Leadership Training with an Emphasis on the United States

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Due to a growing body of empirical research on the influence of quality leadership in schools, the role of school leaders continues to come under the policy spotlight as an important catalyst for school improvement and reform. While classroom teachers have the most direct impact on student learning, educational leaders are able to support and optimize learning through their indirect effect on school and classroom conditions. Critical theorists would challenge these instrumental functions of school administrators and posit a more humane, moral, and democratic view of leadership, which in turn would suggest different forms of training and program evaluation. Despite wide-ranging definitions of leadership, there is a growing awareness and appreciation of leadership effects, and a resulting surge in the scholarship and research focused on leadership training. For the purposes of this article, leadership training has been interpreted to mean the learning process by which individuals are prepared to demonstrate leadership skills and develop those skills over the course of their professional careers. Preparation refers to learning that takes place prior to selection for a formal leadership position, and development refers to learning that takes place while an individual is in a formal leadership position. Both preservice and in-service aspects of training are addressed in the references; however, most of the research addresses aspects of leadership preparation versus leadership development. The body of research on leadership training has been growing substantially since the early 1990s, but it was quite limited prior to this time period. When available, empirically based research studies were selected for inclusion in this article. An effort also was made to include international perspectives on leadership preparation, but the majority of the available literature comes from the United States. Qian, et al. 2017 (cited under General Overviews) notes this dearth of international research in the authors’ overview of the non-US leadership preparation field. As a result of the heavy emphasis on research from the United States, there is a disproportionate sampling of publications focused on university-based training, where most of the administrative preparation takes place due to licensing regulations. Although leadership training is taking place in a variety of venues outside of universities, there is little systematic assessment of its impact on the practices or beliefs of participants.