-, (M) motivation- and (O) opportunity-enhancing HRM practices. Regarding the process, and based on ‘HRM system strength’ literature, it is argued that when teachers perceive HRM as distinctive and consistent, and if they perceive consensus, this will enhance teachers’ and schools’ performance. By combining insights from educational studies on single HRM practices with HRM theories, this paper builds a conceptual framework which can be used to design HRM systems and to understand the way they operate.
The notion of schools as ‘loosely coupled’ organizations has been widely discussed in the research literature. Many argue it is either a protective mechanism for schools to buffer external pressure or a barrier for implementing new reforms. Against the backdrop of systemic change and accountability, we applied a two-level hierarchical linear model to nationally representative data in the US, testing the ‘loosely coupled’ theory through examining the association between data-informed improvement efforts at the school level and data-informed instruction at the classroom level. Statistically significant associations were identified but with a small proportion of variance explained, indicating that the top-down systemic change strategy failed to tighten the system as intended. Alternatively, bottom-up strategies, such as professional learning communities, which operate under the assumption of working with loose coupling, should be considered.
This work explores how mindful leadership practice can inform school and district leadership specifically as it occurs in professional learning communities (PLC). When school and district leaders create PLC cultures that encourage rich thinking and intentional practice, individual and organizational mindfulness is present. As leaders work to craft informed responses to the demands before them, it is argued that such mindfulness places them in a position to maximize learning from the experiences of the moment. As an organizational structure, the PLC provides school members with a location for the practice of mindful leadership. Yet, the PLC can become an end in itself, a structure that organizes participants but lacks the necessary goal orientation for actors to engage in motivating and purposeful work and create meaningful outcomes. We assert that the mindful institutionalization of PLCs orients the school toward cultural change embodied in a collective attention that orients the work of its members. We argue that to do so requires attention to deeply developed explanations of activities within the school setting, opportunities for formative, substantive data use, and on-the-ground real-time orientation to communal learning. We argue that attention to these themes would further enhance the knowledge and skill set available to PLC members.
The aim of the study was to determine the frequency of followership styles, and their connection with job satisfaction and satisfaction with extrinsic/intrinsic aspects of work in teachers. The sample included 206 secondary school teachers of three grammar and three vocational schools in three towns in Serbia. The results indicate that the most prominent followership styles were star followers (58.7%) and pragmatists (39.8%). Star followers attached greater significance to intrinsic aspects of work and reported a higher job satisfaction rate, while pragmatists placed more importance on extrinsic ones. Independent thinking correlated with intrinsic aspects of work and job satisfaction, and active participation with job satisfaction and both work aspects. The results also show that a higher degree of engagement (particularly when combined with economic satisfaction) predicted a higher level of job satisfaction. If dominant followership and motivational structures of teachers were learnt, the management of educational institutions would be improved because teachers who participate in making work decisions have a greater sense of empowerment and commitment to organizational goals. Although affected by types of personality, dominant followership structures of the teacher may be influenced during the course of professional training, thereby directing them towards the development of functional followership types.
The purposes of this study were to report on a systematic approach to validating a Spanish version of the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale and then to apply the scale in a cross-national comparison of principal instructional leadership. The study yielded a validated Spanish language version of the PIMRS Teacher Form and offers a model of scale validation for other scholars who are interested in preparing an instrument for use outside of its culture of origin. The researchers used a back translation and expert panel procedure combined with psychometric analysis in order to achieve cultural equivalency for the translation. Psychometric properties of reliability (G Theory test of reliability) and validity (CFA, Rasch analysis) of the new version were assessed and compared to the original version in order to underpin its validity. The validation study employed a sample of 595 teachers and 26 principals in Santiago, Chile. The study yielded both a comprehensive analytical approach to cultural adaptation of survey instruments, as well a scale that can be used in Spanish speaking contexts. The study further demonstrated variability in patterns of instructional leadership practice across several national contexts.
The inspectorate’s judgements about a school’s educational quality in the Netherlands are to a large extent based on sophisticated desk research, risk analyses and analyses of the school’s self-evaluation reports. This relatively distant mode of inspecting schools relies on rational ideas about organizational management and control while aspects that might hinder boards from effective steering and influencing processes in schools are almost neglected. By comparing two schools that have boards that are considered to be in control and two schools that have boards that are not in control, we examine whether and how an inspectorate’s judgement of being in control fits the behaviour of teachers, team leaders and middle managers. This study among teachers, team leaders, middle managers and quality assurance managers shows that the extent of board control only partly fits the behaviour of teachers, team leaders and middle managers.
Educational administration is a rich domain of scholarship and practice, but one subject rarely discussed is its dark side. This study explored the question: What types of maladministration occur in schooling systems? The goal was to develop findings to inform existing prevention strategies. Focused on the Canadian context, data sources included 64 reports from disciplinary hearings of administrators in the Provinces of Ontario and British Columbia, complemented with other publicly available sources such as news stories. Findings indicated only a small minority of populations of administrators were subjected to disciplinary investigations and sanctions, but the targeted misconduct was often severe. Analysis revealed eight dimensions of maladministration, with sexual misconduct against students and financial transgressions being the most frequent. Academic dishonesty in the context of standardized testing and gendered patterns of maladministration also stood out. A typology emerged that highlighted the main forms of misconduct and negative leader behaviours against which schooling communities should bolster defences. When populated with data on the frequencies of acts of maladministration, the typology can help schooling communities to establish prevention priorities. The data in this study supports making the issues of sexual misconduct and the duty to report sexual abuse central to any planned interventions in the leadership system.
This article analyses the stakeholder model of boards that is widely used in public and third sector institutions in England and Wales. The central tenet of this model is that such institutions should be strategically led by individuals who are representative of and from the groups that have an interest in them. The article focuses in particular on the operation of the stakeholder model of governing bodies of schools in England and Wales where a range of stakeholders including teachers, parents and the community are represented. The issues that arise from this stakeholder model of governing are analysed and the alternatives to it are considered. A significant alternative is the skills-based model, where boards are constituted on the basis of their expertise and not their interest in the institution. This skills-based model is becoming more prominent in the way governing bodies of academy schools in England are constituted and this is certainly the direction of travel outlined in the 2015 regulations. The article reviews the stakeholder model for the governance of schools at a time when there is much interest in the skills-based approach. The wider implications of shifting from a stakeholder to a skills-based model of public board membership are considered.
Most research into emotional labour is focussed on front-line service staff and health professionals, in short-term interactions. Little exists exploring the emotional labour involved in repeated on-going interactions by educational leaders with key stakeholders. This study explored the relationships between emotional demands, three emotional labour facets, burnout, wellbeing and job satisfaction in 1320 full-time school principals. Principals displayed significantly higher scores on emotional demands at work, burnout and job satisfaction, and significantly lower wellbeing scores than the general population. Structural equation modelling revealed that emotional demands predicted the elevated use of all emotional labour strategies. Surface Acting-Hiding emotions had an inverse relationship with burnout, wellbeing and job satisfaction. Surface Acting-Faking emotions had an inverse relationship with job satisfaction. Deep Acting demonstrated no significant associations with outcome variables. The findings of this study extend the current literature on the effects of emotional labour. The study also extends understanding about the separate effects of the facets of emotional labour, which will aid in the development of interventions to reduce high levels of burnout reported by educational leaders.
This paper aims to provide an account of how school leaders in Kazakhstan learn about leadership and management, and what strategies are in place to support leadership development. The paper draws on empirical data collected over three years, derived mainly from interviews and focus groups with school leaders and teachers. The findings suggest that a hierarchical education system and strict policy regulations diminish the likelihood that the changes needed to encourage leadership practice by teachers will take place. The paper examines Kazakhstani school leaders’ learning opportunities, and focuses on the implications of borrowing leadership theories from the West. The key argument is that, if genuine change is to occur, these leaders will require time and space for critical reflection about what it is they need to learn and to do. The paper raises important issues about the conceptualisation of leadership learning and development in non-Western contexts.
This article has three aims: first, it examines the notion of evidence-informed practice and its benefits, as well as recent educational policy designed to promote schools’ use of evidence. Second, it examines four distinct but overlapping and interdependent factors that school leaders need to consider if they wish to establish evidence-informed practice within their school. These factors are: 1) the existence of teacher capacity to engage in and with research and data; 2) school cultures that are attuned to evidence use; 3) schools promoting the use of research as part of an effective learning environment; and 4) the existence of effective structures, system and resource that facilitate research-use and the sharing of best practice. Third we describe how the article’s authors undertook a survey of 696 practitioners in relation to these factors. Also how, with the resultant data we built a Gradient Boosted Tree predictive model to examine the potential policy levers available to school leaders wishing to promote evidence use in their schools. We conclude the article by setting out which of these factors is most likely to increase both support for evidence informed change within schools as well as boost instances of evidence informed practice by teachers.
The subject of special education teachers’ intentions to leave has been a longstanding concern of researchers and practitioners. This paper reports on a study that examined the workplace predictors of teachers’ intentions to leave for a nationally representative USA sample of 2060 secondary school special education teachers (with students aged approximately 13–18). Structural equation modeling was used to assess the plausibility of a conceptual model, specifying linkages among special education teachers’ perceptions of workplace factors, job satisfaction and commitment, and teachers’ intentions to leave. Using the 2007–2008 Schools and Staffing Survey data set, two models were tested to assess job satisfaction and commitment as mediators. Administrative support and teacher team efficacy had strong, significant direct and indirect effects on special education teachers’ intentions to leave. Teacher job design/autonomy, poor socio-economic/human conditions, and student disengagement also exerted significant indirect effects through satisfaction and commitment. However, administrative support and team efficacy were the most important for these teachers in their effects. Among several demographic variables, teacher age was the most powerful demographic factor, with more experienced teachers having lower intentions to leave. The authors suggest that several conditions and attitudes embedded in the teachers’ responses are influenced by administrators.
A positive teacher learning culture is important to effect meaningful changes in schools. Literature has established that successful school leaders can build and nurture learning cultures among teachers. However, less is known about how school leaders can shape the culture and make learning conditions happen at the schools in the Chinese education context. This paper reports an in-depth qualitative case study of a primary school in Shanghai. Using data collected from the principal, vice principal, mid-level leaders and teachers, the study attempts to answer these two questions: how do the school leaders build and nurture a positive teacher learning culture, and how does this culture affect teachers’ working lives?
Using qualitative data collected from three high schools in Shanghai, this study explored the barriers to the development of professional learning communities (PLCs) in Chinese schools from the perspectives of school leaders and teachers. Results indicate that the barriers identified by teachers in the development of PLCs include insufficient collaborative time, ineffective school leadership, unfavourable accountability policy, and lack of collaborative professional culture. By contrast, school leaders regard the absence of financial power, passive teachers, an unfavourable accountability system, and shortage of external resources as the major impediments to PLCs. Moreover, both similarities and differences are observed in the perceptions of teachers and school leaders regarding the barriers to PLC development. Practical implications for the effective implementation of PLCs and suggestions for future research are also presented.
