Journal of School Leadership

Given the multiple transitions that early career teachers (ECTs) experience in the initial years of their careers, navigating a sense of belonging can be particularly challenging. Using data from a series of phenomenological interviews with seven ECTs in the southeastern United States, this article investigates the role of school leaders in shaping and supporting ECTs’ sense of belonging. Major findings suggest that school leadership practices that encouraged ECTs’ psychological safety, visibility within their schools, and social connection with colleagues strongly influenced their sense of belonging. Prioritizing a sense of belonging enables school leaders to foster confidence and effectiveness, thus supporting ECTs’ retention and effectiveness.

Research practice partnerships (RPPs) are a specific type of partnership that fall within the broader category of district-university partnerships and drive change on a problem of practice. This paper focuses on the ways in which an RPP between a university and a PK-12 school district led to growth in both partnered organizations. We utilized a qualitative case study that leveraged the concept of the boundary infrastructure to inform how various aspects of the partnership bled into areas of the organizations. Data included observations of partnership meetings, partnership artifacts, semi-structured interviews with 11 partnership stakeholders, and a focus group conducted within the partnership’s coordinating council. We present three main findings through the lens of boundary infrastructure that demonstrate how the organizational growth occurred: research as a boundary practice, engagement with practitioners, and a flat power structure. The research process helped drive new endeavors within the district. Engagement with practitioners led to curricular changes at the university while also broadening the scope of faculty research agendas. Finally, creating a flat power structure for the partnership’s collaboration helped to include multiple voices in partnership processes. These three findings demonstrate ways in which RPPs may support organizational growth and provide insights for university and district leaders who are considering developing partnerships to drive change.

This mixed-methods study focused on the enactment of state accountability policy by educators and how educators balance social justice beliefs with accountability demands. We specifically studied Texas secondary assistant principal (APs) perspectives on accountability policy and social justice leadership and their leadership actions that helped balance the competing demands of high-stakes testing accountability with equity-focused social justice leadership goals. Our study included two phases. 79 APs completed a phase 1 quantitative survey. We used the survey results to select 10 APs to participate in phase 2 qualitative interviews to more deeply explore how the layers of federal, state, and local policy transformed the subjectivities enacted by assistant principals as they attempted to balance accountability with social justice orientation. Findings revealed divergent AP views across social justice and accountability beliefs. These findings drove recommendations for future research, policy, and practice by connecting what APs shared regarding leadership balancing actions that support social justice school leadership goals and help remedy and repair harmful impacts of high-stakes testing and accountability policies.

School leaders have been retiring and resigning in record numbers, creating a significant need for new leaders to fill those roles. The demands and stress of these jobs limit the number of people interested in educational leadership positions. Millennials can fill this impending void. Previous studies have examined what millennials need in the industry to achieve job satisfaction and retention. This study was the first to propose a new leadership framework, the Millennial Leadership Conceptual Framework (MLCF), that takes into account research on transformational leadership and millennial workplace preferences. This paper surveyed educational leaders to determine if the MLCF components of relationships, voice, and moral purpose were essential for the recruitment and retention of millennials in educational leadership. The results revealed that voice, relationships, but not moral purpose, were critical to millennials’ recruitment and retention.

Women artists and superintendents in the U.S. and around the world continue to face gender- and race-based discrimination when attempting to obtain leadership positions. In this paper, we offer a comparative case study design of a racially diverse group of three prominent women artists and six women superintendents on Long Island who were all mentored by white males and have succeeded in white, male-dominated professions. While we found many similarities between the artists and superintendents regarding how they overcame sex-role stereotyping and interpersonal racism in their respective career trajectories, we suggest that the women superintendents can learn much from the artists about how to center their gender and racial identities and transform their leadership practices in ways that would disrupt the status quo that continues to produce inequities and outcomes in schools. Indeed, women superintendents seemed to experience tensions between emulating male superintendents’ leadership styles and resisting gender stereotypes. They also must navigate a competitive culture of accountability and rankings. This competitive culture among mostly male superintendents is detrimental for women leaders who have less opportunities to seek out women mentors for advice. Our analysis provides important implications for future women superintendents aspiring to practice, what we call a “women-centric approach to culturally responsive school leadership,” or WC-CRSL.

