How do principal learning opportunities need to change, and who should be leading this change effort? The school district central office plays a vital role in principal learning by providing supervision and support for principals. Just as teachers need ongoing learning opportunities and support from their principals to provide high-quality…

This landmark book translates positive and asset-based understandings of organizations to develop a powerful model of school leadership that is grounded in both existing research and the complexities of life in schools. The authors--both senior scholars in educational leadership--apply insights from positive psychology to the role and function of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present the author's commentary on the special issue of "Journal of Educational Administration" entitled "Systemwide Reform: Examining Districts under Pressure". Design/methodology/approach: The author gives her personal opinions, draws upon her recent experiences in the national…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how US school leaders make sense of external mandates, and the way in which their understanding of state and district accountability policies affects their work. It is posited that school leaders' responses to external accountability are likely to reflect a complex interaction between their…

Principals have a strong role to play in forming school cultures that encourage change. Changing a school's culture requires shared or distributed leadership and instructional leadership. A multiyear study found that three elements are necessary for a school culture that stimulates teachers to improve their instruction: 1) Teachers and…

Purpose: The authors review a volume that emerged from a 2-year participatory effort to look at new research directions in educational administration. The review is presented as a conversation between two researchers--an old-timer (Karen Seashore Louis) and a relative newcomer (Meredith Honig)--to probe for differences and convergence in…

Using survey responses from a national sample of US teachers, this paper provides insight into 2 questions: (1) Do 3 specific attributes of leadership behavior--the sharing of leadership with teachers, the development of trust relationships among professionals, and the provision of support for instructional improvement--affect teachers' work with…

In a recent 334-page report, "Investigating the Links to Improved Student Learning," authors Kyla Walstrom, Karen Seashore Louis, Kenneth Leithwood, and Stephen Anderson discuss findings from the Learning from Leadership study. This study was designed to identify and describe successful educational leadership and to explain how such leadership at…

In this article, the role that formal leaders play in helping distributed leadership take root and flourish in schools is explored. The focus of the study is an urban middle school, one of six cases in a larger three-year investigation of distributed leadership in two mid-Atlantic states. Using interview and document-based data, the authors…

This article examines the relationship between trust and the development of distributed leadership. It presents a theoretical argument with supporting evidence from longitudinal fieldwork examining distributed leadership development in comparative cases of two secondary schools. The analysis suggests that trust matters in the design, performance,…

This article explores the role of leadership, experts, and expertise and the functioning of teams in nine schools that modeled an exemplary integration of technology to support schoolwide instructional improvement. Through cross-case analysis, we identified three different staffing patterns and two different support patterns in how the technology…

Purpose: Extant reports on states' policy differences are mostly descriptive and largely ignore the pervasive role of political culture on their educational policy-making processes. This article examines the effect of policy culture on states' policy-making mechanisms. There is evidence that a state's political culture is a significant mediating…

In this article, we revive work redesign theory, specifically Hackman and Oldham's Job Characteristics Model (JCM), to examine distributed leadership initiatives. Based on our early observations of six schools engaged in distributed leadership reform and a broad review of literature, including empirical tests of work redesign theory, we retrofit…

Purpose: The leadership of the principal is known to be a key factor in supporting student achievement, but how that leadership is experienced and instructionally enacted by teachers is much less clear. The purpose of this study was to examine various factors that are often present in principal-teacher interactions and teacher-teacher…

A central problem for school leadership in the United States is to create settings in which success for students motivates teachers. Meeting this objective is becoming more difficult as teachers, except the most brilliant, struggle to cope with the diversity of students in a changing socio-economic climate and a context in which there is a…