The changing education landscape in England, combined with a more rigorous form of governor regulation in the form of the Ofsted 2012 Inspection Framework, are together placing more demands than ever before on the 300,000 volunteer school governors in England. These school governors are, in many cases, directly accountable to the Secretary of State for Education. Using a form of Goffman’s frame analysis and drawing on theory which indicates that head teachers and inspection reports are highly influential regarding the ways in which governors make sense of their environment and accountability, this paper traces the development of a system which is highly specific to England, in order to evaluate to what extent present governor regulatory accountabilities can be seen as either conflicting or in harmony with head teacher and inspector understandings of the role. The paper concludes that there is considerable evidence that the current regulatory framework combined with conflicting and often contradictory head teacher and inspector understandings of governance is giving rise to what Koppell terms ‘Multiple Accountabilities Disorder’ and that this is creating tensions in the system of education governance and regulation in England.
The present study aims to examine whether principals’ emotional intelligence (specifically, their ability to recognize emotions in others) makes them more effective transformational leaders, measured by the reframing of teachers’ emotions. The study uses multisource data from principals and their teachers in 69 randomly sampled primary schools. Principals undertook a performance task to allow assessment of their emotion recognition ability; half the teachers’ sampled (N = 319) reported on principals’ leadership behaviors and the other half (N = 320) on teachers’ subjective perceptions of principals as promoting teachers’ reframing of negative emotions into more positive ones. Data were analyzed through multilevel structural equation modeling. Findings indicated a cross-level relationship between principals’ transformational leadership behaviors and teachers’ emotional reframing, as well as a relationship between principals’ emotion recognition ability and their transformational behaviors. Furthermore, the study revealed that principals’ emotion recognition ability has an indirect effect on teachers’ emotional reframing through principals’ transformational leadership behaviors. The results provide empirical support for the claim that transformational leadership promotes emotional transformation. The theoretical and practical implications of the study are discussed.
Leadership is recognised in both policy and research as a key enabler of innovation in schools. Numerous researchers have focused on how school leaders formally narrate their experiences of leading innovations including their observations of effect; however, modest attention has been paid to the processes through which leaders engage in innovative work. This study focuses on the work of project teams running Norwegian school projects that aim to advance teaching and enhance student learning using information and communication technologies. By employing cultural-historical activity theory, leadership is examined as enactment that is consequential to the directions of the work. The findings demonstrate that the locus of agentive actions change from moment to moment within sequences of interactions. Thus, leadership in this kind of work is not under the control of any of the actors involved or any specific individual: the centre does not hold. The study contributes to understanding leadership in innovative work by demonstrating how leadership is an outcome in emergent multi-voiced work processes. Moreover, the study indicates that the ‘making of newness’ involves innovative work at collective and individual levels, and suggests that projects conducted between loosely coupled partners would profit from adopting routines for the management of interactions.
This quantitative study investigates teachers’ perceptions of how Emotional Intelligence (EI) was utilised by their school principals to manage mandated curriculum change processes in schools in the Johannesburg North district of Gauteng in South Africa. Research shows that EI consists of a range of fundamental skills that could enable school principals to facilitate the curriculum changes that are mandated by the Department of Basic Education and implemented by teachers in their classrooms. Researchers argue that principals could simply instruct teachers that the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statements, for example, are mandated by top management and that they have to implement them, or they could use EI skills to obtain teachers’ collaboration and commitment to implement the mandated changes. Using a quantitative research method, a structured questionnaire was administered to a sample of 600 Foundation Phase and Grade 10 teachers to probe their perceptions about the extent to which leadership utilised EI to manage mandated curriculum change. The results of this investigation show that there is a strong correlation between the utilisation of EI by school principals and the implementation of the mandated changes.
Strategies that encourage direct linkage and exchange between researchers and practitioners are more likely to support changes in educational practice informed by research evidence. Nevertheless, significant challenges remain in linking effectiveness education research to real-world practice: addressing the knowing–doing gap. The paper describes and evaluates an enquiry with a small network of three primary schools to demonstrate a ‘proof-of-concept’ for evidence-informed practice. The enquiry evaluated the effectiveness of a five-stage process of engagement with proven programmes and practices as a management tool for school leaders to address their schools’ improvement agendas. The paper reports on the change process in each school over a one year period and the enablers and constraints associated with the concept of evidence-based practice as a driver for change in teaching and learning. The paper discusses the contribution the enquiry makes to a theory of learning where practitioners and researchers are equal partners in the learning process, and the relevance of this to managing school improvement through research use.
The importance of leadership for improving educational outcomes in schools has been widely promoted. However, the nature of leadership practices, in context, has received less attention in the educational leadership literature. In this article, we present a case study of the specific leadership practices that developed in one school site serving the learning needs of students in a complex, diverse, low socio-economic community in south-east Queensland, Australia. Rather than focusing on the person/role of ‘the leader’, or various leadership qualities/traits, we examine the nature and particularity of the leadership practices as praxis, across a variety of roles and dispositions, as developed within the school. To help make sense of the praxis and particularity of educational leadership practices, we draw upon recent neo-Aristotelian practice theory to reveal the specific actions (‘doings’), dialogue (‘sayings’) and relationships (‘relatings’), which constituted leadership-in-practice, as praxis. These ‘doing’, ‘sayings’ and ‘relatings’ for praxis were evident in: formal leadership practices responsive to the context and history of the particular school site; formal and informal leadership practices involved in establishing a ‘leadership group’ within the school to address students’ needs, and; and informal leadership practices focused on cultivating teacher learning for student learning. Such an approach does not simply reinforce sedimented notions of what constitutes ‘educational leadership’, but sheds new light upon the nature of ‘leading practices for praxis’.
Using a convenience sample of 289 teachers in Singapore, this study examined: (1) whether there were significant differences between teachers’ perceptions of principal’s and immediate supervisor’s empowering behaviours; and (2) teachers’ perceptions of principal’s and immediate supervisor’s empowering behaviours in relation to teachers’ psychological empowerment. Results indicated that teachers perceived their principals and immediate supervisors as exercising empowering behaviours in their daily practices, but they also perceived their principal and immediate supervisor differing in magnitude in some specific dimensions of empowering behaviours such as delegation of authority, providing individualised concern and support, articulating a vision and fostering collaborative relationships. Results also indicated that teachers’ perceptions of principal’s and immediate supervisor’s empowering behaviours were positively associated with teachers’ psychological empowerment, and that they added unique variance to each other in predicting teachers’ psychological empowerment. This study suggests the importance of considering teachers’ perceptions of principal’s and immediate supervisor’s empowering behaviours as two distinct constructs in empirical research so that their unique predictive power could be more aptly captured. From a practical standpoint, it suggests the importance for school leadership developers to enhance school leaders’ awareness and capacity in exercising empowering behaviours towards their teachers in their daily practice. Essentially, schools may stand to gain from developing empowering leaders at different levels of management to promote teachers’ psychological empowerment.
This study applied multilevel modeling to examine how individual characteristics, such as gender and teaching experience, and contextual characteristics, such as principal leadership and perceived colleague support, influenced Korean secondary school teachers’ sense of job satisfaction. Previous research identified teachers with high job satisfaction to have positive influences on their students, making it important to understand teacher job satisfaction not only for teachers but also for students. Using data from a nationally representative sample of 2908 teachers from 150 middle schools, the results indicated that (1) among teachers’ individual characteristics, teacher efficacy had significant effects on teacher job satisfaction, and (2) among institutional, school-level characteristics, perceptions of academic climate, support from colleagues, and supportive principal leadership had significant impacts on teacher job satisfaction. The findings of this study provide reason for individual teachers to reflect on their sense of efficacy and the influence it can have on their professional practice. The study also suggests ways to create better education policies on the basis of its empirical data.
This article presents the results of an interpretive policy analysis of China’s Ministry of Education Standards (2013) for the professional practice of principals. In addition to revealing the evolution of the evaluation of principals in China and the processes by which this policy is formulated, a comparative analysis was conducted to compare it with the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Standards 2008 (ISLLC 2008). The analysis was conducted on the specific standards and indicators across the two documents. The results indicate the presence of both significant similarities and differences in performance expectations for principals: differences are explained by the cultural and national contexts within which school leaders work in both countries. In February 2013 the Ministry of Education in China issued for the first time the national Professional Standards for Compulsory Education School Principals, which provide the specific expectations of quality school leadership. The unprecedented interest in international benchmarking of student academic performance has led to the belief that there are common elements in education policy and school leadership practices. It is hoped that this research sheds new light onto the current thinking on the expectations and evaluation of principal leadership.
This study explores the funding variations by English local authorities (LAs) in January 2014 for pupils with special educational needs and disability (SEND). Two quintile groups (n = 30) are used for comparing LAs with low and high levels of statements and case studies are presented to further explore the allocations. The research findings provide a baseline for LA critical self-reviews and benchmarking of any revised funding formulae. Authorities that make limited use of statements are found to have significantly lower budgets for SEND pupils with and without statements, are more inclusive and make use of statements to primarily access special settings. Evidence is presented to affirm that the government’s current allocation methods, in part based on past levels of funding, can seriously challenge and undermine those LAs with a policy of inclusion and controlled use of statements, as these latter LAs may also wish to make vigilant use of education, health and care plans from September 2014.
This article examines the role of leadership in the development of academic talent in higher education from a social exchange and organizational support perspective. Drawing from a sample of academic staff at a large South African university, the study investigates the extent to which a quality leader–member exchange relationship versus a formal organizational resource perspective contributes to academic staff perceptions of organizational investment in academic talent development. The study found new evidence of the ways in which relationship resources embodied in the leader–member exchange relationship between supervisors (leaders) and employees (followers) influence employees’ perceptions of investment in their development. The results also demonstrated how the leader–member exchange theory, combined with theoretical work on organizational development support, could help to explain the critical role of department heads as leaders in developing academic staff (as followers).
Teacher appraisal has been widely practised in China for decades. With the introduction, in 2009, of the teacher performance pay system, however, teacher appraisal has undergone certain changes. This study explores the practice of teacher appraisal, using a qualitative approach and taking public schools in Shanghai as its research sites. The methods adopted include interviews with teachers and school administrators, observation of relevant activities and document analysis. The study reveals that teacher appraisal in schools in Shanghai is not a one-off event. Although the procedure for generating appraisal results occurs at the end of each year, data collection activities for appraisal – including lesson observation, student evaluation of teachers and checking teachers’ tasks – are conducted throughout the whole year. The current teacher appraisal system has been a success, and this study identifies four factors contributing to that success. First, administrative and developmental appraisal coexist as one single appraisal system. Second, teacher appraisal is integrated with other aspects of schools’ business. Third, teacher appraisal is perceived by teachers as credible and fair. Fourth, non-technical aspects of appraisal, such as teachers’ psychology and social dynamics, are taken into account during the appraisal process.
School governing bodies in England have considerable powers and responsibilities with regard to the education of pupils. This article explores how power relations operate, within governing bodies, through struggles over which types of knowledge are claimed and valued. The article draws on the analysis of policy and on ethnographic research in the governing bodies of four maintained schools to explore the complex interactions between lay, educational and managerial knowledge. The article suggests that educational and managerial expertise are privileged over lay knowledge. Hence, the concept of ‘lay’ knowledge, which is attached to external governors, is easily coopted by managerial knowledge as it does not have alternative expert knowledge attached to it.
