Leadership Models

This paper explores an alternative principal development program that combines the development of shared leadership and individual leaders as schools pursue their learning-improvement agendas.

This review highlights major models that have been influential in the field and discusses evidence for their efficacy in explaining school leaders’ influence.  

This report presents selected findings from the school principal data files of the 2007-08 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS).  It provides the following descriptive information on school principals by school type, student characteristics, and other relevant categories: number, race/ethnicity, age, gender, college degrees, salary, hours worked, focus of work, years experience, and tenure at current school.

This paper examines a number of promising principal preparation programs to identify lessons for improving the impact of principals on student perrmance.

Research supports that school districts' prereferral consultation teams adhere less closely to quality consultation procedures and are less effective than those conducted through university research projects. This study investigated whether this finding might be due to incompatibilities between school settings and recommended team consultation practices.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of distributed leadership (DL) on school effectiveness (SE) in junior secondary schools in Katsina State, Nigeria. The study also investigates if teachers’ commitment (TC) mediates the relationship between DL and SE.

Intended as a formative assessment tool, this guide provides detailed, individual state profiles and state-to-state comparisons of 8 policy areas and 21 policy criteria that support the development of effective leaders.

This paper has three objectives: (1) to create set of policies and initiatives by document the actions taken by Wallace Foundation, (2) to describe how states and districts have worked together to forge more-cohesive policies and initiatives aroung school leadership, (3)to examine the hypothesis that more-cohesive systems do in fact improve school leadership.

Using a structural perspective from organizational theory, the authors review aspects of schooling associated with dropout. They then briefly review selected reform initiatives that restructure the school environment to improve student achievement and retention. 

This paper proposes an incentive scheme for educators that links compensation to the ranks of their students within comparison sets. 

The Characteristics of Public and Private Elementary School Principals in the United States is a subsection of the NCES 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). It provides descriptive statistics on K-12 school principals in areas such as: race, gender, education level, salary, experience, and working conditions.

This well-written book on assertiveness clearly describes the non assertive, assertive, and aggressive styles of supervision. Each chapter provides numerous examples, practice exercises, and self-tests. The author identifies feelings and beliefs that support aggressiveness, non aggressiveness, or non assertiveness which help the reader "look beyond the words themselves."

Greater understanding about how variables mediate the relationship between leadership and achievement is essential to the success of reform efforts that hold leaders accountable for student learning. This multi-source, quantitative study tests a model of integrated transformational leadership including three important school mediators.

This paper seeks to estimate the effect that Career Leader (CL) program has had on teachers’ career decisions, specifically their decisions to stay in a specific school district or to remain in the teaching field.

This review of related literature and research prompted the development of a framework for understanding the role of the principal as an instructional manager. A number of links between school-level variables and student learning are proposed. The discussion includes consideration of instructional organization, school climate, influence behavior, and the context of principal management.

Over the past 10 years, the Southern Regional Education Board has helped states and public universities across the region evaluate their state policies for preparing school principals who are leaders of instruction. This benchmark report reviews the past decade and looks at 10 learning-centered leadership indicators to gauge how far states have come and how far they need to go in selecting, preparing and supporting leaders of change.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of 25 years of quantitative instructional leadership research, up through 2013, using a nationally generalizable data set.

Although the scholarship on race in education is vast, the authors attempt to review some of the most pressing and persistent issues in this chapter. They also suggest that the future of race scholarship in education needs to be centered not on equality but rather on equity and justice. 

The articles in this special issue emerged from papers presented by the authors during a symposium at an annual meeting of the University Council of Educational Administration (UCEA). The authors’ intent then and now is to shed light on the perceptions, preparation, practices, and impact of teacher leaders in schools through presenting reports of research on leadership development conducted in diverse states and for diverse purposes.

The aim of this study was to examine the means by which principals achieve an impact on student achievement. 

Districts and states establish minimum eligibility requirements for individuals serving as principals in public schools. The intent of these requirements—which include mandated degrees, prior teaching and/or administrative experience, and certifications—is to ensure a minimum quality standard in the principal candidate pool.

This article revisits the concepts of leadership and management, examines the impact of the ERA on management practice in schools and colleges, and discusses the notion of managerialism.

Heroic models of leadership based on the role of the principal have been supplemented by an emerging recognition of the value of ‘distributed leadership’. The work of effective senior leadership teams (SLTs) is an important manifestation of distributed leadership, but there has been only limited research addressing the relationship between this model and leadership teams in education.

