Educational Management Administration & Leadership

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 Pashiardis-Brauckmann Holistic Leadership Framework and the Bredeson and Johansson framework for principals’ functions. Additionally, views on success and effectiveness from around the world are utilized. Following this, in this theoretically focused paper we make the argument that successful schools institutionalize the right processes in order to achieve and sustain the desired results and thus become effective. Then, in an effort to bring context into the equation, we discuss what the context is for each education system and student and if schools can make up for the deficiencies of a student’s individual context. We end our discussion by stressing the fact that researchers, through their work, can inspire teachers and principals with their (often) simple descriptions of complex school improvement processes. These descriptions have a profound effect on the applied pedagogical work in schools, which is sometimes more influential than national policy decisions and educational reforms.

This paper describes a process to develop and trial new metrics in South Africa to quantify school leadership and management practices or processes that are considered theoretically related to literacy outcomes. The predictive validity of these measures is assessed in challenging contexts, including 60 township and rural primary schools in South Africa. We observe a randomness to how better leadership and management practices are distributed across better and worse performing schools. Regression analyses confirm weak and inconsistent linkages between measured leadership and management dimensions and literacy outcomes across the sample. However, we find evidence of stronger linkages with intermediate outcomes, including monitoring curriculum coverage. This research contributes to a burgeoning, yet underdeveloped literature on educational management and leadership in Africa and the challenges of measurement in this context.

Although it is generally known that distributed leadership is relevant for reinforcing teachers’ capacity to change, how leadership roles are distributed among teachers largely depends on how principals perceive distributed leadership. Specifying principals’ perceptions and how these are related to teachers’ capacity to change leads to theories about the knowledge and beliefs of leaders with regard to distributed leadership that are crucial for achieving educational change as a team. Combining questionnaire data from 787 Dutch primary school teachers and interview data from 58 principals in a parallel mixed methods design, this study shows differences in how school leaders distribute leadership roles. In addition, the results indicate that several aspects of teachers’ capacity to change, namely, joint work, collegial support, knowledge sharing, self-efficacy and their internalization of school goals, are more present in schools in which school leaders distribute leadership among teachers than in schools in which they do not.

The current study aimed to develop and validate a Principal Emotion Inventory (PEI). Equipped with the theoretical-empirical strategy of test construction, this development and validation procedure consists of one expert survey and five sequential empirical studies with sufficient samples of participating principals based on existing emotion theories and empirical studies. The reliability, substantive validity, structural validity and external validity were tested using exploratory factor analysis, confirmative factor analysis, invariance analysis and structural equation modelling. As a result, a multidimensional model on principal emotions with 25 items was identified with a good model fit. The PEI consists of five factors: enjoyment, pride, frustration, anxiety and hopelessness. This paper is the first attempt to develop and validate a sound instrument that enables measuring school principals’ salient emotions in relation to their working experiences. The PEI would provide a validated instrument for future research on discovering the nature of principal emotions as an independent construct. Measurement is critically important to the replicability and robustness of the research. The findings on principal emotions are also informative for principal preparation and evaluation while taking emotions into consideration.

Teachers’ voice behaviour plays a critical role in school reform by providing constructive suggestions to promote teaching, students’ learning and school management. This study investigates how and under what conditions principals’ authentic leadership contributes to teachers’ voice behaviour. Data collected from 982 teachers in 38 primary schools in mainland China were analysed using regression analysis and bootstrapping tests. The research tested a moderated mediation model of authentic leadership effects on teachers’ voice behaviour in which teacher psychological empowerment was included as the mediator and interpersonal trust as the moderator. The results affirmed the partial mediation model, finding significant direct and indirect effects of principals’ authentic leadership on teachers’ voice behaviour. Moreover, interpersonal trust positively moderated the relationship between psychological empowerment and teachers’ voice behaviour, and also strengthened the whole mediating mechanism. When teachers perceived a higher level of interpersonal trust, the effects of principals’ authentic leadership on teachers’ voice behaviour were stronger than for counterparts who perceived a low level of interpersonal trust. Our discussion highlights the benefits of understanding the impact of authentic leadership on teachers’ voice behaviour in relation to interpersonal trust and their psychological empowerment and indicates how teachers can play a role in implementing the perceived situation practically.