This study examines the perspectives of seventeen school leaders across seven US states to understand what practical wisdom entails in school leadership and how it shapes leaders’ experiences. It builds on recent scholarship that shows the potential of practical wisdom—or the deliberative capacity that illuminates the ethical dimensions of our decision-making—to help school leaders connect the many complex decisions that they make each day with their larger goals of personal and community flourishing. Guided by moral leadership as a conceptual framework, this study leveraged a constant comparative analysis of leader perspectives to identify specific practices, aims, and resources in practically-wise school leadership. Leaders from racially, socio-economically and geographically diverse contexts described practically-wise practices, which included listening, gathering information, clarifying, and modeling; practically-wise aims, which included attending to emotions, context, and roles; and practically-wise resources, which included physical artifacts, relationships with colleagues, and past professional experiences. Findings also show how leaders’ experiences with practical wisdom supported self and community flourishing through inward-oriented, outward-oriented, and action-oriented practices. This phenomenology of what practical wisdom entails and how it is experienced by school leaders provides empirical support for the importance of practical wisdom in educational leadership, as well as implications for a growing number of professional development models that aim to cultivate wise leadership in school settings.

The purpose of this non-experimental quantitative correlational study was to research the influence of school climate for all stakeholders at elementary schools in South Carolina. The literature review has unveiled that school leaders can utilize school climate measurements to understand better areas of need concerning school climate, student achievement, and teacher retention. According to The United States News Research (2024), the South Carolina education system ranks in the bottom 20% of the United States. Moreover, this study’s research questions further probed the relationships between school climate, student achievement, and teacher retention. The study intended to use a Pearson correlation coefficient; however, after running a Shapiro-Wilk test, the results were not normally distributed. Therefore, Spearman’s Rho test revealed that all three research questions were statistically significant. The implications of this study’s results have directed the educational field members’ attention to conduct future research in the school-building leadership styles that lead to desired school climate, student achievement, and, or teacher retention results. Additionally, future research could determine how the following variables affect school climate, teacher retention, and student achievement: school policy, political influences, if other states have the same trends, total student enrollment, total teacher enrollment, student-to-teacher ratio per classroom, elementary, middle and high schools compared to one another, pupils in poverty index, teacher salary, and administrative salary.

School principal burnout is an increasingly prevalent issue affecting our school leaders across the nation. This sense of burnout is leaving our building leaders questioning their passion to remain in the profession and in many cases causing them to leave the profession. Burnout is characterized by chronic workplace stress, exhaustion, and a diminished sense of personal exhaustion. This case study explores the causes of burnout and effective ways to alleviate burnout. Ultimately this study aims to inform stakeholders of the importance in providing support for our school leaders who are often left in a sense of isolation. The findings of this research show that while we cannot fully identify and remove all causes of school principal burnout, removing the sense of isolation school leaders feel by providing quality mentorship programs can help slow the rate.

This study provides the first scholarly investigation into the impact of female leadership motivation on elementary teachers’ performance in Timor-Leste’s unique post-conflict sociocultural environment. The researcher used a mixed-methods approach with an explanatory research design. The collection of data included 68 elementary school teachers’ survey responses from rural and urban areas and in-depth interviews conducted with five teachers from the five elementary schools. The statistical inferential analysis results demonstrate that female leadership motivation strongly impacts and correlates with teacher performance in elementary schools. In addition, the qualitative findings reveal that female leaders exhibit supportive, communicative, and inspirational leadership qualities. Female leadership behaviour, emotional intelligence, and motivational support are significant factors that enhance teachers’ optimism and performance. Through open communication and shared decision-making, female leaders make teachers more engaged and show higher commitment to their work responsibilities. Although the results are limited to elementary schools in Baucau and cannot be extended to other municipalities, they will provide valuable evidence on leadership and teacher development within post-conflict education systems. The study highlights the necessity for a leadership training programme that emphasises motivation-based, culturally sensitive school leadership.

This study examines the attitudes of school leaders and how their interpretation of the African language policy influences its implementation in practice, as well as how this interpretation hinders the multilingual goal in South African public schools. The qualitative data were collected from semi-structured, audio-recorded interviews lasting between 30 and 40 min, with sixteen school leaders from four public schools in the Johannesburg East District. Participants comprised two principals, six deputy principals, six departmental heads, one Institutional Development and Support Official, and one District African Language facilitator. Data were analysed using a Thematic Analysis supported by Constant Comparative Analysis. Findings reveal an uneven understanding of policy among leaders, resource constraints, overcrowding, inadequate teacher training, and competing community preferences for English. The results were interpreted using Burns’ Transformational Leadership Theory, through the mapping of the leaders’ responses to the theory’s four dimensions: idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration. Recommendations, which are tied to the empirical findings, include targeted leadership development in policy interpretation, a strategic plan to support learners’ transition from home language to English at a school level, and a partnership between the school and district to address resource and teacher training gaps.