In this chapter of "Distributed leadership: Different perspectives" the authors take a small step towards addressing such questions by investigating the association between the distribution of leadership to teachers and instructional change in schools.

This review assesses the effectiveness of school-based curricula, finance, management, and teacher’s decision-making. This report has implications for the impact of charter schools, as the primary intervention in this model is local control. The report finds limited evidence of the effectiveness of these reforms, especially from low-income countries.

In a time when public schools continue to be scrutinized, school leadership never mattered more in order to exercise school reform. This qualitative study examined how five principals working in an urban school district perceived their evaluation and how it contributed to their practice.

A multilevel model of leadership, empowerment, and performance was tested using a sample of 62 teams, 445 individual members, 62 team leaders, and 31 external managers from 31 stores of a Fortune 500 company. Leader-member exchange and leadership climate-related differently to individual and team empowerment and interacted to influence individual empowerment. 

Thorough and comprehensive, this book offers essential information about how to form leadership teams, identify high stakes problems, build commitment, create a school-wide vision and establish school-wide goals, handle setbacks, maintain the vision and sustain change, evaluate and assess comprehensive school change.

This small-scale pilot study investigated the role of school principals in the induction of new teachers in Ontario, Canada.

Through real-life single and multiple case studies, This book addresses how principals and their staffs struggle with the challenge of shared leadership, how they encourage teacher growth and development, and how shared leadership can lead to higher levels of student learning. 

This is the first comprehensive national report to scrutinize the impact of strict Zero Tolerance approach in the America public school. This report illustrate that Zero Tolerance is unfair, is contrary to developmental needs of children, denies children educational opportunities, and often results in the criminalization of children. 

The history and the intra-and inter-literature consensus of these two lines of inquiry will be examined in this review. The purpose is to determine whether the findings and generalizations of those bodies of research can be used conjointly in order to understand how schools strive to change to attain more effective instructional outcomes. 

Teach For America (TFA) is a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve educational opportunities for disadvantaged students by recruiting and training teachers to work in low income schools. The program uses a rigorous screening process to select college graduates and professionals with strong academic backgrounds and
leadership experience and asks them to commit to teach for two years in high-needs schools. 

As the federal government urges states and districts to create principal evaluation systems, largely linked to student achievement, it’s also time that principals be part of the conversation. Without the inclusion of the expertise of school and instructional leaders, the new evaluation systems created across the country may not necessarily be improved or attain desired results, and, as a result, principals may not view feedback from these new evaluation systems as informative for improvement of their practice or their schools.

The belief that working in teams makes us more creative and productive is so widespread that when faced with a challenging new task, leaders are quick to assume that teams are the best way to get the job done. Getting agreement is the leader’s job, and they must be willing to take great personal and professional risks to set the team’s direction. And if the leader isn’t disciplined about managing who is on the team and how it is set up, the odds are slim that a team will do a good job.

The authors arguing that the United States needs to move much more decisively than it has in the last quarter-century to establish a purposeful, equitable education system that will prepare all our children for success in a knowledge-based society.

This report examines practices in teacher and principal development in the United States in 2010. It looks at ineffective approaches as well as those models that show promise for improving educator and student performance.

The first paper describes the theory of action and essential components of the DL Program. It presents a brief overview of how the DL Program was initially conceived and operationalized, how it was replicated for its second and current implementation effort, and lessons learned across implementations.

Race to the Top will reward States that have demonstrated success in raising student achievement and have the best plans to accelerate their reforms in the future. These States will offer models for others to follow and will spread the best reform ideas across their States, and across the country.

In the past decade, nearly all states have revised their principal evaluation policies, prompting school districts across the country to rethink how they are evaluating school leaders. The new principal evaluation systems that emerge out of these policy reforms often couple increased accountability with a greater emphasis on development in an effort to spur continuous improvement in school leadership practices.

This review highlights major models that have been influential in the field and discusses evidence for their efficacy in explaining school leaders’ influence.  

Leadership is what is done, not who is doing it. The leadership work blurs the lines between teachers and administrators. Leading Together introduces a collective approach to progress, process, and programs to help build the conditions in which strong leadership can flourish and student outcomes improve. Explore the Collective Leadership Development Model for School Improvement.

