Contemporary accountability frameworks position school leaders as being essential to improving school performance and driving innovation. Simultaneously, new accountability demands have forced the restructuring of school leadership, both in terms of form and function. In this paper, we look at the growing trend of distributed leadership among…

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…

Emerging from concerns about "contrived collegiality" in schools is also the recognition that breaking existing patterns of collegial interaction (or lack thereof) might necessitate some level of leader-initiated (or otherwise organizational) intervention. This paper presents the case of Middleville, a high-performing Midwestern US…

Incentivized collaboration, schools that receive incentives such as public funding or additional resources if they join a network, has become quite popular in Europe and North America (e.g. England, Flanders, United States). We used a comparative case study design to explore why schools would enter such an incentivized network and what role…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

This paper presents the leadership implications from a study that explored how to increase the quality of teaching in a university thereby presenting data from the bottom up--the academic perspective--to inform leadership, policies, and academic development which generally flows from the top down. We report academics' perceptions of and…

This paper argues that the success of schools in disadvantaged township communities is shaped by an interplay of four dimensions: strategy, regulation, pedagogy and compensation. The paper presents these dimensions of successful leadership in secondary schools by drawing on a research study focusing on cases of three Soweto township secondary…

This paper attempts to identify leadership practices and qualities of school teachers as they engaged in effecting change initiated by a curriculum reform in Hong Kong. Based on interview data of teachers from nine schools, this paper shows how teacher leadership manifested itself in schools. Three approaches to teacher leadership were identified,…

The use of coaching as a developmental methodology has been instituted as a way to develop leadership in schools in Scotland as elsewhere in the UK. While there are studies that examine the skills and impact of coaching, there is only limited discussion of the process of coaching and the role and experiences of the coaches. This article examines…