Most studies in headship focus on the elements of training and head teachers’ capabilities in leading schools. The concept of isolation experienced by head teachers during the early years of their headship is, however, overlooked. This article attempts to explore the neglected aspect of headships’ experiences with isolation that later contributes to the betterment of the headship appointment. This mixed-methods study explores the experience of head teachers’ isolation in the early phase of their leadership years, and presents findings on the strategies used to overcome the isolation. Using an open-ended questionnaire, a total of 170 novice head teachers from Malaysian primary and secondary schools were asked to give their responses on experiences of isolation. Furthermore, 10 novice head teachers, who experienced isolation in the early phase of their leadership years, were interviewed. Findings revealed that the level of isolation among the head teachers was fairly low, and they perceived their isolation experience as temporary.
In the UK the title ‘professor’ is generally applied only to the most senior academics – equivalent to North American full professors – and whom anecdotal evidence indicates to be often unprepared for the increasingly expansive academic leadership roles that they are expected to fulfil. The study reported in this paper was directed at exploring the reliability of such evidence, and the ways in which professors develop or prepare themselves, or are developed or prepared by others, for what are generally considered their professorial academic leadership roles. Data were gathered by questionnaires and interviews, revealing that excessive professorial workloads often result from confusion about what constitutes academic leadership and precisely what and how much is expected of professors. Yet despite an evident dearth of ‘official’, designated, academic leadership preparation and/or development provision, professors were resourceful in drawing upon their experience, networks and intellectual capacity to develop ways of becoming and being effective members of the professoriate.
There have been constant debates on how to improve school leadership in South Africa. This has emanated from numerous research findings locally and internationally that demonstrate that schools will be as effective as the people who are at their helm. The national Zenex/Advanced Certificate in Education research findings have also claimed that mentoring of school leaders has great potential to sustain effective schools. The idea of formal mentoring is fairly new in South African schools but its popularity is growing widely.
This qualitative study focused on the experiences of five mentors who mentored five principals. There was only one historically white school in the study. Two of these principals are principals in historically black schools, one from a rural school and one from a farm school – all these schools are situated in KwaZulu-Natal Province in South Africa. The results demonstrate that whilst the mentors highlighted room for improvement in the current incipient practice of formal mentoring, they displayed optimism for the future of schools whose leaders are mentored. They also maintained that effective mentoring builds confidence and commitment among school leaders.
Since research shows that the quality of a school’s teaching force is related to its personnel practices, there is a growing interest in human resource management (HRM) in education. Existing research has generated insights into the differences, constraints and effects of single and isolated HR practices. Yet, little research is available examining bundles of HR practices (that is, HR architecture) from a principal’s perspective. This article investigates how and why HR architectures for new teachers are configured by principals by looking at the ways principals make sense of hiring, induction and tenure practices. The analysis is based on semi-structured interviews with 54 primary school principals in Flanders (Belgium). After coding the interview transcripts using descriptive categories, the transcripts were coded based on principal’s strategic orientation and human resource orientation. Looking at the differences and commonalities in these orientations, four HR architectures were identified: an administrative, a developmental, a strategic and a strategic-developmental HR architecture. These architectures showed that only a minority of principals configure bundles of HR practices for new teachers strategically. Moreover, they point to a disharmony in principals’ beliefs regarding how new teachers should be managed. Differences between these four HR architectures can be found in the extent to which principals perceive and cope with external challenges. Suggestions for further research, limitations and implications of this study are discussed.
The Holistic Equilibrium Theory of Organizational Development was used to gain an in-depth understanding of the influence of holistic staff capacity on conducting effective internal whole-school evaluation (IWSE) within the Gauteng Department of Education’s public secondary schools. In the context of South African education, the staff of each public school are legally mandated to conduct an IWSE annually to self-determine their school development paths within a school improvement framework. This IWSE programme, however, takes a myopic unidimensional approach to whole school improvement, demanding public school staff, from diverse milieus with varying degrees of capacity, to take greater ownership of their own development needs through self-evaluative mechanisms. Using a concurrent triangulation mixed methods approach comprising a structured questionnaire, supported by focus group interviews, individual interviews with school principals and open-ended responses, this study elicited data on five distinct but integrated theoretical capacity dimensions: school evaluation, school improvement, collaborative cultures, professional learning communities and transformational leadership. The findings from both data collection strands corroborated the overarching conclusion that development of holistic capacities, transcending a technicist, bureaucratic approach, is more likely to result in the meaningful use of IWSE scaffolding school improvement.
In this article, we describe the professional development towards distributed leadership among different organizational levels in Finnish day care centres within the Helsinki metropolitan area. The aim of the study was to monitor the progress of professional development between educational administration and practitioners. The data was based on descriptions of reflective practices used in the development projects of each research day care centre. Participants were asked to describe developing practices and reflect on their own contributions to the process as both individuals and together as working teams during the two years of the development project. The researchers collected these reflections, analysed them to produce results and then delivered this evidence to participants for utilization in reflection and further processing of working practices with the support of the mentor. Directors and mentors viewed distributed leadership as a good way to encourage development practices and brought out the role of staff as important agents in the development process. The distribution of leadership seems to be best realized among the participants at the lowest and middle hierarchical levels.
The aim of the study was to investigate, from a critical perspective, mentees’ perceptions regarding the persons they view as their influential mentors – whether they regard them as authentic leaders and whether these mentors affect the development of mentees’ emotional intelligence (EI). Using a sample of 62 teacher-mentees from different school levels and different sectors in Israel, semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore participants’ perceptions of mentoring processes that had influenced them professionally. A qualitative analysis, based on a confirmatory approach using ATLAS.ti, revealed that the influential mentors were perceived as authentic leaders, acting within different dimensions of authentic leadership (AL) at different levels. In addition, it was found that mentees perceived their influential mentors as contributing to the development of the mentees’ EI, including different relationships between the various dimensions of AL and the different dimensions of EI. This led to the generation of a multifaceted model which may develop a critical perspective regarding the difficulty of mentoring, considering the uncertainly in mentors’ works. The findings support this critical review of mentoring and, it is argued, will encourage educational leaders to focus on advancing different dimensions of authentic leadership during mentors’ professional development programs, in order to develop different dimensions of mentees’ EI.
A qualitative study was conducted to examine how gender and ethnicity influenced leadership experiences of a mixed ethnic sample of British women. An intersectional framework was used which took the viewpoint that socio-demographic identities should be considered simultaneously in order to challenge universalist, gender and ethnic neutral assumptions of leadership. One hundred and thirty women of white, black, Asian and mixed ethnicity in senior management and leadership positions from a broad range of sectors participated in focus groups and interviews exploring leadership constructions and enactment. White women’s leadership definitions reflected contemporary leadership models. In contrast, minority ethnic women defined leadership using predominantly ethno-cultural lenses, which informed their self-identities and orientation towards others. Regarding enacting leader identities, white women described historical gender and class barriers to enacting leadership, while minority ethnic women described current barriers linked to ethnic and religious identities. Practical implications for women’s leader identity development and theoretical implications for developing more inclusive leadership theories are discussed.
This article reports research into the role and responsibilities of the chairs of governing bodies of further education colleges and sixth-form colleges in England. Further education colleges and sixth-form colleges represent a significant part of post-16 educational provision in England. Every college in the sector has a governing body, which has a chair elected from and by the governing body’s membership. Sixteen chairs from further education and sixth-form colleges in England were interviewed and data themes identified: the chair’s role and responsibilities reflect those of chairs in non-further education/sixth-form college settings; a range of expertise is required, but detailed educational knowledge is not a priority in the requisite skill-set; chairs consider they bring a range of high level values and commitments to the role; chairs’ participation in role-specific training and development was not a strong theme; the responsibility of being the chair is substantial and complex; high-quality chair–principal relationships are crucial and complex; the governing body clerk has a significant role in relation to the chair, the principal and college governance generally; and the role and the responsibilities of chairs and the way they are specified locally by their governing bodies have significant implications for further education and sixth-form governance.
This small-scale case study focused on academic managers to explore the ways in which they control the workload of academic staff and the extent to which they use the workload model in performance management of academic staff. The links that exist between the workload and performance management were explored to confirm or refute the conceptual dichotomy, identified from the literature, exist in practice. A conceptualization derived from neoliberal ideology is described which uses new public management as the anchor for the study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the three academic managers in each of the faculties and the transcripts analysed. The analysis of the responses confirmed that workload and performance management are not linked at the operational level, confirming the dichotomy in practice. Further research is suggested that would focus on the perceptions of academic staff directly affected by the workload and performance management processes.
This study tested the role of enabling school structures, collegial trust and academic emphasis in the development of professional learning communities (PLCs) in a low-income school district. The empirical study was based upon the perceptions of teachers and principals as provided by survey responses (N = 67 schools). While enabling school structures, collegial trust and academic emphasis simultaneously contributed to the explanation of PLCs, only structure and trust had a unique effect on PLCs with structure having the larger contribution.
The purpose of this study is to analyse how the access to structures of empowerment by teachers in primary and secondary education impacts on their trust of the headmaster of the school management board. Using the theoretical framework of empowerment and trust in the context of companies, one adapted the constructs of these scales to the reality of primary and secondary schools. A questionnaire was presented to 112 teachers in order to evaluate the impact of empowerment structures on their trust of the leader. The results obtained indicate that a context of empowering work is significantly predictive of trust in the school’s headmaster. The teaching staff who realize that they have access to empowerment structures (power, resources, opportunities, support and information) and feel that they can exercise some influence on the organization of their workplace are in a better position to trust the headmaster. The results are discussed and the contributions of the study to theory and to school administration are presented.
Although school improvement continues to present as an unresolved educational problem, the required changes are relatively straightforward. Essentially, schools need to be retooled with students’ experiences and high-quality instruction at the center of the design. In this article, we present the findings of research into the leadership of high-capacity learning community schools, wherein the design features yielded school-wide improvement in teaching and learning. Specifically, educational leadership emerged organically throughout the school, and the school leaders took a collaborative, learning-oriented approach to regulating, coordinating, expanding and protecting professional practice. These leadership activities reflected the ontology of living systems, as different from managed systems, and enabled the leaders to create an environment within which authentic teaching and rich learning flourished.
The past 20 years have been a period of reforms for school systems in Visegrad countries. However, the successful implementation of educational reforms requires effective leaders and managers and, to produce effective leaders, changes in the system of leadership and management programmes need to be adopted. From 2004, the Czech Republic saw a growth of school project activities, with educational projects becoming important tools for supporting innovations in teaching and learning processes. Despite the new system of leadership development, there was a gap between level of headteachers’ competencies and the competency required to manage educational projects successfully. This study focuses on the leadership competencies of project management, particularly risk management, in the context of educational organizations. The survey data were collected through interviews with headteachers, senior teachers and project managers in 118 educational subjects from nine regions of the Czech Republic. The research team acquired data from 300 educational projects. The key findings show that headteachers have difficulty in managing the risks of educational projects. Survey results also indicate that a very high level of risk occurred in 8% of the examined projects, and medium risk, in 27%. It is suggested that training and knowledge-transfer programmes about project management, including risk management, should become priorities when preparing headteachers for their role.