Applying an analytic model to better understand collective leadership development, this study examines three high schools: one urban, one suburban, and one rural. Each school's unique structure and context tests the model's explanatory power.

New breakthrough thinking in organizational learning, leadership, and change. Continuous
improvement, understanding complex systems, and promoting innovation are all part of the
landscape of learning challenges today's companies face. Amy Edmondson shows that
organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those
organizations work.

Effective Instructional Leadership Teams can be integral to helping underperforming schools strengthen their leadership, professional learning systems and core instruction.

Our primary purpose is to examine the degree to which state equity plans identify the distribution of principals and principal turnover as factors influencing three leadership mechanisms that affect student access to effective teachers—namely, hiring of teachers, building instructional capacity of teachers, and managing teacher turnover.

This article reviews the research and best practices on succession planning in education as well as in other sectors. The authors illustrate how forward-thinking superintendents can partner with universities and other organizations to address the leadership challenges they face by creating strategic, long-term, leadership growth plans that build leadership capacity and potentially yield significant returns in improved student outcomes.

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. 

In this article, the authors put forth a new set of standards with equity at the core. They seek to advance the conversation about why standards centered on equity are needed—particularly in light of a proposed standards refresh—and what implications would follow from equity-focused standards.

Effective school leaders, particularly principals, are associated with better outcomes for students and schools. Principals help set school vision and culture, which support teacher effectiveness and ultimately can help improve student achievement.

In an era of heightened accountability and limited fiscal resources, school districts have sought novel ways to increase the effectiveness of their principals in an effort to increase student proficiency. To address these needs, some districts have turned to pay-for- performance programs, aligning leadership goals with financial incentives to motivate and direct leadership efforts. Pay-for-performance strategies have been applied to schools for decades.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing dialog of whether and how instructional leadership is distinguished conceptually from general leadership notions, such as charisma, and to continue the ongoing psychometric research on the The Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED) by examining its convergent and divergent validity. The authors hypothesize that the VAL-ED will be highly correlated with another measure of instructional leadership, but will be weakly correlated with more general measures of leadership that are rooted in personality theories.

School leadership matters for school outcomes, including student achievement. This assumption has become commonplace since the publication of the highly influential Wallace Foundation–commissioned report by Leithwood and colleagues in 2004. Policymakers and researchers often quote the report's main conclusion that “leadership is second only to classroom instruction among all school-related factors that contribute to what students learn at school”.

This study examines the associations between leadership behaviors and student achievement gains using a unique data source: in-person, full-day observations of principals collected over three school years. The study finds that principals’ time spent broadly on instructional functions does not predict student achievement growth. Time spent on informal classroom walkthroughs negatively predicts student growth, particularly in high schools.

The author provides a new framework for understanding leadership practice. The work of leaders will increasingly be shaped by three overriding but contradictory themes: design; distribution; and disengagement. These are the `architecture' of school and educational leadership.

Teams have more talent and experience, more diverse resources, and greater operating flexibility than individual performers. J. Richard Hackman, one of the world's leading experts on group and organizational behavior, argues that the answer to this puzzle is rooted in flawed thinking about team leadership. 

This article reviews U.S. administrative licensure regulations, focusing on type of school leader licensure, provider types, and leadership quality. Licensure obtained through university-based and alternative routes is examined.

This paper ties together evidence drawn from several extensive reviews of the educational leadership literature that included instructional leadership as a key construct. 

The study finds that interest in instructional leadership among scholars and practitioners remained strong throughout the period of the review, the PIMRS has proven a reliable and valid data collection tool, and the use of research methodology has improved in several specific areas. Nonetheless, the results also suggest that the conceptual frameworks and methodologies used by these doctoral students were, on the whole, inadequate for the task of contributing to either the theoretical or the practical knowledge base in this field.

This article reviews the empirical literature on the relationship between the principal's role
and school effectiveness during the period from 1980 to 1995

This article reviews research from 1980‐1995 exploring the relationship between principal leadership and student achievement. The focuses is on the substantive findings that emerged from the review.

In this chapter, the authors synthesize the results of a series of analyses of empirical data on distributed leadership and school improvement. The studies centered on the impact of new state policies that sought to create broader and deeper leadership capacity in schools as a vehicle for stimulating and sustaining school improvement.

This chapter describes findings from a series of related quantitative studies in which we sought to understand how leadership contributes to school capacity for improvement and student learning.

