Search Results (11)

The Leadership for Learning (LfL) framework is often used to investigate the effect of leadership on student achievement (SA). This framework encompasses instructional leadership (IL), transformational leadership (TL), and distributed leadership (DL) qualities that are likely to influence teaching–learning processes at school. The existing literature indicates that LfL can influence both teacher performance and practices and students’ achievement significantly. The current study aims to investigate the mediating role of teacher performance in the relationship between LfL and student achievement using meta-analytical structural equation modeling (MASEM). Correlation values obtained from 60 studies (a total of 36,331 participants) investigating the relationship between these variables were used for the meta-analysis. The findings showed that all three types of leadership affected teacher performance directly, and teacher performance had a direct effect on student achievement. While the effect of IL on SA was mostly indirect, TL and DL were found to affect student achievement both directly and indirectly through teacher performance. Our findings suggest significant implications for not only researchers but also policy-makers and practitioners to improve school performance. Full article

This paper considers the articles presented in this Special Issue and argues that, in most developed education systems in Western countries, there have been four major shifts in how school education is understood and delivered over the course of human history, from a time when only the wealthy and privileged received an education to the present day. It tracks changes in school leadership since the 1980s, when a combination of efforts to improve the effectiveness of schools and efforts to decentralise schools led to self-managing schools and changed responsibilities for school leaders. It reflects on whether the recent impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on school communities may lead to a fifth major shift in school education. This article discusses four different school leadership approaches that have emerged in Western education since the 1980s, instructional leadership, transformational leadership, distributed leadership, and leadership for learning, and argues that of these four, leadership for learning would be the most appropriate leadership approach in a post-COVID-19 future. Full article

In Japan, there is almost no national policy that details the attributes and abilities desirable for school management staff. However, in March 2023, Toda City in Saitama prefecture, a city famous for its aggressive education reforms, published the Toda City School Management Rubric (SMR) as perspectives to be referred to in the daily practice of school management through a time-consuming hearing from principals and vice principals. By categorizing each dimension of the rubric itself as well as the documents relating to the creation process with the four school leadership styles, while making a comparison to school leadership standards in the U.S. and U.K., this paper aims to illuminate how the magic words of “school leadership” were turned into concrete perspectives for school leaders to reflect on. As a result, there are similarities and differences among leadership standards in three countries. Moreover, a transformational leadership style seems to be the most frequently mentioned among the four school leadership styles, and many of the principals and vice principals referred to instructional leadership in a sense that they need to take a lead in transforming traditional teacher-led instruction into student-centered learning. Furthermore, a distributed leadership style is considered to be important by many school leaders, especially because they continue to seek an appropriate balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches, and some principals and vice principals take the issue of work style reform seriously, which assumes an aspect of transactional leadership. As an arguably unprecedented attempt to comprehensively analyze the detailed policy documents on school leadership in Japan, this article will provide cross-cultural implications for school leadership policy and practice. Full article

Decentralized execution is a widely used framework in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, it has a well-known but neglected shortcoming, redundant computation, that is, the same/similar computation is performed redundantly in different agents owing to their overlapping observations. This study proposes a novel method, the locally centralized team transformer (LCTT), to address this problem. This method first proposes a locally centralized execution framework that autonomously determines some agents as leaders that generate instructions and other agents as workers to act according to the received instructions without running their policy networks. For the LCTT, we subsequently propose the team-transformer (T-Trans) structure, which enables leaders to generate targeted instructions for each worker, and the leadership shift, which enables agents to determine those that should instruct or be instructed by others. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method significantly reduces redundant computations without decreasing rewards and achieves faster learning convergence. Full article