This paper reviews a selection of literature on secondary principal practice from which to propose an approach for further research. The review demonstrates that applications of Bourdieu’s theory of practice have contributed to understandings about secondary principal practice, and that the distinction he made between rules and strategies has the potential to provide a useful approach to gaining new understandings of everyday secondary principal practice. The paper signals that it is timely to undertake research into secondary principal practice in Aotearoa New Zealand, and that applying Bourdieu’s conceptualising of strategies to this research has the potential to reveal some of the unconscious, unstated and less visible practices of everyday leadership. Further, applying Bourdieu’s theory of practice to analysing and explaining this data on secondary principal practice may reveal new insights about what secondary principals do and why.
Despite the increased importance of school inspection in recent years, the current knowledge base does not provide a clear view on the effects and side effects of being inspected. More evidence is needed in more diverse educational contexts. This article responds to this need with a quantitative study on the effects and side effects of school inspections on Flemish schools. In total 2624 respondents from 130 primary and secondary schools participated in the study. The article discusses the conceptual, instrumental, symbolic and strategic effects of inspection and its impact on self-efficacy and collective efficacy. Regarding side effects, the emotional impact is discussed alongside disturbing effects, misleading activities by schools and individual teachers and the impact on staff members’ personal lives. Furthermore the article distinguishes between the responses of staff members from schools with a positive inspection judgement and those with a less favourable judgement, and between the responses of teachers and of members of the school management teams. This study is embedded in the Flemish educational context. The results of our study are put in perspective next to results of studies in other educational contexts. Several particularities of the Flemish educational context (and how they may have affected our results) are discussed.
Change process research often discusses barriers that impede organizational change (e.g., Banta, 1997; Cavacuiti and Locke, 2013; Mutchler, 1990; Stewart et al., 2012); however, no empirical research has addressed how behaviors established in leadership models counteract these barriers. This study explored these two interconnected constructs of leadership and change in stories of secondary school department chair change attempts, and identified specific leadership behaviors described within their stories that aided the conversion of change barriers into conditions that enhanced the change process. Leadership behavior identification within department chair stories of change was guided by Blake and Mouton’s (1962) leadership theory, which has been further delineated by Yukl et al. (2002), and identification of change process barriers was guided by Ely’s (1990a) eight conditions for change. From the combined descriptions of six successful and four unsuccessful narratives of department chair-led change emerged essential conditions for change and commonly occurring change barriers. Specific leadership behaviors capable of overcoming these change barriers were also identified. Unexpectedly, this investigation also unearthed a change barrier seemingly unrelated to previously identified conditions of change: the contentious resistor. The contentious resistor was described as the most detrimental barrier to department chairs’ leadership of the change process.
Instructional rounds is a professional learning practice for supporting school and district leaders’ understanding of the instructional core, the interaction among curricular content, instruction, and student learning, which is a foundation for instructional leadership practices. This article examines instructional rounds visits within a network of school district superintendents in a northeastern state of the USA over five years. It investigates how discussions within visits demonstrate features of discourse that afford opportunities for learning, that is, those that employ specific evidence in interpreting classroom practice. The analysis suggests that such instruction-specific discourse can be initiated by facilitators or participants. However, instruction-specific discourse is relatively rare and easily threatened, thus limiting opportunities for learning. The article offers implications for enhancing opportunities for instruction-specific discourse, thus making instructional rounds more generative of learning.
There is wide recognition that early childhood experiences are critical to a child’s development and their subsequent life chances. However, little research has been undertaken into leadership in early years settings, which is so influential in this regard. This article summarizes research into the leadership of Sure Start Children’s Centres, which provide support to the most vulnerable children and families. Completed by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) on behalf of NCSL, this research involved a review of literature on early years leadership and the production of 25 case studies of leaders of ‘highly effective’ children’s centres. The study identified three specific challenges faced by leaders of children’s centres. Two of these, ensuring positive outcomes for children and dealing with change, are particularly salient in light of challenges affecting leaders in times of austerity. The third, increasing the visibility and value of leadership, is a perennial challenge for the sector. The study found that leaders demonstrated eight core behaviours to address these challenges. These included engaging responsively with families, using evidence to drive improvement, motivating and empowering staff and embracing integrated working. The authors recommend that these behaviours inform the delivery of future leadership development for these leaders.
The need to identify and suitably prepare teachers to undertake school leadership roles especially as principals is now well documented in the literature. Similarly documented is the general concern about the lack of suitable applicants willing to consider the role. This study raised the question of what might be learnt when a purposefully-selected cohort of 31 teachers drawn from executive, non-principal roles participated in a year-long, multi-phased leadership development program: The Flagship Program of the Association of Independent Schools of New South Wales, Australia (AIS). The design of the program was informed by internationally acknowledged principles of good practice in leadership preparation. Evaluation of the program combined action learning methodologies working with participants with more formal evaluation of each of the program’s stages to investigate participant growth and program effectiveness. The action learning component undertaken with the direct involvement of all participants and with the support of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) was able to pinpoint what the participants themselves saw as important and what was less so at this stage of their preparation for school leadership roles. In so doing, the study adds a valuable participant perspective to the overall literature on leadership preparation.
Teachers’ professional development is nowadays seen as key in efforts to improve education. Knowledge sharing is a learning activity with which teachers not only professionalize themselves, but contribute to the professional development of their colleagues as well. This paper presents two studies, aimed to explain knowledge sharing by teachers’ occupational self-efficacy and Human Resources Management (HRM). In the first study we examined the impact of HRM from a ‘content perspective’, and focused on a bundle of Human Resources Management practices, namely, high-commitment Human Resources Management (HC-HRM). Multilevel analyses of survey data from 410 teachers, from 30 teams, in one school, showed that high-commitment Human Resources Management strengthened the relationship between occupational self-efficacy and knowledge sharing. The second study examined the moderating impact of Human Resources Management from a ‘process perspective’. In this study we focused on ‘distinctive’ Human Resources Management: employees perceptions of a visible Human Resources Management within the school. Multilevel analyses of survey data from 282 teachers, from 47 teams, in four schools, showed that a distinctive Human Resources Management strengthened the relationship between occupational self-efficacy and knowledge sharing. Although the findings are encouraging and enabled us to formulate some practical implications, the study limitations also gave rise to suggestions for further research.
This study analyses the collaboration between principals within four Flemish school federations (voluntary collaborative networks between either primary or secondary schools). Interview data from principals were analysed using a micropolitical perspective. A central idea in micropolitical theory is that organization members’ actions (and sense-making) are largely driven by their interests. As such this perspective allows to understand how principals’ interests influence how collaborations within federations work out in practice. In three federations, we found an alignment of principals’ interests that stimulated a collaborative dynamic, which eventually contributed to improvement of the federation. Moreover, it also enhanced principals’ professional development. In the fourth case, however, such dynamics were absent due to a conflict of interests between the federation and one member school. Because one school felt the federation threatened its educational identity and mission, it almost completely withdrew from the federation. Thus, we conclude that principals’ balancing of interests plays an important role in the development of collaborative relationships and practices within school federations.
Using Activity Theory as an interpretive lens to examine the distribution of leadership, this paper shares a case study on how leadership for an ICT project was distributed in a Singapore school.
The case study involved observations of 49 meetings and 34 interviews of leaders and the teachers who were involved in the ICT project.
Applying the lens of third-generation Activity Theory helped to reveal two main interrelated activity systems, and the leadership actions performed by senior and middle management. The two activity systems comprised the school and the ICT project. The focus in Activity Theory on the social–cultural perspective highlighted the role played by social norms in mediating the leadership activity.
The conclusion focuses on the understanding of distributed leadership as analysed through the lens of Activity Theory and suggests future research directions. Activity Theory enables research on distributed leadership to identify and examine interrelated activity systems that various leaders are involved in, and how these impact the leadership provided.
Despite the deeply entrenched belief in and practice of corporal punishment to maintain learner control in schools, a secondary school in Namibia has for a number of years proven to be an exception to this practice. This is an interpretive account of the teachers’ and learners’ experiences and perceptions of the influence of their school principal’s leadership on learner behaviour. In-depth individual and group interviews were held with teachers and learners. Onsite observation was conducted for 14 consecutive school days and school documents were analysed. The data reveal an engaged school leadership that has created a school culture characterized by respect, care, trust, edifying relationships, a sense of belonging, praise, acknowledgement and recognition, and collaboration. By creating a collaborative school culture the school’s leadership is not located in the principal alone but in a ‘web of relationships’. In the view of both teachers and learners these features of the school’s leadership and culture are largely responsible for the positive learner behaviour in the school. This research reaffirms the central role played by school principals in establishing and maintaining their school’s culture. It also illustrates the mediating role of school culture in learner behaviour. It is significant that this occurs in a socio-economically deprived context in a developing nation.
This study considers the rhetoric and practice of self-assessment by governing bodies of schools and colleges. The context expects governing bodies to reflect on their performance and this is supported by theoretical approaches to self-assessment of ‘boards’. However, there are both general notes of caution and interview evidence of the complexities and limitations of self-assessment by governing bodies. The article includes advice on the basic conditions necessary for undertaking self-assessment by school and college governing bodies. In the light of the evidence and case presented, the authors urge care and sophistication when practising or considering the outcome of self-assessment by school and college governing bodies.
In Hong Kong, there is an acute need to provide newly appointed principals with opportunities for continuous professional development so that they could face the impact of reforms and globalization on school development. The Education Bureau has commissioned the tertiary institutions to provide structured professional development courses to cater for the needs of aspiring, newly appointed and serving principals for leadership development. This paper aims to report on an exploratory qualitative study regarding the perception of 32 newly appointed principals from secondary schools on (a) their role as a new principal and (b) their needs and expectations on the school leadership development programme so that contents of existing development programmes could be improved to meet their needs. Findings demonstrated that the newly appointed principals expected to be equipped with the administrative skills of human resources management such as empowering middle leaders and handing underperforming staff; the practical technique of financial management; the skills of dealing with legal matters regarding school management and the capacities of curriculum and instructional leadership. In addition, they attributed networking with peers and working with mentors as invaluable experience and support for their early years’ principalship.
The article reports the findings of a qualitative case study in one elementary school in Iceland. The aim was to investigate the level of leadership capacity within the school, and how this had evolved through the school’s improvement. Information was gathered over one school year about planned improvements that had taken place in the school over the 10-year period prior to the study. Data was collected through observations, document analysis, semi-structured interviews, informal conversations and a survey. Participants came from all sectors of the school community. A conceptual framework developed by Lambert (2003a) was used to analyse the leadership capacity within the school. The findings show that the leadership capacity of the school, and of groups within the school, had grown considerably during the period under study and was connected to the degree of involvement in school improvement work. The findings indicated an interactive relationship between school improvement and the building of leadership capacity during the period under study.