This article presents results from a study that examined the instructional management behavior of 10 elementary school principals in a single school district. The primary goal of the research was to describe the instructional management behavior of these principals in terms of specific job behaviors.

This article reviews the evolution of instructional leadership as a model for principal practice, examines barriers to its successful enactment, and proposes strategies

This study examines how local school leaders make sense of complex programs designed to evaluate teachers and teaching. New standards-based teacher evaluation policies promise to provide school leaders and teachers with a common framework that can serve as a basis for improving teaching and learning in schools.

The RAND Corporation served as the evaluator of PPIP and examined implementation and outcomes from school years 2007–2008 through 2010–2011. Although the district is likely to continue implementing much of what constitutes PPIP, this report focuses only on the period during which PPIP was being funded by the TIF grant.

The article underlines how, within this conception, distributed leadership operates as a network
of strong cells organized through cohesive diversity and emergent development rather than mechanical
alignment and predictable delivery.

This article aims to address and explain the conceptual ambiguity surrounding distributed leadership.

This book anchors distributed leadership in the core work of instruction and argues that to be most effective, leadership distribution has to be first and foremost focus upon improving learners outcomes

what is distributed leadership? What does the evidence say? And, can it work for your school? Teacher Magazine asked Professor Alma Harris.

If we think about leadership as being confined to only those in positions of authority then we are willfully ignoring the leadership talent and capability of many others. If leadership is fundamentally about influence, then within any school there are many sources of influence, both formal and informal.

This article takes a contemporary look at distributed leadership in practice by drawing upon empirical evidence from a large-scale project in the USA. Initially, it considers the existing knowledge base on distributed leadership and questions some of the assertions and assumptions in recent accounts of the literature. 

Teachers Leading Educational Reform explores the ways in which teachers across the world are currently working together in professional learning communities to generate meaningful change and innovation in order to transform pedagogy and practice. By discussing how teachers can work collectively and collaboratively on the issues of learning and teaching that matter to them, it argues that through collective action and collaborative agency, teachers are leading educational reform.

This Wallace paper summarizes a decade of the foundation’s research in school leadership to identify five critical roles for school principals to be effective.

The Visible Learning research synthesizes findings from 1,400 meta-analyses of 80,000 studies involving 300 million students, into what works best in education.

Companies today face adaptive challenges. Changes in societies, markets, customers, competition, and technology around the globe are forcing organizations to clarify their values, develop new strategies, and learn new ways of operating.

This report describes the opportunities for supporting school leadership under ESSA, discusses the standards of evidence under ESSA, and synthesizes the research base with respect to those standards.

This report provides descriptive information on traditional public, charter, and private school principals over the period of 1987-88 through 2011-12. It includes comparative data on number of principals, gender, race/ethnicity, age, advance degrees, principal experience, teaching experience, salaries, hours worked, focus of work, experience and tenure at current schools, etc.

The specific purposes of this article are to identify and synthesize the empirical research on how leadership influences student achievement and to provide evidence on how school leaders should direct their efforts.

During the 1980s, our systems experienced team teaching and open classrooms. Educators began to talk about teachers' workplace and its effects on teachers' morale, knowledge and skills, and other characteristics.

This article examines the relationship between the time principals spent on different types of activities and school outcomes, including student achievement, teacher and parent assessments of the school, and teacher satisfaction

The present study explores the relationship between distributed leadership and teachers' organizational commitment. Semi-structured interviews with teachers and school leaders of secondary schools were conducted

In this study the relationship between school leadership and teachers'
organizational commitment is examined by taking into account a distributed leadership
perspective.

This report is a comprehensive and research-based framework outlining the conditions necessary for transformational school leaders to succeed. It offers a framework of conditions that can help districts enable great school leadership.

The authors propose a conceptual framework of equitable leadership practice, describing three drivers to catalyze organizational growth in 10 high-leverage equitable practices designed to mitigate disparities for non-dominant students.

This report analyses whether and how highperforming systems have supported the subject expertise of their elementary school teachers.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the way in which principals in different countries are securing successful organisational change through systematically building social capital. It argues that how a school works as a cohesive unit and how people collaborates will ultimately define organisational performance.

This article concerns the real-world importance of leadership for the success or failure of organizations and social institutions. The authors propose conceptualizing leadership and evaluating leaders in terms of the performance of the team or organization for which they are responsible.