Ethical considerations have been examined in American and European school management research, but indigenous and comparative aspects have largely been understudied. To better understand the ethical decision-making of indigenous school leaders, the present research aims to examine the ethical considerations of one such minority group – Bedouin Arab educators in Israel – and to compare their ethical decision-making with that of their counterparts in Israel’s Jewish majority. The research utilized the pre-designed multiple Ethical Perspectives Instrument, which requires participants to resolve school dilemmas by choosing one of two given ethical perspectives taken from the following six: fairness, utilitarianism, care, critique, profession and community. Two exploratory studies were carried out: Study 1 examined the ethical judgments of Bedouin bachelor of education (BEd) students (n = 28), and their perceptions of the ethical judgments of hypothesized Bedouin school leaders. Study 2 compared the ethical judgments of Bedouin (n = 30) and Jewish (n = 39) masters (MA) educational administration students. Bedouin undergraduates reported care and critique as their own dominant ethical preferences, but viewed utilitarian considerations as being dominant among hypothesized Bedouin school leaders. Among the graduate students, utilitarian considerations were more dominant among the Bedouin group than the Jewish group. The implications of the findings are discussed.

This qualitative research inquiry explores how school leaders shape their identities while navigating incessant and seemingly endless school transformations. The central questions addressed are the following: how do school leaders make sense of their identities in rapid periods of reform? And how do they view themselves in new educational landscapes? An exploratory case study of four target schools that took part in policy reform initiatives directed at the ubiquitous use of Information Communication and Technology was undertaken for this inquiry. Using narrative inquiry as an analytical frame for the focus group discussions interviews and field notes, this inquiry investigates and builds emerging explanations to school leaders’ sense-making in periods of reform.

The objective of this paper is to determine the extent to which adopting Nonaka’s SECI knowledge-creation processes enhances strategic planning capacity in the context of Hong Kong school education.A quantitative questionnaire survey is conducted to examine the predictive effects of the knowledge-creation processes of the SECI model on strategic planning processes. Data is collected from 42 principals and 392 teachers from 42 schools. A multilevel structural equation model is applied to examine the predictive effects of the mechanism on strategic planning capacity. Results show that the combination process of the SECI knowledge-creation model predicts strategic planning capacity, while a collaborative culture enables the process of knowledge externalization and combination. In response to the international debate on culture and context-dependent issues in using Nonaka’s SECI model for knowledge creation, this study reaffirms that the SECI model is largely dependent on Japanese collaborative culture. The study also brings theories of knowledge management into discussion of strategic management in the school context. To enhance school planning capacity, school leaders should cultivate a collaborative culture to support the alignment of different departments in the knowledge combination process to craft strategies for development planning.

In the USA, university-based educational leadership programs, usually referred to as principal preparation programs, have traditionally been the sole source of preparing aspiring school leaders for the job. In response to criticisms from time to time, the programs have been reformed and redesigned. This research was an attempt to investigate the current status of educational leadership programs regarding their missions, goals, and objectives, the curriculum design, and the incorporation of standards. Findings indicated that the programs’ missions, goals, and objectives focused on the knowledge, skills, and dispositions as articulated in the Interstate School Leadership Licensure Consortium and Educational Leadership Constituent Council Standards in the form of expectations for school leaders. The courses aligned with the standards were designed to equip candidates with the basic knowledge and processes of administration and instructional leadership along with awareness of the current issues, application of research tools to make informed decisions, use of modern technology, and developmental and cultural understanding. Moreover, the internship component of the programs was meant to provide authentic opportunities for candidates to apply theory into practice and to devise and practice their own leadership style