This article is based on a qualitative multi case study carried out in southwestern Kenya along the border areas of Nyanza and Rift Valley province. The purpose of the research was to examine the challenges public secondary school principals faced in their leadership roles and suggest efforts they might adopt to minimize the effects of these challenges. Data was drawn from interviews with six secondary school principals, document analysis as well as participant observation. Findings indicated that principals of public secondary school are faced with challenges associated with overdependence, uncertainty and vulnerability.
This paper presents interview data from research conducted in two public high schools in the state of Queensland, Australia. The research was concerned with exploring issues of equity and diversity. Both schools had recently converted to ‘independent’ status within a new state policy reform – the Independent Public Schools initiative. This reform was seen as having a significant effect on matters of equity and diversity and so became an important focus of the research. Within current accountability parameters, there were concerns expressed by key personnel at the schools about how converting to an Independent Public Schools was both enabling and constraining student equity in terms of resource distribution and school access, and undermining schools’ focus on their public purpose in relation to imposing an excessive focus on narrow external accountability measures. These concerns bring to light the significance of moral leadership within autonomous schooling environments – shaped as they are by regimes of accountability and competition that can clearly compromise student equity and delimit schooling purposes.
When it comes to organizational performance, leaders matter. Without significant attention to the preparation and development of school leaders, government initiatives aimed at building world class education systems are unlikely to succeed. Across the Anglophone world leadership preparation and development has become a key leverage point in education policy, with many nations establishing systems of licensing, accreditation and mandatory programmes. Outside the Anglophone world and central powers of the global north, school leadership preparation and development exists in a highly contested space that balances colonial legacy, deficit thinking and an unrelenting desire to compete on a global scale, with calls for localized knowledge, values and histories. In this article we problematize this context by arguing that the ontological complicity of policy interventions – particularly those funded by the global north – is shaping African developments in a manner that is exclusive of localized knowledge and in doing so, constrains that which it sort to improve in the first place. We build our argument on two key points: first, the centrality of preparation programmes in our understanding of educational leadership, management and administration, and second, the apparent absence of interrogation of the socio-political work of constructing the research object. What we propose is a greater need to focus on the epistemological preliminaries of research, rather than just the confirmation or disconfirmation, of the researcher’s model of reality.
The concept of distributed leadership is widely used, but the ways whereby it becomes positive when distributed from the principal through the school counselor, still call for further clarification. The present study aims to illuminate this subject by analyzing the work of the principal and the counselors in five successful Israeli schools. Using an instrumental multi-case study method, it was found that the main distribution practice was team counseling, a counselor-led practice wherein at any time a student’s need arises, the counselor forms an ad hoc team to work together until the problem is solved, at which time the team is disbanded. By working within the school’s structure, respecting participants’ trust and expertise, and enabling information flow, the principal and the counselor facilitate distribution of positive leadership for the benefit of students and the school. Further theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
This paper explores the concept of instructional leadership and principals’ perceptions of the practices of instructional leadership. Despite the emphasis on the effects of school leadership regarding teaching practices and learning outcomes, research on direct instructional leadership is scarce. It is focused either on identifying overall leadership practices or on measuring the effect of various intangible school level variables, such as school climate, on student learning. The concepts related to instructional leadership are ambiguous and vague, and challenged by contemporary understandings of school leadership (transformative and distributed leadership). The data consists of narratives written by principals from Norway, Sweden and Finland on successful and unsuccessful efforts of guiding teachers’ work in the classroom. These narratives are used for enabling principals to communicate their experiences of the complexity of interacting with teachers in instructional matters. A theoretical framework of practice architectures is used to elucidate the material, discursive and relational aspects of instructional leadership. A three-step analysis of the data suggests that successful instructional leadership is characterized by solidity, co-production and direction. Interestingly, principals’ narratives on instructional leadership lack an explicit vocabulary of didactics, examples of face-to-face guidance of teaching as well as direct professional relationships for strengthening teaching practices.
Readiness for change is one of the constructs that fosters positive behaviours, attitudes and thinking towards new adjustments on the part of employees. As one of the internal context variables, trust acts as a catalyst for supportive behaviours in times of change and uncertainty by reducing change related resistance and stress. Based on this understanding, this study explores the predictive value of organizational trust for cognitive, emotional and intentional readiness for change among a group of primary and secondary school teachers in Turkey. The data from 603 public school teachers were collected using the Omnibus T-Scale and Readiness for Change-Cognitive Emotional Intentional Scale. Taking each dimension of readiness for change as a criterion variable, three sets of predictors were defined for three separate hierarchical regression analyses. The results provided empirical evidence concerning the relationship between intentional, emotional and cognitive readiness for change and perceived faculty trust in colleagues and in the principal after statistically controlling for the school level and teacher demographics at primary and secondary level public schools. The results were interpreted within the scope of the current literature as well as structural and functional characteristics of Turkish education system.
This paper examines the relationship between leadership roles and skills in secondary schools in Greece. Drawing upon a sample of 124 secondary public school principals, a structured questionnaire was developed to measure leadership roles and skills. The Competing Values Framework (CVF) was adopted to operationalize the eight leadership roles. The threefold classification of skills by Katz (1974) was enriched by a fourth categorization in order to identify principals’ skills. The results indicate that Greek principals are inclined to perform the roles of innovator, director, monitor and facilitator more intensely, giving less attention to the broker, producer, coordinator and mentor roles. The importance of the innovator role in explaining the variance of two of four skill categories was confirmed; while the monitor role was strongly associated with human skills. The administrative skills were negatively associated with the facilitator role while the conceptual skills were not found to be correlated to any role. It is argued that understanding the nature of the associations could enable education policy makers and principals to pursue these roles and behaviors, thereby contributing to improvement of the school.
This article describes the development and validation of a measure for transformational and transactional leadership that may be used as part of a more comprehensive instrument to measure a school’s capacity to implement school-based interventions. Data used for this study were gathered from the reports of 1144 teachers from 45 Norwegian schools who were taking on a school development intervention aimed at preventing and reducing problem behaviours among students. Using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, measurement structures with two factors at the teacher level and one factor at the school level provided a good fit to the data. Although there is some overlap between transactional and transformational leadership, the two concepts do measure distinct features. Transformational and transactional leadership was eventually measured by teacher reports on two scales, each consisting of four items. As part of the validation, scores on the scales were related to other aspects relevant for organisational capacity. As expected, the transformational and transactional leadership scales both correlated significantly negatively with staff freedom and positively with innovation climate, affiliation, principal positions in schools, and collaborative activity at both the teacher and the school levels.
Leadership is considered to be significant for creating a developing and learning school organisation. In Sweden, distributed leadership and teacher teams are an ‘institutionalised practice’; despite this, sustainable school improvement is difficult to achieve. This article presents findings from a case study of three schools that examined the influence of distributed leadership when establishing developing and learning school organisations in the Swedish context. The study investigated the differences and similarities in the organisations and highlighted the emerging tensions. The article argues that support from the school’s principal is vital and that teacher leaders must focus on development instead of management, learning instead of quick solutions and be challenging instead of confirming. But above all, for a developing and learning school organisation to be created collaboration needs to be expanded and a professional attitude firmly adopted. This article provides in-depth descriptions of how leadership is distributed in ‘natural school contexts’ and its impact on school improvement outside the Anglo-Saxon school setting.
The development of emotional intelligence skills offers sufficient leadership qualities for advancing the organization and for achieving its objectives. In particular, the emotionally intelligent leader–principal is able to inspire and facilitate a self-conscious and organizational culture by adopting the values of understanding, trust, prospect, achievement and effectiveness and combining emotions, beliefs, vision and values in a flexible manner. In order to inquire on the above, a data-gathering process was employed in the spring of 2011, with the use of anonymous questionnaires administered to 301 educators/teachers and 36 principals who work in primary schools in Athens. The data-gathering process included the application of a questionnaire that derived key insight into the identification of key emotional intelligent and leadership factors. The data analysis process has set off 14 significant statistical factors. Ten of them were related to the principal’s emotional intelligence and four referred to leadership. The research findings have offered key insights into profiling the school principal from a leadership and emotional intelligence standpoint. Hence, such information could be rather useful in the training and development of principals, as well as for further research that could investigate the correlation between emotional intelligence and effectiveness of primary school principals.
Parent-school engagement is widely understood to be an important factor in children’s school experience and educational outcomes. However, there is considerable variation in the ways that schools manage their relationships with parents, as well as variation in what parents themselves view as important for engagement with their children’s schooling. In a qualitative study conducted with parents in urban, outer metropolitan, regional and rural areas of the Australian state of New South Wales, we found that parents considered the attitudes, communication and leadership practices of school principals to play a crucial role in fostering and maintaining relationships between parents and schools. These findings suggest that despite policy rhetorics positioning schools and parents as ‘partners’ in the educational equation, parents are more likely to be engaged with schools where the principal is perceived as welcoming and supportive of their involvement, and less likely to be engaged where the principal is perceived as inaccessible, dismissive or disinterested in supporting their involvement.
The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the life and career paths of women higher education administrators in sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, the study sought to interpret the women’s experiences and identities, through the framework of intersectionality and gender performance, as ones that contributed to advancement within contexts traditionally barred to women. This research illustrates commonalities among the participants, elucidating the faith, family, and education as common constructs in their experiences and as mechanisms that propelled career trajectories. A major finding of the research is that the participants both preformed gender and defied it through the enactment of gender norms and personal agency, creating a threshold for their professional achievement in highly gendered cultures and institutions.
This article examines the conditions for the growth and expansion of research-engaged schools in England. The current policy climate is seeing a rapid growth of autonomous schools coupled with the continuing tendency to hold schools to account for overall student educational attainment indicators. Within this context, the article begins by considering some of the benefits of developing a research-led school culture and gives a brief account of the research-engaged school movement. Using a biological analogy, the article argues for an understanding of the growth of a school research culture as occurring within an interconnected ecosystem. Four ‘nourishing’ factors are explained in detail: systemic connectedness; leadership for knowledge creation; teaching as a research-informed practice; and the school as a learning organisation. School leaders are urged to consider developing a culture of research engagement as a long-term, sustainable improvement strategy.
The authentic leadership literature suggests that there are three critical elements that precede the bestowal of authentic leadership: first, the espoused values and actions of authentic leaders must be congruent; second, the expectation of the leaders and the followers must be congruent; and, third, the leaders must behave with high moral integrity for the good of their subordinates, the organization and the community. These features of authentic leadership involve subjective interpretation, and therefore evaluations of it may vary in different settings. This study used the Q method to compare leaders’ and followers’ constructs of authentic leadership in Ghana and New Zealand. Thirty leaders and followers in each of the organizations studied in Ghana and New Zealand sorted selected statements about authentic leadership. Three factors or types of authentic leadership were identified and named for each of the four settings. While these results suggest that authentic leadership is idiosyncratic, further analysis showed that some attributes of authentic leadership were common to the organizations, and some were common to the countries. These findings confirmed that in order to encourage and support authentic leadership, it is necessary to consider an ‘employee-centric’ approach in which followers’ viewpoints are given full recognition. Further, effective leadership training programmes needed to be tailored to specific organizations in specific contexts to achieve desirable outcomes for organizations.