Substantial variation was found in the relationship of evaluators' ratings of teachers and value-added measures of the average achievement of the teachers' students. The results did not yield a simple explanation for the differences in validity of evaluators' ratings. Instead, evaluators' decisions were found to be a complex and idiosyncratic function of motivation, skill, and context.

The study explored the following overarching question: What does it take for leaders to promote and support powerful, equitable learning in a school and in the district and state system that serves the school? The study pursued this question through a set of coordinated investigations,

In this report, the development of altering concepts of school leadership over a period of about 4 decades is sketched.

Instead of looking at the principal alone for instructional leadership, we need to develop leadership capacity among all members of the school communities.

This article describes a 4-year program of research about transformational forms of leadership in schools
responding to a variety of restructuring initiatives.

For purposes of the Ontario Leadership Framework (OLF), leadership is defined as the exercise of influence on organizational members and diverse stakeholders toward the identification and achievement of the organization’s vision and goals. For aspiring leaders, this framework provides important insights about what they will need to learn to be successful. Those already exercising leadership will find the framework a useful tool for self-reflection and self-assessment.

This study aimed to improve our understanding of the nature, causes, and consequences of school leader efficacy, including indirect influences on student learning.

The purpose of this paper is to provide one perspective on this question, focusing in particular on findings that may be applicable in the Nordic context.

This study aimed to estimate the impact of collective, or shared, leadership on key teacher variables and on student achievement. As well, it inquired about the relative contribution of different sources of such leadership and whether differences among patterns of collective leadership were related to differences in student achievement

This study aimed to estimate the impact of collective, or shared, leadership on key teacher variables and on student achievement. 

This chapter of "A New Agenda for Research in Educational Leadership" book presents a broad agenda to help strengthen the extent, quality, and clarity of the latter source of knowledge -- empirical research on leadership. 

Using meta-analytic review techniques, this study synthesized the results of 79
unpublished studies about the nature of transformational school leadership (TSL) and its
impact on the school organization, teachers, and students.

In 2008 the authors published an article in this journal entitled Seven Strong Claims about Successful School Leadership (Leithwood, Harris, and Hopkins 2008). This article revisits each of the seven claims, summarising what was said about each in the original publications, weighing each of the claims considering recent empirical evidence, and proposing revisions or refinements as warranted.

Leading School Turnaround offers new perspectives and concrete, evidence-based guidelines for the educational leaders and administrators faced with the challenge of turning our low-performing schools around. Using the tools outlined in this groundbreaking book, school leaders can guide their schools to higher levels of achievement and sustained academic success.

This study inquired about patterns of leadership distribution, as well as which leadership functions were performed by whom, the characteristics of nonadministrative leaders, and the factors promoting and inhibiting the distribution of leadership functions. 

This report by researchers from the Universities of Minnesota and Toronto examines the available evidence and offers educators, policymakers and all citizens interested in promoting successfulschools, some answers to these vitally important questions

The purpose of this paper is to examine relationships between principal leadership, dimensions of school capacity, and teacher professional learning in 32 Hong Kong primary schools.

In this study, the six aforementioned variables are added to one model focusing on both the direct effects instructional and distributed leadership have on teacher job satisfaction and self-efficacy, and the indirect effects through the mediation variables of supportive school culture and teacher collaboration. 

The purpose of this study was to develop an understanding of the relationships among principal transformational leadership, school leadership-team transformational leadership, and school culture.

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.

This study investigates teacher empowerment in schools that have at least four years of experience with some form of decentralized or school-based management. 

Focusing on school leadership relations between principals and teachers, this study examines the potential of their active collaboration around instructional matters to enhance the quality of teaching and student performance

This study analyzed three urban districts' efforts to improve the instructional quality and performance of their schools. The study also assessed the efforts made in four: (1) promoting the instructional leadership of principals; (2) supporting the professional learning of teachers, in particular through school-based coaching models; (3) specifying curriculum; (4) and promoting data-based decision making for planning and instructional improvement.

Building on the analysis that was first reported in School Leadership That Works, the authors of Balanced Leadership identify the 21 responsibilities associated with effective leadership and show how they relate to three overarching responsibilities

The goal of this study was to examine the relationship between four patterns of distributed leadership and a modified version of a variable Hoy et al. have labeled “teachers’ academic optimism.” The paper finds that high levels of academic optimism were positively and significantly associated with planned approaches to leadership distribution, and conversely, low levels of academic optimism were negatively and significantly associated with unplanned and unaligned approaches to leadership distribution.

