The more than six decades of research on school effectiveness and the two decades of research on school success demonstrates the importance of principal leadership in successful schools. However, the 30-year history of research on person-environment fit has not been robustly connected to the literature on successful school leadership. This study…

This study sought to explore teachers' perceptions of new principals (NPs) and how these perceptions influenced different aspects of their work environment. The research was conducted using case study methodology of three schools in Melbourne, Australia. Data collection tools included semi-structured interviews of teachers and principals,…

This article provides a review of the contemporary instructional leadership research base in Malaysia. The core aim of this review is to assess the recent knowledge base on instructional leadership in Malaysia and to evaluate its current contribution to the existing international literature. The article explores a range of published material that…

The article explored the characteristics of principals as leaders in schools in deprived socio-economic contexts in South Africa. The qualitative research was conducted in four provinces; four schools per province were purposefully sampled, and in each school, individual interviews were conducted with the principal, one member of the school…

Transition from teacher to principal involves both a technocratic response based on 'yearning for certainty' that requisite leadership skills will be learned, and a critically-reflexive approach to adopting a new professional identity (Crow and Møller 2017. "Professional Identities of School Leaders across International Contexts: An…

Few studies have investigated what occurs inside charter schools with respect to instructional leadership, teaching, and learning. To address this gap in the literature, this case study examines two major issues: how the principals at four charter schools enact instructional leadership in their respective schools, and what barriers the principals…

The aim of this study is to explore what aspects the principals and the members of the management teams in the primary and upper secondary education schools in Vantaa support distributed leadership in their school and how necessary they see that distributed leadership is extended to the students in matters concerning the curriculum and the…

The aim of the study was to determine if Chinese school principals use influence actions differently from US principals. The concepts framing this study are leader influence actions, societal and local culture. The analysis was conducted with data from two independent studies conducted in each country using the strategic leadership questionnaire…

This article explores how recent research in education has applied different aspects of "network" theory to the study of school leadership. Constructs from different network theories are often used because of their perceived potential to clarify two perennial issues in leadership research. The first is the relative importance of formal and…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine how district leaders of two school systems in the USA describe an effective principal. Membership categorisation analysis revealed that district leaders believed an effective principal had four major categories of characteristics: (1) documented characteristics (having a track record and being a…

This study of four private primary schools in Beirut, Lebanon, investigated why the children in the schools appeared to out-perform their peers in other schools. The study investigated the cultures that teachers and principals constructed in schools with children and their parents, wondering whether they would exhibit characteristics said to…

This article reports the findings of a study that sought to identify Muslim teachers' constructions of "masculinity" and "femininity" of the school principal. The first purpose of the study was to trace Muslim teachers' perceptions of masculine and feminine features of school principals, and the second was to explore their…

Emotion is a growing focus for contemporary thinking about leadership in public policy and corporate arenas. In British education systems, three imperatives are evident: the idea that transformation is essential; leadership succession in crisis; and, more recently, that leaders must be able to run organisations that address the emotional…

School leadership literature suggests that school effectiveness and ongoing improvement rely on school leaders and principals. Despite significant contributions made by principals towards teaching and learning in schools, there have been few studies that explore principals' perceptions of the factors underpinning their successes and achievements.…

In the year 2007 in Scotland, in common with countries elsewhere in the world, the difficulty of recruiting high-calibre school leaders was becoming an increasing concern. The recruitment and retention study, commissioned by the Scottish Government and undertaken by three universities (Cambridge, Edinburgh and Glasgow), was charged with exploring…