This study aims to describe the century-long trajectory of educational leadership research (ELR), including changes over time in its main and subsidiary themes, as well as its most influential authors, papers, and journals. The study combines the bibliometric performance and science mapping analysis of 7282 articles retrieved from the Scopus and WoS databases. SciMAT software (version 1.1.04) was used to analyze changes over four sequential time periods and to exhibit the thematic evolution of the field—Period 1 (1907 to 2004), Period 2 (2005 to 2012), Period 3 (2013 to 2019), and Period 4 (2020–2023). Research during Period 1 focused on principals and included efforts to distinguish between their administrative functions and forms of ‘strong’ leadership contributing to school improvement. Period 2 included research aimed at understanding what strong principal leadership entailed, including the development and testing of more coherent models of such leadership. While instructional and transformational leadership models were prominent during Periods 1 and 2, Period 3 research invested heavily in conceptions of leadership distribution. Early research about ‘social justice leadership’ appeared during this period and eventually flourished during Period 4. While principals were an active focus through all Periods, the leadership of others gradually dominated ELR and accounted for the broader leadership theme found in all four periods. The results point to the evolutionary nature of ELR development, which eventually produced a relatively robust knowledge base. Experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic suggest that crises such as this might prompt more revolutionary orientations in the ELR field. Full article

This study explores the experiences, practices and perceptions of primary school principals currently leading autism classes in Ireland. Autism classes in mainstream primary schools are becoming increasingly common in the Irish education system. The prevalence of autism classes highlights the importance of their role in enabling autistic children to attend mainstream schools. It reflects the increasing number of autistic pupils who require these specialised placements. Primary schools serve all children. It is essential that autistic children are supported in the best way possible so they can reach their full potential. The principal has a pivotal role in all aspects of his or her school, including leading the autism classes. Given the centrality of their role, it is imperative that the principal is supported by the best practices and theory available. This study sought to give the principals time to reflect on their inclusive leadership and decipher what it meant for them in their lived experience and context. Theories of leadership through a socio-cultural lens frame the overall study. A qualitative research design was adopted using semi-structured interviews with 15 primary school principals. Analysis of the data was conducted using a reflective thematic analysis approach. Findings of the research reveal that there are particular leadership styles that align with an inclusive leadership approach. These styles are distributed leadership, transformational leadership and instructional leadership. A positive disposition towards inclusion is an important factor in the principal’s perceptions of their leadership. The idea of inclusionary leadership is borne out of the study. This term indicates that leaders striving for inclusion in their schools do not view it as a destination to be reached but rather a long-term journey they travel. This research is a pathway for further study in the field. It has implications for pupils, principals, school communities and policy makers regarding the value of the work of inclusionary leaders. All participants referred to in this paper have been given two letter pseudonyms to protect their identity. Full article

Transformational leadership has been persistently studied in the educational administration field considering that it can be a viable tool to respond to the increasing demands on school systems for greater effectiveness. As a result, a rich knowledge base has been accumulated. Our study aims to investigate this knowledge base by combining bibliometric and science mapping analysis so as to exhibit its intellectual and conceptual architecture, and to reveal the strategic themes that emerged during the scientific evolution of transformational school leadership (TSL). 300 articles retrieved from the Scopus database were included in the analysis. The thematic evolution analysis was performed using the SciMAT software over three time periods: the Incubation Period (1989–2009), the Development Period (2010–2020), and the Maturation Period (2021–2022). The findings show that research during the Incubation Period mostly attempted to conceptualize TSL while it mostly focused on principals, instructional leadership, and self-efficacy during the Development Period. The mentoring theme emerged during the first period but disappeared later without being fully-developed. Teacher leadership emerged as a weakly-addressed theme during all periods. Work-family conflict and digital competencies were the two prominent themes during the Maturation Period while online learning and learning culture were found to be the emerging themes. The findings suggest significant implications for the sustainable development of the TSL research field. Full article

University-district partnerships are promising models for leadership preparation programs, however many partnerships fall short of their potential. In this two-year qualitative, action research study, we examine how a university-district partnership led to the simultaneous renewal of the district and university as it sought to develop transformational school leaders. Analysis of semi-structured interviews with program participants, university staff, and district administrators indicated the impactful role of cohorts, co-teaching, and inquiry-based instruction in the continual improvement of all stakeholders. We show how each of these program components informed and transformed the university and district. We also identified partnership conditions that supported their effectiveness. Our findings inform universities and districts designing partnerships for leadership preparation and provide existing partnerships that incorporate cohorting, co-teaching, and inquiry-based instruction a better understanding of their potential impact. Full article