This book is designed to help the reader fully comprehend teacher leadership as a pathway to school improvement.

This book introduces the foundations of the recently revised professional educational leadership standards and provides an in-depth explanation and application of each one.

This paper presents the research base and conceptual framework for a new principal leadership assessment tool: the Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED™).

The purpose of this analysis is to describe the research base that undergirds the emerging concept of learning-centered leadership.

In this article, the authors examine leadership for effective learning employing research on highly productive schools and districts and high-performing principals and superintendents.

This book introduces the foundations of the recently revised professional educational leadership standards and provides an in-depth explanation and application of each one. 

In a high school in Greece, teachers assume all administrative roles, freeing up the principal to take school governance to the next level.

Using the collective leadership framework, this study examines (a) how principals perceive their own influence and that of other key stakeholders in various school decisions and (b) how principals’ perceived influences of other stakeholders are associated with their own influence.

This report provides an overview of NYCLA’s flagship principal preparation program. Intended to help others involved in principal preparation think through important elements of principal preparation, including candidate selection, developing experiential learning opportunities, and funding, staffing and sustaining the program, the guide shares NYCLA’s successes and lessons learned during the 11 years we have delivered the Aspiring Principals Program in New York City, as well as through our work with various state and district partners nationally to adapt the program.

This book offers a comprehensive and strategic approach to address what has become labeled as "talent and human capital."

The purpose of this chapter was to trace the place of “social justice” in the field's discourse since the early 1960s, the decade in which the first academic journals of the field appeared. More specifically, the chapter aims at (1) presenting the emergence of “social justice” as an area of study in the field's journals from a historical perspective and (2) analyzing the major topics related to this area of study and its types of publication. 

This book aim is to advance understanding along many dimensions of the shared leadership phenomenon: its dynamics, moderators, appropriate settings, facilitating factors, contingencies, measurement, practice implications, and directions for the future. 

This study attempts to investigate the differential effectiveness of provocation, brainstorming, and emotional mastery at fostering the emotional intelligence of adolescents.

The Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED) is a multirater assessment of principals' learning-centered leadership. The instrument was developed based on the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. In this article, we report on the validity and reliability evidence for the VAL-ED accumulated in a national field trial.

This report, one of six state-of-the-field reports, explores the connection between learning-focused leadership and leadership assessment as it contributes to coherent leadership assessment systems. The report outlines the function and implication of leadership assessment in national, state and local contexts.

The Howard County school board agreed to pay nearly $1.65 million in salary and benefits to persuade Renee Foose to retire as schools superintendent.

A review of school effectiveness literature is presented in this paper. Research studies and other literature on this topic are examined, including case studies, surveys and evaluations, studies of program:implementations, and organizational theories of schools and other institutions.

The term “mega system” derives from a field research project at the Laboratory for Student Success at Temple University that studied comprehensive school reform. Comprehensive school reform moves a whole school forward by dramatically changing the way it operates.

Drawing from video analysis of Distributed Leadership team meetings, this paper explores the work of the teams themselves, focusing on team priorities, organization, roles and authority dynamics, and decision making. The analysis focuses on the four Distributed Leadership schools that were in their second year of implementation in 2007-08.

Given the burgeoning interest in distributed leadership in education, it is timely to consider how research on this topic could make stronger and more rapid connections with student outcomes than has been evident in the history of the parent field of educational leadership (Harris, 2008). The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to develop an account of distributed leadership that is appropriate for research on this relationship.

Whether they are termed regional or assistant superintendents, area directors, instructional leadership supervisors, executive officers, or some other title, a leadership hierarchy is employed in school districts in the United States whereby principals report to and are managed or supported by principal supervisors. Traditionally, this role has primarily been one of representing the demands or expectations of the central office to the school by focusing on providing information about district initiatives and ensuring compliance.

This study draws upon survey and administrative data on over 9,000 teachers in 336 Miami-Dade County public schools over 2 years to investigate the kinds of collaborations that exist in instructional teams across the district and whether these collaborations predict student achievement. While different kinds of teachers and schools report different collaboration quality, we find average collaboration quality is related to student achievement.

The authors use research-based "impact modeling" to show how a strategic approach to recruiting and supporting rookie teachers could yield as much as 4.2 extra months of student learning. We provide 5 recommendations for school systems to leverage their investment in structures that provide rookie teachers with both shelter and development.

