Educational Management Administration & Leadership

Globally, there is increasing pressure on schools to enact change, and the literature indicates that transformational leadership is positively associated with school leaders’ effectiveness at implementing positive reforms. Here, we report on a study conducted in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) within the current context of intense educational restructuring in the K–12 system. The purpose was to investigate whether school principals in the UAE practise transformational leadership, and whether they and their teachers perceived principals’ leadership styles differently to their western counterparts. This study adopted a mixed methodology, and revealed variation in perceptions between principals and teachers related to whether principals were practising transformational leadership. However, when analysed using Hofstede’s cultural framework, this variation may be related to cultural differences between the western orientation of the leadership model adapted by Emirati principals and the Islamic orientation of the population. Therefore, a new model of transformational leadership is proposed, based on a paradigm that may be more appropriate for Middle Eastern/Islamic contexts. This Modified Transformational Model may be useful to those leaders who wish to adopt transformational leadership with cultural accommodations.

This work explores how mindful leadership practice can inform school and district leadership specifically as it occurs in professional learning communities (PLC). When school and district leaders create PLC cultures that encourage rich thinking and intentional practice, individual and organizational mindfulness is present. As leaders work to craft informed responses to the demands before them, it is argued that such mindfulness places them in a position to maximize learning from the experiences of the moment. As an organizational structure, the PLC provides school members with a location for the practice of mindful leadership. Yet, the PLC can become an end in itself, a structure that organizes participants but lacks the necessary goal orientation for actors to engage in motivating and purposeful work and create meaningful outcomes. We assert that the mindful institutionalization of PLCs orients the school toward cultural change embodied in a collective attention that orients the work of its members. We argue that to do so requires attention to deeply developed explanations of activities within the school setting, opportunities for formative, substantive data use, and on-the-ground real-time orientation to communal learning. We argue that attention to these themes would further enhance the knowledge and skill set available to PLC members.

This article explores qualitative shadowing as an interpretivist methodology, and explains how two researchers participating simultaneously in data collection using a video recorder, contextual interviews and video-stimulated recall interviews, conducted a qualitative shadowing study at six early childhood centres in Norway. This paper emerged through the discussion of this experience with another researcher, who had shared interests in early childhood leadership, about the benefits of this research methodology in studying leadership practices in early childhood centres. We argue that qualitative shadowing methodology is a powerful resource that can enrich leadership, learning and development within the early childhood sector. By facilitating reflective engagement between practitioners and researchers through qualitative shadowing, it is possible to enhance the exploration of complex phenomenon such as early childhood leadership practice.

In recent years, a principal supply shortage crisis has emerged in the USA. This problem has been exacerbated by an increase in principal departures, which has been found to be negatively related to school outcomes. While research exists on several determinants of principal turnover, any examination of the relationship between principals’ affective reaction to pay relative to their intent to leave their position at a particular school is missing from the literature. This research seeks to fill this void by examining the association between California (USA) high school principals’ pay satisfaction and turnover intentions (n=156). The importance of potential referent sources (i.e., teachers within the school districts, other high school principals within the school district, and other high school principals in different school districts) for pay satisfaction and the relationship between achievement and turnover intentions were also examined. This study uses a two-stage structural equation modelling approach and finds evidence to suggest that high school principals’ pay satisfaction is influenced by the salaries of comparative peers and is negatively associated with principals’ intention to turnover. Achievement was not found to be related to turnover intentions. Policy implications and future research recommendations are discussed.

The necessity for schools to implement human resources management (HRM) is increasingly acknowledged. Specifically, HRM holds the potential of increasing student outcomes through the increased involvement, empowerment and motivation of teachers. In educational literature, however, little empirical attention is paid to the ways in which different HRM practices could be bundled into a comprehensive HRM system (content) and how HRM could best be implemented to attain positive teacher and student outcomes (process). Regarding the content, and following the ‘AMO theory of performance’, it is argued that HRM systems should comprise (A) ability-, (M) motivation- and (O) opportunity-enhancing HRM practices. Regarding the process, and based on ‘HRM system strength’ literature, it is argued that when teachers perceive HRM as distinctive and consistent, and if they perceive consensus, this will enhance teachers’ and schools’ performance. By combining insights from educational studies on single HRM practices with HRM theories, this paper builds a conceptual framework which can be used to design HRM systems and to understand the way they operate.

The notion of schools as ‘loosely coupled’ organizations has been widely discussed in the research literature. Many argue it is either a protective mechanism for schools to buffer external pressure or a barrier for implementing new reforms. Against the backdrop of systemic change and accountability, we applied a two-level hierarchical linear model to nationally representative data in the US, testing the ‘loosely coupled’ theory through examining the association between data-informed improvement efforts at the school level and data-informed instruction at the classroom level. Statistically significant associations were identified but with a small proportion of variance explained, indicating that the top-down systemic change strategy failed to tighten the system as intended. Alternatively, bottom-up strategies, such as professional learning communities, which operate under the assumption of working with loose coupling, should be considered.

Effective education reform depends on its successful realization by the school leadership carrying out the reform. School principals and middle leaders in the 21st century re-examine their traditional role so as to understand complexities and ambiguities characterizing their various responsibilities within the context of school reform. As critical change agents and system players, formal leaders interpret reform demands and translate them into school practices through a process of sense-making. Though sense-making is an ongoing process that school leaders undergo personally and collectively during policy reforms, little attention has been paid to the role principals and middle leaders perform as sense-makers. This literature review article explores sense-making in school leadership through a holistic approach. It demonstrates how sense-making is framed in both theoretical and empirical studies as well as suggests implications and avenues for future research.

Systems thinking is a holistic approach that puts the study of wholes before that of parts. This study explores systems thinking among school middle leaders – teachers who have management responsibility for a team of teachers or for an aspect of the school’s work. Interviews were held with 93 school coordinators, among them year heads, heads of departments, evaluation coordinators, instruction coordinators, and information and communications technology coordinators. Data analysis revealed that systems thinking among school middle leaders consists of four characteristics: (1) seeing wholes; (2) using a multidimensional view; (3) influencing indirectly; and (4) assessing significance. The findings of this study expand the existing knowledge on systems thinking in school leadership, discussing practical implications as well as further research avenues.

A continuing challenge for the education system is how to evaluate the wider outcomes of schools. Wider measures of success – such as citizenship or lifelong learning – influence each other and emerge over time from complex interactions between students, teachers and leaders, and the wider community. Unless methods are found to evaluate these broader outcomes, which are able to do justice to learning and achievement as emergent properties of the learner’s engagement with his or her world the education system will continue to focus on narrow measures of school effectiveness which do not properly account for complexity. In this article we describe the rationale and methodology underpinning a pilot research project that applied hierarchical process modelling to a group of schools as complex living systems, using software developed by engineers at the University of Bristol, called Perimeta. The aim was to generate a stakeholder owned systems design which was better able to account for the full range of outcomes valued by each school, and for the complex processes which facilitate or inhibit them, thus providing a more nuanced leadership decision-making analytic. The project involved three academies in the UK.