This study builds on a set of Australian case studies exploring the impact of Place on the work of principals and of the importance of Place in the preparation and development of principals. The project compares the ways that principals in Iceland and Australia build leadership capacity in small rural schools. Leaders of small schools in both settings face challenges because of their remoteness, such as lack of access to professional learning opportunities, professional isolation and teaching roles in addition to leadership and administrative responsibilities. Qualitative data from interviews and observations were used to construct narrative accounts of salient aspects of the principal’s work. It was evident that these schools were good schools, hardly noticed and rarely visited by their respective educational authority personnel. Their principals accommodate the changes they face, accepting the conditions they find. These schools are characterised by a culture of acceptance, where expectations for performance and behaviour are known and shared and not questioned. But is this enough? Could they be great schools or even simply better schools? In what ways? At what cost? How might these schools become great schools if principals were to develop a culture of inquiry?
Changes facing higher education from increased government, student and community demands are resulting in a greater focus on leadership within universities. Attempts to adapt to higher education theory that underpins leadership in other sectors have been criticised for failing to recognise its unique role in the development of creative and innovative thinking required to increase and exchange knowledge. What is needed is a new approach to leadership that goes beyond individual control and management bureaucracy to embrace more sharing and collaboration. One such approach is distributed leadership; however, existing research into distributed leadership in higher education has been criticised for being normative and less democratic than is suggested in its theorisation. The research for this paper focuses on the reflections of participants in projects designed to use distributed leadership to build leadership capacity in learning and teaching in Australian higher education. The outcome was a resource designed to identify actions needed to enable a distributed leadership process that is genuinely aimed at engaging staff in influencing leadership decision making. The authors propose that this paper extends research in distributed leadership beyond the normative, subjectivist functionalist research for which it is criticised, towards a more universally applicable research paradigm.
This article presents and discusses the findings of a recent study on the professional identities of middle managers in a school of healthcare in a selected Chartered (pre-1992) UK university. Attention focuses on the career backgrounds of the middle managers, perception of identity and the interactional balance between the professional, academic and managerial aspects of their role. The study adopted an interpretive approach, in line with social constructivism, exploring their beliefs, feelings and perceptions with regard to their career background, identities and role. The data suggest that this group of middle managers were influenced by a complex array of circumstances and social processes, but also by critical incidents, key people and opportunities. There was evidence of very high levels of job satisfaction, and the respondents gave examples of core personality traits that contributed to their sustained career success. The data portray these middle managers as hybrid characters attempting to juggle multiple identities; however, this identity was being shaped by the university’s strategic vision to be an elite, research-led learning environment. If senior leaders of higher education institutions wish to aspire to excellence in healthcare education it is essential they recruit middle managers who demonstrate a complex interweaving of personal and professional qualities within a context of moral purpose, described in this study as, ‘loving the job’.
Although there is growing research evidence to support the view that the leadership practice of the school principal is the second-most important influence on student learning behind classroom teaching, there is no clarity about what, exactly, the principal is meant to do to ensure this outcome. Hence, Leithwood et al. (2010) propose that one of the principal’s important influences on student learning is the ‘rational’ path, which includes the issue of school-wide disciplinary climate. This argues that the principal plays a pivotal role in establishing the school-wide disciplinary climate that aids student learning. This article reports upon research conducted in Pakistan that focuses on the disciplinary climate aspect of school leadership by exploring how the personal values of principals are made manifest in student behaviour. Data from this research infers that the establishment of an appropriate school-wide disciplinary climate for improving student learning is influenced by two important factors. First, there needs to be an alignment between personal and organizational values and behaviour throughout the school. Secondly, the consistency of alignment between the values and behaviour of the principal, in particular, is the cornerstone in creating a beneficial school-wide disciplinary climate.
Teacher leadership is increasingly seen as a key option for school reform and improvement. However, despite the extensive literature on teacher leadership, this issue has achieved little attention in Iran. To fill such a research gap, the present study examined teacher leadership practice in a sample of Iranian schools. The ‘Teacher Leadership School Survey’ developed by Katzenmeyer and Moller (2009) was administered to 213 teachers across 22 schools in Kermanshah province. The intention was to examine the teachers’ perceptions of teacher leadership practice in schools and the ways through which such perceptions might have been influenced by variables including gender, age, teachers’ educational degree, teaching experience and school level. The results of descriptive statistics, t-test and one-way ANOVA revealed that teacher leadership was practiced above sometimes and closer to often in the sample schools. Further, data analysis indicated significant differences in teachers’ perceptions of teacher leadership practice with reference to their educational degree and the level they taught. However, teachers’ age, gender, and years of teaching experience did not appear as significant factors.
This multi-case study sought to construct meaning using a cultural capital lens in relation to educational leadership preparation programs building the capacities of social justice leaders in demographically changing schools. Data revealed principals’ perceptions about preparation, expectations and general beliefs and assumptions related to leadership for social justice emphasizing contradictions between principals’ equity-oriented rhetoric and their underlying beliefs and assumptions affecting their diverse school populations. The implications for research and practice include opportunities that principals and principal preparation programs have to implement to keep leadership for social justice at the forefront of the charge to equitably educate all children.
Attempts to improve poor academic performance in South African public schools resulted in the Schooling 2025 mandate, which stipulated the academic standards that learners needed to achieve by 2014. As school leaders must do this through their teachers the emotional tensions associated with such changes are likely to increase. This paper investigates the use of emotional competence by school leaders via the perceptions of their teachers. Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analyses of the data obtained from a random sample of 2386 teachers indicated that the postulated five sub-dimensions associated with emotional competence could be reduced to two, namely intrapersonal and interpersonal. The Structural Equation Model suggested a strong positive causal relationship between the two competences and hence a good understanding and regulation of one’s own emotions, influences, understanding and relationships with others. A school leader with a good understanding of their personal emotional competence will have a greater influence on social orientation towards others and possibly lead to improved interpersonal competence. In the South African context it was found that both competences are associated with gender, school type, socio-economic contexts of the learners and home language of the educators.
This article discusses key findings from my doctoral research involving a qualitative case study inquiring into the lived experiences of spirituality in principal leadership and its influence on teachers and their teaching within three public primary school contexts in New Zealand. Spirituality is understood in this article as a complex and controversial human phenomenon, the meaning of which may be shaped and re-shaped by diverse perspectives and experiences. It includes personal, social-cultural and transcendent connectedness, meaning making about life and living, and a desire for greater authenticity, resulting in consistency between people’s beliefs, moral-values, attitudes and their actions. The three principal participants believed their personal meanings of spirituality were intentionally and yet appropriately interwoven into a range of professional tasks, linked to characteristics of servant, transformational, moral and relational leadership styles, and contributed to their sense of resilience in the job. Most teacher participants perceived spirituality in their principal’s leadership as influential through the quality of their professional character, competence and conduct. Most teacher participants attributed positive effects on their professional attitudes and practice. However, there was some ambivalence and uncertainty associated with the phenomenon of spirituality and difficulty attributing influence to an integral dimension of the person who leads. The article concludes with several implications for school leaders and teachers.
The purpose of this research is to examine the motivations of females aspiring to school superintendency positions in Texas. We report on a reanalysis of data from two previous studies and how the findings build an understanding of previously documented obstacles and barriers female candidates encounter in their journey toward the superintendency. This reanalysis was done to assist us in developing research protocols to be used in a statewide study of female central office administrators and their aspirations to the superintendency.
The effect of critical incidents on school principals has been marginally investigated. Principal leadership has many pleasures, but it is often replete with problematic circumstances. The skilled school-based leader requires rationality and diplomacy to manage conflict successfully. This study examined the perceived effects of a critical incident, the closure of their school, on the professional and personal lives of principals. The investigation employed a narrative analysis approach in the Province of British Columbia, Canada. Narratives from two superintendents and six principals generated the evidence used to study the professional and personal complications associated with a principal living through a school closure. The investigation generated understandings of the impact of this critical event. Principals were aware of their precarious position of having dual allegiances to both district and school community. The emotionally-charged environment manifested professional and personal concerns, anxieties and resultant health concerns in the life of the school leader. The study provides publics affected by a school closure with understandings and knowledge regarding communication issues and approaches in closure considerations. Principals benefit from both enhanced discourse and administrative practices. School districts profit from in-depth perspectives and improved preparedness for critical events.
This article emerged as a case study from a fact-finding mission of a joint programme between the Centre for Commonwealth Education (CCE) in Cambridge University and the Institute for Educational Planning and Administration (IEPA) in University of Cape Coast, Ghana, to embed innovative approaches to teaching and learning in the basic schools of the latter country. The strategy was to enhance the leadership capacity of the headteachers. A leadership for learning (LfL) model with five seminal principles was used to guide and direct the change process. It was organized on the basis of capacity building whereby CCE provided expertise consultation and Ghanaians contextualized learning materials, and their execution. At the close of the second year, the qualitative case study involving four schools revealed that conspicuous changes were indeed taking place at different levels. The case study also provided evidence that LfL tended to be a broad systemic ideology that relied on the collective effort of various stakeholders.
School boards are expected to monitor and enhance the educational quality of their schools. To know whether and how school boards are able to do so, we first of all need to know whether school boards are aware of the educational quality of their schools in the first place. Taking Dutch school boards in primary education as an exemplary case (N = 332) we developed and tested a path model using structural equation modelling to analyse the extent to which school boards discern educational quality in their schools. The results show that, in general, school boards in primary education believe that they can contribute to enhancing the quality of school education. If the school board and school(s) management stick to their governing and management roles respectively, this positively affects the extent to which the school board is able to identify educational quality in the schools it governs.
This article reports on the findings of a larger case study about the impact of values on educational leaders in Iceland. The environment of Icelandic schools has changed considerably in recent years. These changes have affected schools and changed the nature and scope of principals' work. Scholars have argued that these changes are primarily market driven and have made schools subject to market pressures. Ten principals, five women and five men, were interviewed and asked how recent changes had affected their roles. They were also asked to share information about difficult decisions they had made during this time. Moreover, in all the ten schools, one mid-level administrator was interviewed. This article shows that Icelandic principals work in a changing and unstable environment, where values of school stakeholders often compete for recognition. It highlights the conflicting demands principals were faced with and the difficult issues they had to resolve in a competitive environment. Many of the conflicts involved core activities of teaching and learning against various other new services. Their narrative shows that they focus on their role as pedagogical leaders and see care as a core value in their practice. This holds true regardless of gender.
This article analyses the paradox inherent in the ‘top-performing’ yet tightly controlled Singapore education system. As government controls have increased in complexity, existing policymaking conceptual heuristics in accounting for centre-periphery relationships appear inadequate. It argues that more direct government control is being replaced by ‘steering through paternalism from close proximity’, reflecting a more subtle centre-periphery relationship in an Asian context.