An effective leader follows a style that helps maintain good relations with his staff. A school leader should use a style best suited to his teachers’ behavior. This research investigates the association between four leadership styles (instructional, democratic, transformational, and laissez-faire) and teachers’ behavior in Malaysia. This study applied a quantitative research method using a survey technique by administering questionnaires. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. Multiple regression and ANOVA were used to study the strength of the relationship between variables. The research found average care of the principals towards teachers’ emotional behavior. Democratic leadership style showed significant relationships that explain 28.5% of the variation in the emotional behavior of the teachers. Leaders with a democratic leadership style were more aware of and responded positively to teachers’ psychometric behavior. School principals with transformational leadership styles responded positively to teachers’ pro-social behavior, although the relationship was weak. These results indicate that a democratic leadership style addresses the issues of teachers’ emotional behavior, while instructional leadership, which is the most perceived leadership style, does not. The result of this study can guide Malaysian school principals in choosing the appropriate leadership style best suited to teachers’ behavior. Full article

Managers are expected to carry various leadership qualities in order to raise the human profiles (professionals) required by society. Leadership becomes even more important when it comes to education as it shapes our future. In educational institutions, especially transformational leadership (TL) and instructional leadership (IL) have a particular importance and play an active role in conveying a classical managerial approach. This as well influences the sustainability of the educational institutions. The managers with these two leadership qualities will contribute to a reduction in their employees’ perceptions of organizational silence (OS) and an increase in the perception of organizational attractiveness (OA). In this paper, we analyzed the effects of transformational and instructional leadership styles of the managers of high schools, which contain the aviation field of study, and their effects on organizational attractiveness and organizational silence. The universe of this study is 1537 teachers working in 21 public high schools in the 2017–2018 academic year in Turkey, and the sample is 749 teachers who responded to the survey. We used a relational model of quantitative research methods. In this study, the Transformational Leadership Scale and the Instructional Leadership Scale were used to determine the leadership styles of the managers according to the perceptions of the teachers, while the Organizational Attractiveness Scale and the Organizational Silence Scale were used to determine the perceived organizational attractiveness and organizational silence of the teachers. Within the scope of reliability analysis, all dimensions of the scales used were found to be reliable. SPSS 24.0 and LISREL 8.1 package programs were used in the analysis of the research data and the relations between the variables were examined by using the Structural Equation Model. As the main finding is the existence of correlation of the elements, specifically, it was found that transformational and instructional leadership have positive effect with same-direction on organizational attractiveness, positive effect with inverse-direction on organizational silence, as well as positive effect with inverse-direction between organizational silence and organizational attractiveness. These findings provide an additional layer of factors to be analyzed that might affect the sustainability of educational institutions. We propose further studies to be carried out on development of new correlation models between sustainability elements on one side, and organizational silence or organizational attractiveness on the other. Full article

Instructional leadership notions and practices allow educators to engage in relevant roles within schools. Instead of implementing these concepts in professional programs, Mexican and Spanish education systems still preserve a “technically oriented” training model that separates educational and professional aims. Diverse studies have identified the benefits of implementing instructional leadership orientations within “Educational cooperation”, “Cooperative education”, “Team teaching” and “Teacher leadership” at schools. This systematic review conducted using Web of Science—contributes by organizing the produced knowledge and identifies the main findings reported by the academic literature on this topic. It seeks to answer the following questions: (1) What are the contributions of this research to the education systems examined? (2) What kind of knowledge about educational leadership and professional learning communities can be inferred from them? Results from the majority of studies found that instructional leadership offers a useful tool to promote shared responsibility between teachers and head teachers and supports professional learning communities. A main conclusions of the present study is that it highlights the importance of bypassing existing bureaucratic practices within schools in order to replace the traditional “technical orientation” of training programs. Instructional leadership may facilitate some of the required transformations in the context of global educational reform. Full article