This portraiture-informed study by Taeyeon Kim challenges the dominant discourse of accountability, which often focuses on high-stakes policies at the expense of relational aspects of accountability in schools. Building on working theories of accountability, humanizing leadership, and paradox theory, Kim theorizes the "human side of…

Background: When well implemented, recess is a critical part of the school day for children's healthy development. We explored the implementation of a recess improvement process in 5 elementary schools across 3 states. Methods: We conducted a mixed-methods implementation study in which we visited each school 3 times over 1 school year, collecting…

Purpose: The study aimed to explore the authority and power of kindergarten superintendents in public education to elucidate their leadership dynamics. Design/methodology/approach: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 Israeli kindergarten teachers about the authority and power of their superintendents. Thematic analysis was used to…

Purpose: Current school leadership research has primarily utilized quantitative methods to explore the relationship between leadership and teacher learning. However, there is a notable gap in understanding how principals facilitate professional learning, especially in centralized educational settings. This study aims to address this gap by…

In this qualitative study, the researcher investigated and described the specific leadership practices employed by elementary principals in Texas to initiate school improvement in campuses designated as needing targeted support, additional targeted support, or comprehensive support and improvement by the Texas Education Agency (2023a). The…

Early in 2020, the United States was faced with the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic resulting in several school districts across the country shutting down. What began as a temporary school closure morphed into one of the most creative and labor-intensive restructurings of schools. Leading the dramatic changes were elementary school…

Purpose: In the last 13 years, schools across the country spent a significant amount of time, money, and energy transitioning to the Common Core State Standards. States have also adopted high stakes accountability systems to track the achievement and growth of students. Despite these efforts, most schools are demonstrating only modest growth in…

Purpose: This study aims to understand how to develop, support and utilize professional learning community (PLCs) to build organizational capacity to support teacher learning and collaboration. Although literature highlights the importance of leadership in creating a PLC, there is little research on specific actions leaders can take to create an…

Reading instruction has always faced a high-stakes battle between supporters of opposing methods for teaching a child to read. Many of the debates center on early reading instruction. Principals play a vital role in the reading programs at their schools. Therefore, this qualitative study, using a single-case study design to inquiry, aimed to…

This study investigated the role of administrative support in the correlation between teachers' perceptions of organizational support and their levels of leadership. This study adopts a relational screening model. The study population consisted of teachers in elementary, middle, and high schools. The sample consisted of 304 teachers selected…

I designed this study to explore elementary assistant principals' perspectives of their roles as instructional leaders while fulfilling other administrative duties typically associated with the assistant principal position. I aimed to build on existing research on the role of contemporary elementary assistant principals as instructional leaders.…

The pedagogical and didactic guidance of teachers has been linked, in the relevant literature, to the school management's adoption of the model of pedagogical leadership as well as to the assurance of a series of factors that influence it. This study aims at investigating the pedagogical role of the principal in Greek primary schools. Data were…

This sequential mixed-methods study aimed to understand Belizean primary school principals' level of self-efficacy as a crucial component in their abilities to lead schools toward education recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In phase one, the researcher used the total population sampling method and emailed surveys to Belizean primary…

Despite rich and growing school choice and school marketing literatures, little is known about if and how principals of zoned public elementary schools engage in marketing. We address this gap by drawing on in-depth interviews with principals of nine schools--in different neighborhoods--in the Baltimore school district. We find that principals…

The place of Church school headteachers as spiritual leaders of the school community is rarely highlighted. This article investigates how 13 Church primary school headteachers (Catholic Church of England, and Methodist) interpret this role. It draws on the Faith in the Nexus research which investigated how church primary schools nurtured pupils'…