This quantitative study explores the relationship between school leadership and the development and sustenance of teacher social capital. The literature review discusses aspects of leadership theory to elucidate understanding of how leadership influences teachers’ working relationships. Quantitative methodology and analyses ascertain the correlation between Leithwood et al.’s dimensions of transformational leadership and the author’s dimensions of teacher social capital. Study findings indicate significant, positive moderate to high moderate correlations between: (1) transformational leadership and the environmental conditions nurturing teacher social capital; (2) leadership and teacher social capital; and (3) leadership and teacher collective efficacy (TCE). An additional major finding is the perception of higher levels of transformational leadership among teachers in middle performing and high performing schools as compared to the perceptions of teachers in low performing schools. This study provides evidence of the importance of transformational leadership in the development of teacher social capital within a school. High levels of teacher social capital should result in positive outcomes of student achievement, teacher quality and teacher job satisfaction. The study findings, interpretations and conclusions contribute to both school leadership and school improvement literature and should inform discussions about leadership development and the impact of leadership on teacher working relationships.
This article deals with the changes introduced in the Italian education system after the 1997 School Autonomy reform. Looking at the complex interplay between global influences and processes of local inflection, the work explores the degree to which we are witnessing a significant shift towards a new mode of governance and the interplay between governance changes, shifts in the mechanisms of control and the shaping of professional subjectivity. Analysing the interplay between politics, policy and culture, we draw on Newman’s analytical model to map the changes in the modes of governance and interpret them in terms of tensions between centralization/decentralization and internal/external change. The article highlights two main ‘paradoxes’ that cross-cut the political project of reforming education in Italy: (1) the coexistence of an attempt to introduce decentralized forms of governance and empower self-regulating actors with the tightening of hierarchical ties; (2) the simultaneous request to fulfil new managerialist accountability demands and continue to deal with hierarchical forms of control.
Values theorists in educational administration agree that understanding organizational values is integral to organizational effectiveness. However, research in this area tends to be superficial, and a review of pertinent literature reveals no clear definition of organizational values or consequent implications for practical application. One of the substantive issues in current organizational values discourse is the lack of agreement around descriptors pertaining to the phenomenon; additionally, participants in the discussion frequently assume common understanding. What, then, does "organizational values" consist of conceptually, and how can it be defined? In this article the author summarizes a study conducted to clarify understanding of the organizational values phenomenon, and offers a general model of organizational values based on the results.
This study provides empirical data about the role and work context of the school principal in the Lebanon. The study applied grounded theory methods in collecting and analysing the data. The data were collected through a series of open-ended interviews with 53 secondary school principals, and focus group interviews with 8 principals from public as well as private schools. The results show that Lebanese school principals, despite a wide variety of backgrounds, share a core set of role expectations. Discussion of the results compares the role and role demands of the Lebanese school principal to what has been reported in empirical studies of principals in Western countries. While the results reveal many role similarities, it is also clear that the socio-political and cultural conditions in Lebanon shape the role and role demands of Lebanese school principalship. In contrast to their Western counterparts, principals in Lebanon: (1) give limited attention to the instructional dimension of the role; (2) assume limited responsibilities as the agent for school change and improvement; (3) adopt an authoritarian orientation in enacting the role; and (4) hold a highly idiosyncratic ‘craft’ conception of the work of the principal. The study’s results reinforce the need for more in-depth cross-cultural comparative studies of education professionals.
The notion of leadership for learning as a resource for improving student learning in schools has attracted much attention from scholars. However, its use lacks clarity or meaning for teachers implementing this concept in schools. In seeking to pursue a better understanding of leadership for learning based on a comprehensive review of relevant literature a scaffold of key themes was established. This scaffold shows leadership for learning as a liberating process in which whole-school communities actively engage in purposeful interactions that nurture relationships focused on improving learning. In examining the extent to which this conception of leadership for learning was evident in schools, a survey was developed and tested for its veracity. This article presents the results of factor analysis and importantly, introduces two themes not originally included in the scaffold.
The overarching purpose of this study is to examine the prospects of school leadership for the development of intercultural education. The article focuses on the ways in which Greek-Cypriot headteachers conceptualize: diversity and intercultural education; and their school leadership roles in culturally diverse settings. To this extent, interviews were carried out with the headteachers of 20 primary schools, which presented high concentrations of immigrant students. In general, two main approaches concerning intercultural education were identified: cultural-deprivation and cultural-celebration. Headteachers, who fostered assimilation in their schools, adopted a transactional leadership style the goal of which was ‘unobstructed’ and ‘unproblematic’ operation of their schools. Conversely, headteachers, who ‘celebrated’ diversity in their schools, opted for the transformation of their school cultures by promoting immigrant parental involvement and community liaison. Nonetheless, there was a third category of headteachers, who held container concepts of diversity, pertaining to both cultural-deficit and cultural-celebration approaches. These headteachers proclaimed the transformation of their schools to accommodate diversity by creating collaborative networks in their schools. However, such suggestions seemed to be rhetorical, while in practice they seemed to seek assimilation.
The aim of this research is to gain understanding about school culture characteristics of primary schools in the Flemish and Chinese context. The study was carried out in Flanders (Belgium) and China, involving a total of 44 Flemish schools and 40 Chinese schools. The School Culture Scales were used to measure five school culture dimensions with regard to goal orientation, leadership, innovation orientation, participative decision making and formal relationships. The School Culture Scales were validated in both contexts, and within-group agreement indexes were calculated. The results show that on average, the Flemish schools scored higher than the Chinese schools in four dimensions of the school culture features. Within-group differences were also found. The differences between and among the Chinese and Flemish schools are discussed.
School-to-school collaboration has been central to many improvement efforts over recent decades. In an attempt to promote both improvement and equity current developments in England have included changing formal governance arrangements to promote collaboration for improvement through ‘federations’ and ‘chains’ of schools. However, federations and school chains remain a relatively under-explored area and there is a noticeable absence of research exploring the impact of such arrangements on student outcomes. This paper draws on a programme of research including the national evaluation of federations, the first quantitative study of the impact of federations on student outcomes and a longitudinal qualitative study of the development of federations to consider two key questions: What is a federation? And do federations make a difference? In order to achieve this, the paper provides an overview of the key characteristics of federations and considers their contribution to improvement efforts. In conclusion the paper reflects on a number of issues and implications associated with developing a federated school system.
The purpose of this study of school improvement planning in the southeastern USA was to establish the current view of the process through the eyes of the district superintendents. The answers to the questions were consistently mixed. Generally, the presence of school improvement planning is prevalent in the large majority of districts. However, the data indicate a lack of fidelity to the process between superintendents’ beliefs regarding the process and how they perceive those tasked with development and implementation of the process. Given that school improvement planning is an internationally accepted process, the findings have implications not just for the USA but for international audiences as well. The authors make two recommendations: (1) significant further research into the effects of the process on student learning, and (2) continued research into the reasons for the lack of congruency indicated here between district expectations and school development and implementation.
This article questions why leaders in post-compulsory education tend not to view leadership research positively or utilise it in improving their practice. Drawing on the theoretical literature of educational management and leadership, and the current political and economic context of post-compulsory education, it proposes a new direction of critical practice leadership informed by advanced practitioner research. Challenging assumptions about leadership practice and leadership research creates an opportunity for an ethical and practical perspective for leadership practitioners and a distinctive contribution to the field of leadership theory and research by resisting the false dualism between theory and practice.
School leadership has been shown to exert a positive but mostly indirect influence on school and student outcomes. Currently, there is great interest in how quality leadership preparation is related to leadership practice and improved teacher outcomes. The purpose of the study was to understand the moderating influence of leadership preparation on leadership practices and teachers’ job collaboration, leadership and satisfaction. The study features a non-experimental design that combined data from a US study of exemplary leadership preparation and a nationally representative sample of elementary school principals. The sample consists of 175 teachers whose principals were prepared in an exemplary leadership program and 589 teachers whose principals were traditionally prepared. Data were analyzed with structural equation techniques and results have shown that innovative leadership preparation exerts a statistically significant direct effect on principalship leadership practices and a significant indirect effect on teacher collaboration and satisfaction. The results provide important policy implications. Investments in leadership preparation influences leadership practices that yield more positive teacher work conditions, which are essential for improve student learning and as a result leadership preparation program design and improvement can play an important role in district reform and school improvement.
The purpose of this study was to compare transformational and instructional leadership theories, examine the unique impact that school leaders have on student achievement, and determine which specific leadership practices are associated with increased student achievement. The sample for this study consisted of 590 teachers in 37 elementary schools in the Intermountain West of the United States. Teachers rated their principals’ leadership style according to the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (Transformational Leadership) and the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (Instructional leadership). Student achievement was measured by a criterion referenced test. Hypotheses were tested using regression analysis. Results indicated that instructional leadership explained more of the variance in student achievement than did transformational leadership. Principals’ leadership style tended to have a meaningful impact on student achievement beyond the impact of school context and principal demographics. Specific leadership functions associated with student achievement were also identified and reported. Conclusion, implications and limitations are also discussed.
In this paper I report on leadership for sustainability in regional schools in Western Australia (WA) in the context of the Australian Sustainable Schools Initiative (AuSSI-WA). Case studies are developed to examine leading cultural change in eight WA regional schools with data presented in three representative narrative accounts. Consistency is apparent across the study as school leaders occupying both formal and informal leadership positions articulate a desire to bring about change and represent an explicit shift towards sustainability in these regional schools. In the main, these school leaders envision their schools as a place where the community works for a sustainable future; they are firm in their belief that responsibility for change is to be shared and; they recognise the importance of strategies to introduce and embed change in their schools. Such findings have implications for whole of school approaches to embedding change in our schools.
The increasing importance of educational collaborations and networks that blur organizational boundaries requires conceptual developments in leadership theory. One approach to both theorizing and promoting such phenomena is through the idea of system leadership. Three different meanings of the term are identified: interschool leadership; a systemic leadership orientation and identity; and leadership of the school system as a whole. Previous descriptions of system leadership, and policy initiatives related to it, have focused on headteachers and senior leaders. However, teacher leaders may also exercise system leadership in relation to all three meanings. Professional development networks and school collaborations provide a range of distinct contexts for interschool leadership by teacher leaders and these are identified. This extends existing theories of teacher and distributed leadership. Further, it is proposed that teacher leaders can, like headteachers, have a systemic leadership practice orientation that is informed by moral purposes. The model of teacher activist professional identity provides a starting point for analysing teacher system leadership identity. Teacher leaders can and do influence system-wide change and, to conceptualize this, the concept of system leadership from below is introduced. In making this argument a number of issues and methodological tools are identified that are important in researching both headteacher and teacher system leadership in relation to the three meanings of system leadership.
