Principals are responsible for planning school improvement efforts at the school level to leverage increases in student achievement. Recent research underscores how principals engage in satisficing behaviors that result in low-quality school improvement plans (SIPs). To disrupt compliance-based planning practices and produce high-quality SIPs,…

This study forms part of a participatory action research project, undertaken in four Spanish schools, analysing the planning and development of educational practices that link each school with its territory through community participation processes. The article describes how school leadership can help to develop participatory processes with the…

This study aims to develop and validate the Principal Competency Inventory (PCI), an instrument used to assess a principal's leadership competencies that promote student learning in South Korea. An extensive review of prior work was conducted to understand the theoretical foundation related to school leadership and the competency construct of the…

Middle leaders in schools are increasingly recognised as playing pivotal roles in school improvement. Although some school systems provide formal professional development for middle leaders, many middle leaders express a preference for job-embedded learning. Yet, international research has documented difficulties in providing intensive support…

The aim of this study was to explore the role of school principals and their term of office in regard to school improvement. In particular, we investigated the convergences and divergences between the views of school principals in Greece and the findings of relevant international literature. To this end, we collected and analysed data from 66…

School middle leadership is a complex and increasingly important school leadership position, with research showing the significance of middle leadership to school improvement and teacher development. The purpose of this article is to identify and analyse empirical peer reviewed articles on middle leadership from 2006 to 2020, to understand how…

The government of Chile mandated a system-wide reform in public school education in 2017. The reform calls for de-municipalization of the public school sector (345 municipal education departments under mayoral control) and the creation of 70 Servicios Locales de Educación Pública (SLEPs) between 2018 and 2025. The reform represents a largescale…

The main purpose of this paper is to examine perspectives of successful and effective leadership as well as successful and effective schools in an effort to uncover the governance interventions which produce one or the other characterization. This examination is undertaken through the utilization of two guiding frameworks: the…

In England, schools are able to take on academy status, which is intended by the central government to give them greater autonomy (DfE, 2018). Groups of academies can form multi-academy trusts (MATs), which typically grow in size with additional schools becoming academies and joining. One mechanism for MAT growth is sponsorship, which occurs when…

Teachers' voice behaviour has attracted growing attention in universities due to its positive outcomes for institutional reform and improvement. This study investigated how and under what conditions university leaders' transformational leadership is beneficial to teachers' voice behaviour using data collected from 434 teachers from universities in…

Many studies claim the importance of goal-setting for school improvement but few outline specific practices. This study highlights specific goal-setting practices associated with successful school improvement efforts. It reports on a 2-year collaborative research project, which closely examined three principals' goal-setting practices in the…

As improving low-performing schools has become a critical strategy to achieve educational equity in China, local educational departments have implemented various school collaboration programs. Drawing on international literature and empirical data from in-depth interviews and policy documents in two Chinese urban districts, this multiple-case…

Quality education is of major public and private interest and, understandably, considerable effort is paid to the quality of schools and improvement of the level of education in society. Many governments recognize the limitations of centralized policy in motivating school improvement and turn to 'network governance' to coordinate school systems.…

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…

This case study explores how educational leaders in a UAE juvenile correctional educational center perceive their multi-dimensional responsibilities and roles. The dynamics of leaders' responsibilities and roles, as well as the constraints they face, are conceptualized within the paradigms of functionalism, conflict theory, and postmodernism. To…