Systemic disruptions and uncertainties resulting from the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic have put extraordinary pressure on system-level educational leadership worldwide. Despite often being seen as drivers of thinking and change, system leaders had few, if any, precedents to draw from on how to lead effectively through such crises. This paper…

This study employs social network analysis (SNA) to identify influential individuals and their communication patterns within Chinese schools in Wenzhou. The research also aims to reveal communication and advice-seeking patterns that significantly impact the overall distributed leadership structure and practices within the schools. The study…

Focusing on primary school principals' espoused strategies for developing social capital over their early years in the principal's office, we show that investing in social capital was a core challenge during their formative years. Based on our analysis of data from a longitudinal study of 35 new principals, we argue that school principals made…

There is an increased focus on schools and school systems to develop teaching teams to improve school teaching and learning practices. As such, effectual school leadership has become synonymous with creating the conditions for teachers to work collaboratively to improve school teaching and learning. Middle leaders, teachers who are formally…

School improvement reforms aimed at achieving improved student learning remain high on the agenda for leaders across the globe. The purpose of this paper is to understand the leadership attributes that enable school leaders to bring about positive change. This qualitative study is based on interviews with school leaders (school principals and…

Beginning in 2009, the United States (US) federal government spearheaded a nationwide teacher evaluation reform effort, encouraging states to change their process of evaluating teachers. School principals, the primary evaluators of teacher performance, act as middle leaders in the sense they must attempt to balance messages from federal, state,…

Stress is an inevitable part of school leadership. However, little is known about the main causes of school leaders' stress in Ireland, and their association with workplace wellbeing and leaders' daily responsibilities. The current paper aimed to address this gap. A cross-sectional, mixed-methods design survey was conducted with 267 school leaders…

The instructional leadership approach expects school leaders to give top priority to ongoing improvement of teaching quality and academic outcomes. Researchers have found that despite the top-down pressures to assume an instructional leadership role, school principals demonstrate limited direct involvement in such leadership. The current…

Empirical studies of crisis leadership have historically been limited to analyses of particular events, captured in themes of flexibility, care and the importance of communication as a response. Since 2020, the crisis has been global, demanding immediate and multiple pivots for school leaders. While care and communication are particularly…

Although research generally attests to the beneficial role of transformational leadership (TL) for school effectiveness, little empirical work has distinguished individual- from group-focused dimensions of TL and analysed their relationships with target variables at the individual and group level of followers simultaneously. Using a dual effects…

This exploratory multi-case study investigates the types of teacher performance data principals consider and collect when evaluating teachers. Data come from public school principals (N = 10) in the U.S. state of Michigan and includes: interviews (n = 30), observations (n = 20), and artifacts collected in 2016 and 2017. Additionally, specific…

Reflecting post-bureaucratic organisation theory, education reformers intended charter schools to empower school-level leaders, most typically principals, with autonomy to pursue clear, student-centred missions. Yet little research explores whether charter school principals have more power than traditional public school counterparts. We summarise…

The current qualitative study sought to examine how male and female principals enact their instructional leadership. Data were collected through 59 semi-structured interviews with 36 female principals and 23 male principals from Israel, and analysed in a four-stage process--condensing, coding, categorising, and theorising. Findings presented two…

Psychological safety is the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Critical team events such as conflict and faultlines (hypothetical lines that split a team into subgroups) should impact psychological safety. Previous research has shown the benefits of task conflict on team outcomes under certain conditions and the…

Although the benefits of teacher collaboration have been touted, school administrators often struggle to foster productive collaboration at their sites. This study takes a deep dive into teachers' interactions to understand how administrators' efforts to engineer collaboration play out in teachers' relationships. Analysis of qualitative interview…