Teacher evaluation policy is implemented in many countries to improve the teaching quality in schools. This paper explores the implementation of teacher evaluation policy in secondary schools in Flanders (Belgium). The case study method is used to explore the implementation process in six schools, which are selected based upon teachers’ perception of practicality of new teacher evaluation policy. We contrast three schools in which teachers perceive this policy positively with three schools in which teachers perceive this policy negatively. Due to the generic policy, responsibility for the implementation is shifted to the school. Our study focuses on school leadership actions and on teacher evaluation development characteristics during the implementation process. The results identify a difference in leadership actions and teacher evaluation development characteristics in positive perceiving schools compared to negative perceiving schools. In positive perceiving schools, school leaders formulate high expectations towards teachers, emphasize the importance of appreciation and trust and provide clear communication to teachers about teacher evaluation. Also, two teacher evaluation development characteristics, namely the meso-level support and the goals of teacher evaluation differ in the two subsets of schools. This leaves us wondering whether governments should take greater responsibility in supporting schools and local networks in order to implement policy successfully.
This article explores the impact of changing policy priorities on the role of director of children’s services, before and after the economic crisis of 2008 and the election of the coalition government. The role of director of children’s services from 2003 to 2010 was driven by the New Labour imperative to deliver regionally based integrated services, as called for in Every Child Matters (Department for Education and Skills, 2003). Changing political and economic priorities since the election of 2010 have recast the notion of ‘integrated services’. The Conservative-led coalition has instead emphasised the importance of localised decision-making at institutional level in education and social services. This article reflects on the perceptions of directors, drawing on empirical data gathered from two sets of interviews conducted with directors of children’s services in North-West England between 2007 and 2012. Concerns are expressed about this changing political and economic landscape which has left the role of director of children’s services open to question. Recent reforms in education and health have devolved responsibility for coordinating public services to institutions, potentially marginalising broader agendas about welfare, rights, and so on for children and young people.
Educational change can call up a range of feelings that can pose a number of problems for those experiencing and/or organizing it. This article analyses the processes of educational change from a psychodynamic standpoint. In particular it explores affective containment, which enables feelings to be fully experienced and to be used productively. an aspect of organizing during educational change, known as affective containment, that enables feelings to be fully experienced and to be used productively. In the article, we first review some important and relevant concepts, which include the nature of social affects, projection, introjection, projective identification, and splitting and projection, before considering affect and educational change and the notion of affective containment. We then describe and interpret a case that illustrates what can happen when affective containment processes are not securely in place during educational change. We discuss some of the main issues to emerge, which include: the nature of affective containment at individual and group/organizational levels that can support educational change; the importance of ensuring that boundaries between student and staff systems are secure during educational change; the reparation processes that can be a feature of educational change and their impact on the change process; and the leadership responsibility for providing affective containment during educational change.
This research generates new knowledge about how 24 educational leaders in the USA and England used their doctoral research to build narrative capital to inform strategies to steer their organizations towards cultural alignment. Cultural alignment prevents forms of segregation rooted in nation-states’ wider historiography of education segregation based on low income and/or racial, cultural and linguistic diversity, and those recognized as having special educational needs. The evidence reveals doctoral study enabled the leaders to focus on the inner life and the emotional relational dimension of their narratives, and their alignment with the narrative of the members of their organizations through building networks of organizational participation in processes and practices. The networks enabled values to be shared such as trust, respect, agreeing to disagree and celebrating diversity. Thus doctoral research enabled the leaders to provide chances for members of the organization to evaluate their personal and professional narratives with each other and build narrative capital. Narrative capital is essential to underpin the construction of new life narratives that move beyond old descriptive scripts to scripts that turn dreams into objective realities, social mobility and civic engagement. Further research is recommended to explore how networks of participation in organizational processes and practices for cultural alignment are described and understood by leaders, educational professionals and students.
For three years from 2008 every school in England had a designated school improvement partner (SIP), portrayed as a critical friend, whose role was to support and challenge the headteacher. A mixed-methods study involving a national survey and face-to-face interviews evaluated the enactment of the national policy from the perspective of the direct recipients – the headteachers/school principals. Headteachers’ perceptions of their school improvement partners, and their experiences of the support and challenge provided by SIPs, varied. Much seemed to depend on individual SIP’s expertise and conduct. The SIPs’ prescribed agenda was seen as too focused on data rather than discussions about learning and teaching, and requirements for SIPs to report to the local authority and governors were in tension with trustful relationships with headteachers. The SIP programme could be interpreted as a commitment to the entitlement of headteachers to support and challenge, or as a mechanism for surveillance and discipline. Lessons are drawn for the ‘national’ and ‘local leaders of education’ who have replaced SIPs, and for anyone internationally concerned with support and challenge for school principals.
This article considers the experiences and perceptions of practising English headteachers and the tensions that they face when juggling government prescription and government initiatives, which may be antagonistic to their educational values and beliefs. Managerial control over teachers work has been particularly acute and destructive to ‘human flourishing’. Headteachers have a moral and ethical responsibility for the welfare and education of pupils. Such professional ethics oblige the professional to seek the good of the pupil and therefore good is viewed as intrinsic to the work of an educator. Thus headteachers are directly involved in negotiating between sometimes contradictory imperatives and drivers. How then does the headteacher cope with what Colley refers to as ‘situated ethics work’? This article presents data derived from written responses from 10 headteachers that begin to open up this question. I argue that it is not uncommon for people to weaken in their values-driven stance when under great pressure. It is however important to recognize the extent to which educational values are constrained by neo-liberal value-based market agendas in order to continually question and re-evaluate what is happening within education rearticulating this for the benefit of pupils.
Literature examining effective leadership in education describe a number of models such as Transformational, Learner-Centred, Distributed and Situational. A similar example is ‘pedagogical leadership’, a phrase that frequently appears in literature and one referring to forms of practice that shape and form teaching and learning to be integrated in leadership. In this paper, however, we will argue that the term pedagogy is an ambiguous one when it is attached to the concept of leadership and requires further explanation, particularly in the 21st century. Our conclusions are informed by findings from research undertaken by us with headteachers and leaders of early years settings in England during 2012. One of the key findings is that we should shift from using models of leadership and instead to view leadership as a praxis that is not merely concerned with the dichotomy of teaching, learning and outcomes, but is also concerned with an integrated conceptualisation of the relations between teaching, the learning ecology of the community and the social set of axes in which the educational organisation is set. This understanding of pedagogical leadership is thus concerned with the links between desired educational outcomes and the set of social realities that surround the educational setting.
This article explores the notion of leadership identity construction as it happens through a leadership development programme. Influenced by a conception that leadership development is essentially about facilitating an identity transition, it uses an intersectional approach to explore school leaders’ identity construction as it was shaped and influenced by experiences on the leadership development programme. The article draws data from a mixed-methods study that evaluated the impact of the leadership training programme offered to practising school leaders in South Africa. In order to examine the process of leadership identity construction, the article draws from data where identity work was visible. It argues that categories of identity – gender, race and social class – interacted simultaneously with the contexts and backgrounds of participants to shape and influence the outcome of the leadership development programme. This complex intersection enabled unexpected outcomes where women appeared to benefit more from the programme despite their less privileged entry status. The article calls for more work that asks direct questions on leaders’ construction of identity in order to inform leadership development programmes more meaningfully.
The contemporary English policy discourse in higher education of ‘Putting Students at the Heart of the System’ has led to an increasing use of managing by performance ‘smart-data’ reinforcing a consumer-led representation of students as ‘partners’ in the ‘business of learning’ within the academy. This approach disguises ongoing fundamental changes to academic work by mixing an increased ‘market-driven’ transparency with ‘accountability’ in ‘institutional and organization management’, utilizing so-called research-led or evidence-informed practice. The policy discourse masks and limits any critique of such data production, or more particularly its purposes and uses, while perhaps yet more significantly, generating an associated ‘modernizing’ rhetoric impacting multiple levels of decision-making throughout the HE institution. Evidence from previous research into school sector reform as data-based decision-making became mainstreamed is used to support our prognosis for the future. Drawing upon documentary analysis of KIS (Key Information Sets) and other publicly available data, this article presents a critique of widespread institutional reform that is rapidly becoming reliant upon what we call ‘data-smart policy’. In conclusion, a series of emerging issues are identified as part of managing the way forward in meeting data access requirements, ensuring student satisfaction and consumer protection, while preserving intellectual values associated with substantive scholarship and sound academic leadership.
This study focuses on the leadership engagement of children, young people (CYP) and their families in six school-based extended services (ES) clusters in a single, large, urban local authority in England. Empirical research was carried out in two strands of activity that focused on outcomes and experiences for CYP and leaders and leadership. Document analysis of annual reports and action plans, observations of activities for CYP, a survey of CYP views, interviews and/or focus groups with parents and interviews with local authority leaders, cluster coordinators, school leaders and agency representatives was undertaken. Analysis of the data was carried out using the components of activity theory. Findings show four distinct roles for ES clusters as: (1) coordinator of resources; (2) conduit for communication; (3) hub for socially inclusive activity; and (4) mechanism of school/ES leadership accountability. The extent of CYP and parental engagement was dependent on the commitment of professionals to socially inclusive leadership and the meso- and macro-level organizational context where ES clusters could or could not access already existing partnerships. This research has implications for the implementation of the Coalition government’s ‘Big Society’ approach to service provision.
We have designed and deployed a mapping framework to present and analyse knowledge production and distributed leadership in schools. Positions are identified from within the field: functional (descriptive and normative), critical and socially critical. For each position we examine the purposes, rationales and narratives within selected texts that illuminate knowledge claims about what is known, what is worth knowing, how it is known and who the knowers are. Analysis has identified the prevalence and political dominance of functional approaches and provides explanations regarding the interplay between the state, public policy and the preferred types of knowledge.
The study explores the attitudes of a sample of school principals in a Kuwaiti local authority towards the need for transformational leadership, the use of its behaviours, whether these school leaders are ready to behave in diverse ways or whether there are barriers that prevent them from acting in such a manner. The findings of this study demonstrate that the participants agreed on the need for transformational leadership and had positive attitudes towards its behaviours. Although the participants identified some barriers to the application of this leadership style, the results indicated that the participants were generally ready to promote transformational leadership behaviours.
In about a decade the theory of distributed leadership has moved from a tool to better understand the ecology of leadership to a widely prescribed practice. This article considers how to account for its spread and dominance and what purpose it serves. The concept offers an enticing suggestion of including more in leadership, and even sometimes including staff members equally. The resulting issues around distribution of power are largely ignored or referred to in passing; a kind of inclusivity lite, which does not engage with, for example, issues of gender or ethnicity. Using a range of concepts of power, the article explores the ways power is enacted in how distributed leadership is theorized and how it has been promoted. It is suggested that opportunities to contribute to leadership are not equal and that distributed leadership remains silent on persistent structural barriers. The theory's confusions, contradictions and utopian depictions are argued to be a profoundly political phenomenon, replete with the uses and abuses of power. The conclusion suggests that the effect of distributed leadership theory is to maintain the power status quo.
This article presents findings from a study of 14 heads of construction in further education colleges in England as they manage the transition of new construction lecturers from a culture of hypermasculinity to one of emotional labour and caring. It focuses firstly on the dilemmas faced by heads of construction at the recruitment stage before moving on to consider the difficulties faced by new lecturers as they change cultures and face the demands of administrative, academic and pedagogical challenges. The article concludes by discussing the implications of the research both for colleges and heads of construction themselves.