Often principals in urban school districts report to a central office staff person whose primary function is to supervise principals. Over the past decade, the principal supervisor role has shifted away from administrative oversight toward developing principals’ instructional leadership capacity. As principals are increasingly responsible for driving improvement in their schools, the demands of supervising principals similarly have changed.

This article sketches out a framework for inclusive leadership. As one of the constellation approaches to leadership and social justice, inclusive leadership is concerned first and foremost with inclusion, both in its processes and the ends for which it strives.

As school districts work out next year's instructional format and take stock of their teacher workforce, districts in a position to hire are also readying themselves for a potentially unprepared influx of novice teachers. School administrators have the difficult task of ensuring that new teachers are effective regardless of setting, while also having to bridge the learning loss exacerbated by last spring's dramatic turn of school.

We highlight some of the key discoveries and developments in the area of team performance over the past 50 years, especially as reflected in the pages of Human Factors. Teams increasingly have become a way of life in many organizations, and research has kept up with the pace.

The purpose of this study was to explore the purpose and practices of leadership evaluation as perceived by principals. The researcher wanted to identify the perceived purposes and practices of leadership evaluation as described by nine public school principals, and to respond to the apparent need expressed by administrators to receive substantive feedback.

The bulk of the study is dedicated to an analysis of the empirical research literature on leadership effects. This includes the presentation of results from an earlier meta-analysis carried out by the authors, a summary of other meta-analyses, and a new meta-analysis based upon 25 studies carried out between 2005 and 2010.

In this report, the Southern Regional Education Board outlines critical actions that states, districts, universities and principals themselves should take as part of a systematic plan to address principal succession. The report makes the case for principal succession planning and describes six steps for succession planning that states and districts can implement to ensure they have the right principals for the job.

Education created RTT under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to provide incentives for states to reform K-12 education in areas such as improving the lowest performing schools and developing effective teachers and leaders. In 2010, Education awarded 12 states nearly $4 billion in RTT grant funds to spend over 4 years. A state's RTT application and scope of work included the state's plans for development and
implementation of teacher and principal evaluation systems by participating school districts

This report examines the evidence and analyses to substantiate the claim that leadership and principals in particular have a significant impact on students and schools.

This study examines the influence of principal leadership in high schools on classroom instruction and student achievement through key organizational factors, including professional capacity, parent–community ties, and the school’s learning climate.

This study examines the influence of principal leadership in high schools on classroom instruction and student achievement through key organizational factors, including professional capacity, parent–community ties, and the school’s learning climate.

The authors use principals’ self-ratings to construct typologies of effectiveness in both domains and compare their relationship to student achievement. Results show that principals view themselves as either strong or weak on instructional leadership and organizational management skills simultaneously. They also find that learning gains vary significantly across the principal profiles.

Stories of leadership successes follow a familiar structure: A charismatic leader, often the CEO or school principal, takes over a struggling school, establishing new goals and expectations and challenging business as usual within the organization. 

This 4-year longitudinal study, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, is designed to make the “black box” of leadership practice more transparent through an in-depth analysis of leadership practice. This research identifies the tasks, actors, actions, and interactions of school leadership as they unfold together in the daily life of schools. 

Building on activity theory and theories of distributed cognition, this paper develops a distributed perspective on school leadership as a frame for studying leadership practice, arguing that leadership practice is constituted in the interaction of school leaders, followers, and the situation.

Traditional organizational theory mandates that organizations predict and stay in control in order to avoid chaos. This book proposes that members of organizations work at developing a new frame of reference for understanding organizational life

This paper provides evidence on how school leaders used their new autonomy and its impact on school performance. 

The report examines the internal and external conditions that matter for students’ and teachers’ feelings of safety.

Based on a synthesis of unpublished transformational school leadership (TSL) research completed during the last 14 years, this study inquired into the nature of TSL and its effects on student achievement using review methods including standard meta-analysis and vote-counting techniques. 

This study reviews evidence about the overall influence of direction-setting leadership practices (DSLPs), 1 of 4 major categories of practices included in a widely known conception of effective leadership (e.g., Leithwood & Louis, 2011) and a focus of many other such conceptions, as well.