Principals play a key role in the success of their schools and students’ performance (Grissom et al., 2021). At the same time the literature also shows that principals do not feel prepared to lead and support special education programming. This places some of the most academically vulnerable students without the benefit of quality school leadership. This case study chronicles one principal’s work in changing the special education model within his school from direct instruction to co-teaching. Through interviews with the principal and with five co-teachers in the school, we used deductive coding with Hitt and Tucker’s (2016) unified framework for effective principal practices to help show if and how effective principal practices can be employed to overcome specific content weakness and move schools toward more inclusive practices. Findings suggest that principals who apply general effective leadership practices can overcome gaps in special education training. This case study suggests that strong instructional leadership actions could mitigate the limitations reported in the literature that principals have in providing special education leadership.

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent school closures led to unprecedented disruptions of K-12 education in the United States, but the impact on teacher grading practices was varied and nuanced. Grading doubtlessly changed during the pandemic, but the extent to which these emergency grading policies would change traditional practices was unknown. This mixed-methods study sought to understand how these pandemic school closures impacted subsequent grading reform efforts in K-12 schools. Using a convergent parallel mixed methods design, researchers collected quantitative data from a sample of 95 principal participants from 6 regions around the U.S. using a 16-item survey, while qualitative data were collected from 7 principal participants from around the country via semi-structured interviews. Descriptive statistics and a Wilcoxon signed-rank test were used to analyze quantitative data, and an interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) approach was used for qualitative data analysis. Quantitative and qualitative data strands were mixed during interpretation, producing three final dimensions that explain the central phenomenon: the importance of principal grading reform vision, the ephemeral nature of post-COVID-19 grading reforms, and the significance of flexible grading practices both during school closures and today.

This paper advocates for a unique framework that combines Servant leadership (SL) principles and a systems-thinking (ST) approach. This framework is designed to address the persistent absence of equitable learning environments for culturally, linguistically, and racially diverse students, particularly multilingual learners (MLs). By integrating SL and ST, leaders can foster contextual and cultural understanding while implementing language acquisition services tailored to MLs’ needs. The proposed conceptual framework delineates essential practices empowering leaders to cultivate equitable environments rooted in social justice. This framework is not just a theoretical concept, but a practical tool that can advocate for sustainable change in educational leadership for MLs.

The trend of group learning activities in higher education were affected during the Covid pandemic, but the virtual platform of learning enhanced its usability. A qualitative study with students in colleges in India has revealed that the learners adopt cyclical responsibilities, create social spaces, and increase the quality time to foster cohesiveness among groups. Group learning helps students to learn themselves by the support of peers and builds confidence to share their opinions without hesitations. Students from the same regional language background become closer to each other very fast. However, present research has found that group members belong to different socio-cultural-economic backgrounds. The similar area of interest encourages them to form a group rather than language. They gradually develop rapport among them to overcome the differences. The study also found that the students prefer to form a group of their own because of easy collaboration among them. However, it is not always possible for all the students to find members with similar interests and therefore instructor’s guided group formation is preferred. It is found that a smaller group consisting of 3-5 students performs better than a larger group. But, the performance in group learning also depends on duration of group activity, nature of tasks and dedication among group members. The students see the outcome of group learning activities beyond getting better grades, but they start relating the lessons of group learning to build better social life in future.

School leadership plays a critical role in improving a school’s performance by enhancing teachers’ satisfaction, which subsequently increases their commitment. This study aims to investigate the relationship between path-goal leadership behavior, job satisfaction, and teachers’ commitment, as well as the mediating role of job satisfaction among the public elementary school teachers in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. The current study employs survey questionnaires to collect data. The results reveal that achievement-oriented, directive, and participative leadership behavior positively influence job satisfaction. Furthermore, job satisfaction significantly influences teachers’ commitment. Lastly, job satisfaction also mediates the relationship between achievement-oriented, directive, and participative leadership behavior and teachers’ commitment. This study contributes to school management by examining principals’ leadership behavior that can enhance teachers’ job satisfaction and commitment. Additionally, it provides insights into leadership behavior and addresses the gap in research on the application of path-goal leadership styles among school principals in Indonesia.

