Purpose: The practice of theory borrowing from other research fields is common in interdisciplinary and applied research. Nevertheless, educational administration researchers seldom discuss this phenomenon and its complexities in depth. Design/methodology/approach: This essay provides an overview of what has been written about the practice of…

Purpose: Using a document analysis methodology, the study analyzes official policy documents produced by the centralized Israeli Ministry of Education and by the State Comptroller responsible for reviewing the Israeli government's policies and operations. Coordination is assessed using three lenses: coordination among policy plans initiated by…

Purpose: This study examined how principals experienced professional learning that asked them to reflect on their own biases and beliefs, as well as to determine where there are systemic issues of inequity in their schools, and what they planned to do to address those challenges. Design/methodology/approach: Through interviews, observations, and…

Purpose: Recent teacher evaluation reforms across the globe can improve student outcomes, though doing so depends on implementation by school leaders. This study aims to describe how teacher reports about classroom observation processes (TROPs) vary across within-teacher observations, teachers and schools and depend on contextual, teacher and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework that explains structural responses to external organizational shocks. The authors illustrate framework dynamics with one district's secondary schools' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: The conceptual framework imagines structure as emergent,…

Purpose: This paper aims to highlight how a group of novice principals in Connecticut and New York used relational, dispositional and situational factors to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The study aims to support new principals and educational leaders. Design/methodology/approach: Using Mutch's (2015) dispositional, relational and…

Purpose: In Arizona's mature, market-based school system, we know little about how school leaders make meaning of school choice policies and programs on the ground. Using ethnographic methods, the author asked: How do school leaders in one Arizona district public school and in its surrounding community, which includes a growing number of…

Purpose: This study aims to explore the conception and construct of ideological leadership (IL) as it relates to public organizations, such as public schools, and to validate a tool for its measurement in this setting. Design/methodology/approach: Data was collected from 633 teachers working at 69 randomly-sampled Israeli public schools. In each…

Purpose: In an era of increased autonomy and accountability in education, school principals have been given the responsibility for many tasks that used to be centralized, such as hiring and managing personnel, ensuring that the curriculum is followed and that the development of the school is on the right path. In this study an exploration is…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that led 28 teachers of emergent bilingual (EB) students to seek a master's in educational administration with a focus on bilingual/English as a second language (ESL). Design/methodology/approach: To address the study objectives, the authors used a qualitative…

Purpose: This study sought to provide an understanding of what a culturally contextualized model of instructional leadership looks like in Turkey, and how this differs from models disseminated in the USA. Design/methodology/approach: This study employed qualitative meta-synthesis to systematically review the full set of 22 qualitative studies of…

Purpose: This paper has a twofold purpose: (1) to demonstrate, largely with historical evidence, that, contrary to what some have argued, thinking about educational research articulated at the start of the twenty-first century was not really "new wine in new bottles" but, rather, a continuation of the so-called paradigm wars about,…

Purpose: While the current knowledge in the field of educational leadership and management (EDLM) has been primarily based on research produced in English-speaking Western societies, there have been significant efforts by other societies to contribute to the knowledge production, especially during the past decade. The purpose of this paper is to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesize the attributes of loose and tight coupling in educational organizations. In addition, it is aimed to determine whether this phenomenon has value and strategies to offer for the current educational administration and research. Design/methodology/approach: Integrative literature review…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to reconceptualize the theory-practice gap in educational leadership, not as a deficit, but as a necessity for legitimacy within institutional contexts. Design/methodology/approach: This paper draws on institutional theory to reframe the theory-practice gap, which is often seen as a deficit of leaders or…