This study used Hierarchical Multivariate Linear models to investigate relationships between principals' behaviors and district principal evaluation purpose, focus, and assessed leadership activities in 13 school districts in Michigan. The study found that principals were more likely to engage in learning-centered leadership behaviors when the purposes of evaluation included principal professional development, school restructuring, and accountability; when the focus of evaluation was related to instructional leadership; and when evaluation addressed leadership in school goal setting, curriculum design, teacher professional development and evaluation, and monitoring student learning.

When school boards offer hefty buy-out packages to get rid of superintendents with whom they no longer see eye-to-eye, do taxpayers get the shaft?

This report describes the Consortium for Policy Research in Education’s mixed-method evaluation of the Distributed Leadership (DL) project. The evaluation featured a cluster randomized control trial, where schools first agreed to participate in the study and then were chosen by lottery to participate in the DL project or serve in the comparison group. Overall there were 16 DL schools and 21 comparison sites in the evaluation.

Perspectives on Diversity, Equity, and Social Justice in Educational Leadership provides educational leaders with practical steps for implementing multicultural education into schools. Drawing from multicultural scholars like James Bank’s it equips educational leaders with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to ensure that schools provide all students with equal educational opportunities.

The National Teacher and Principal Survey is completed every four years soliciting descriptive information from principals and teachers across the 50 states. A few highlights include: Sixty percent of school principals have been at their schools for three years or less. 

A subgroup of principals—leaders for social justice—guide their schools to transform the culture, curriculum, pedagogical practices, atmosphere, and schoolwide priorities to benefit marginalized students. The purpose of the article is to develop a theory of this social justice educational leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the development of educational leadership, administration and management (EdLAM) research by identifying thematic strands that hallmark key publications and synthesise major research findings and limitations. 

This article provides a meta-analysis of research conducted on distributed leadership from 2002 to 2013. It continues the review of distributed leadership commissioned by the English National College for School Leadership (NCSL) which identified two gaps in the research during the 1996–2002 period.

This empirical study of the practice of five elementary school principals whose student achievement gains were three times the expected rate of progress redefines some capabilities identified in the literature as central to leadership for learning.

While most educators believe working in teams is valuable, not all team efforts lead to instructional improvement. Through richly detailed case studies The Power of Teacher Teams demonstrates how schools can transform their teams into more effective learning communities that foster teacher leadership.

The hypothesis that guided this study was that the degree of teacher professionalism in a school would be related to (a) the professional orientation of principals in their exercise of administrative authority—especially, the extending of adaptive discretion to teachers in the conduct of their work—and (b) the trust evident among various actors in the school community.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships among faculty trust in the principal, principal leadership behaviors, school climate, and student achievement.

Latent class analysis (LCA) was used to identify different types of principals across the U.S. The authors analyzed the 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey as it presents a unique opportunity to study the different types of U.S. principals since it contains leadership measures not found in other national surveys or administrations. A final sample of 7,650 public schools and principals were included in the analysis.

Attracting and retaining teachers can be an important ingredient in improving low-performing schools. In this study, we estimate the expressed preferences for teachers who have worked in low-performing schools in Tennessee. Using adaptive conjoint analysis survey design, we examine three types of school attributes that may influence teachers’ employment decisions: fixed school characteristics, structural features of employment, and malleable school processes.

The purpose of this study was to examine various factors that are often present in principal–teacher interactions and teacher–teacher relationships to see how those may have an impact on teachers’ classroom instructional practices.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss findings from Learning from Leadership. This study was designed to identify and describe successful educational leadership and to explain how such leadership can yield improvements in student learning.

This report represents the first systematic comparison of student outcomes in schools led by the Aspiring Principals Program (APP) graduates after three years to those in comparable schools led by other new principals.

This Considerations Packet is designed to support school leadership teams as they guide school improvement efforts. Topics include the rationale for using a team approach, team composition, and necessary skills and responsibilities of the leadership team.

This quantitative meta-analysis examines impact of the principal's leadership on student achievement.

The Council’s mission is to promote the cause of urban schools and to advocate for inner-city students through legislation, research and media relations.

The Education Digest is monthly publication that scans hundreds of publications so it can select the most critical, most newsworthy articles. They are then condensed for quick reading.

UChicago Consortium was created in 1990 after the passage of the Chicago School Reform Act that decentralized governance of the city's public schools. Researchers at the University of Chicago joined with researchers from the school district and other organizations to form UChicago Consortium with the imperative to study this landmark restructuring and its long-term effects