To date, much of the research exploring how principals and coaches functioned amid the COVID-19 pandemic focused on (a) teachers’ needs or (b) how principals and coaches responded to teachers. Largely, these bodies of literature exist in isolation, which helped motivate the current investigation. The purpose of this study was to explore relationships between teachers’ needs and principals’ and coaches’ enactments of care. This study draws upon 24 qualitative interviews collected at two different time points during the COVID-19 pandemic to analyze the ways principals and coaches strategically deployed acts of care (Noddings, 1984) to respond to teachers’ most pressing needs. We report on the coupling patterns that emerged in the data analysis and provide implications for practice and research.

The importance of meaningful integration of students with disabilities with appropriate support services has become increasingly important in recent decades. However, there are challenges in effectively preparing aspiring administrators to foster inclusive educational environments. This study explored aspiring educational leaders’ self-efficacy beliefs about inclusive practices after completing a preliminary administrative services credential (PASC) in California. This study used an explanatory sequential mixed methods approach to assess the preparedness of aspiring leaders and the factors that influence their self-efficacy based on Bandura’s social cognitive theory. Surveys and qualitative interviews shed light on how aspiring administrators perceive their readiness for administrative positions. The findings indicate that aspiring administrators feel moderately to highly prepared for overseeing inclusive practices, with key strengths in promoting collaboration and implementing differentiated learning strategies. However, challenges remain in areas such as resource management and mentorship. The study underscores the necessity for enhanced professional development focused on special education, increased emphasis on collaborative skills, and structured mentorship programs. These implications point to the importance of refining administrative credential programs to better equip aspiring school leaders for inclusive education.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has and will continue to transform education for years to come. While researchers tend to focus on the impact of AI on teaching and learning, relatively few have considered the impact of AI on school leadership, particularly instructional leadership, and specifically teacher supervision—an aspect of school leadership that possesses the closest connection to AI’s origins in education. In this paper, we first describe the role of school leaders as instructional leaders. We then move to consider one aspect of instructional leadership—teacher supervision—and its theoretical and empirical understandings. In the second section of the paper, we outline various promises and pitfalls of using AI for teacher supervision using existing research on AI in education that informs key tasks and skills of teacher supervisors—observation and feedback. In our final section, we combine our understandings of teacher supervision and our considerations of using AI for teacher supervision to outline promising avenues for research.

To create the change necessary to dismantle educational inequities, school leaders need to involve faculty in the change process. Faculty involvement ensures that equity-based interventions are designed with diverse input to maximize their efficacy and helps to secure faculty buy-in to carry out those interventions. Prior research outlines how schools use committees, department meetings, and other methods to involve faculty in change; however, there is limited research on the efficacy of these structures. This study fills that gap by examining the relationship between the use of the structures to involve faculty in decision-making, and the perceived degree of faculty involvement in equity-based decision-making. This research took a quantitative approach, utilizing a survey of 206 independent school teachers to examine the usefulness of six decision-making structures (committees, open forums, faculty meetings, department meetings, informal conversations, and surveys). Multiple regression analysis showed that committees, meetings, and forums each predicted a higher perceived degree of faculty involvement. However, it did not support that correlation for department meetings, informal conversations, and surveys. School leaders should continue their frequent use of committees and expand their use of full-faculty meetings and open forums to effectively involve faculty in equity-based decision-making.

This article presents Critical Inclusive Praxis, a conceptual framework designed to support the development of inclusive, democratic, and socially just school cultures. It emphasizes the essential role of principals in transforming schools through reflective and dialogical action that addresses equity and diversity. In today’s complex educational landscape, the framework calls for intentional, justice-driven leadership. Grounded in critical pedagogy and inclusive education theory, this conceptual paper draws on a broad review of literature on school culture, change, leadership, inclusion, and challenges within the school community to develop a five-element model for inclusive school leadership. Each element captures a distinct aspect of leadership while collectively promoting equity-focused, socially conscious, and action-oriented practices. The Critical Inclusive Praxis framework illustrates how principals who engage in ongoing critical reflection and collaboration can better meet the diverse needs of their communities. It offers both a theoretical foundation and practical guidance for school leaders committed to fostering inclusive environments through shared leadership, culturally responsive strategies, and transformative engagement with staff, students, and families.