The current study examines senior school leaders' theories of action driving their decision-making around how they manage departments and distribute leadership to department heads. Based on a thematic analysis of transcripts of interviews with the principal, head of the curriculum unit, and two department heads from nine high schools, four…

Education leadership literature indicates that relatively little attention has been given to the specific duties and responsibilities of South African deputy principals in comparison with other leadership and management positions in schools. As a result, their roles and responsibilities remain vague. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to…

Distributed leadership focuses on what teachers and school leaders do together, but also on how the situation mediates that interaction. This paper focuses on the importance and function of the situational dimension of practice. By framing situational aspects in terms of local educational infrastructure, it explores organizational components in…

Existing distributed leadership (DL) theories tend to focus on distributing financial, material and human resources in order to enhance school performance. However, their impact appears controversial. Critical scholars assert that using DL to promote trust and democracy can be a self-fulfilling prophecy orchestrated by few formal leaders. When…

Provision of education during/after violent conflicts remains a global dilemma with many conflict-affected children excluded from/within education. Likewise, school leadership is increasingly seen as a key element in developing inclusive schools across communities. This single intrinsic case study with aspects of ethnography was conducted in one…

Increasingly, educational systems are appreciating the importance of middle leaders leading educational improvement in schools. Schools depend on middle leaders to lead site-based educational development in areas including curriculum development, teacher professional learning and student learning improvement. Middle leaders are in a unique but…

The purpose of this study is to understand and describe patterns of principal instructional leadership practice in Iranian primary schools and to then assess whether there are differences between the high- and low-rated principals. A mixed methods design was used to collect both qualitative and quantitative data from principals and teachers within…

In this explorative qualitative study the effect of political decentralization on vocational school leadership is investigated. Through conducting structural interviews with 15 school principals in the states of Bremen and Lower Saxony in Germany, the study was able to conclude that political decentralization entails the creation of elected bodies…

This concept article discusses the importance of developing psychic income as an administrative strategy to enhance the context of school environments and to curb high teacher turnover. The hope is to promote further debate and research in order to establish the extent to which psychic income influences retention rates in hard-to-staff schools.…

This study was conducted to determine how instructional supervision was carried out in schools. The study begins with a brief outline of the decentralization of the inspection system in Botswana. It proceeds to present a brief global historical background of instructional supervision before findings on instructional supervision are discussed.…

Following the initiation of educational reforms, this article reports on the different models of leadership that have emerged as being important for developing teacher professionalism in government primary schools in Karachi, Pakistan. The evidence from the case studies, reported in this article, illustrates that even within formalized government…

Teacher leadership is a concept that is gaining increasing interest from both practitioners and researchers. This article presents findings from three case studies in the UK that can be characterized as exhibiting developed, emergent and restricted teacher leadership. Differences and similarities between the schools were examined, leading us to…

The headteacher's role in school improvement and the changing nature of the role suggest the need to investigate how new school leaders learn their jobs, that is, their socialization to the leader role. This study has two purposes: (1) to identify the content and methods used in the professional and organizational socialization experiences of new…