School Leadership Preparation Research Articles

‘Sink or swim’ school leadership socialisation: A global South case of principal preparation and development

Much of the school leadership preparation and development literature emanates from the global north with little attention paid to leadership preparation and development in non-western contexts. This article draws on a South African case in a larger study that explored how school leaders were socialised into the principalship role in four Sub-Saharan African countries. Framed by leadership socialisation theory, and using questionnaire and interview data generated from 29 school leaders, the writer adopted the conceptual elements of professional, organisational and anticipatory socialisation in analysing the data. The article provides strong evidence of ‘sink or swim’ school leadership socialisation. The writer argues that more attention be given to the dimensions of professional and organisational socialisation in global south contexts, South Africa being an illustrative case. She further highlights the importance of anticipatory socialisation in the preparation and development of school leaders, particularly in resource-constrained contexts.

“I had no knowledge of this”: disrupting majoritarian narratives regarding Mexican American K12 students and employing documentary film in the preparation of equity-oriented school leaders

ABSTRACT This qualitative study examines the experiences of primarily Latinx and Black aspirant school leaders in a social-justice oriented principal preparation program situated within a Hispanic Serving Institution in South Texas. Through the usage of weekly journal reflections and semi-structured interviews, this action research study employs Critical Race Theory, critical race heuristics, majoritarian narratives, and counter-stories as theoretical lenses to map the perspectives of aspiring school leaders as they view the film Stolen Education a documentary highlighting the historical injustices Mexican American K12 students endured in South Texas. Findings from this research highlight the erasure of Latinx history from K12 history books; the role of linguistic genocide in the film and in participants’ family histories; and the linkages between past and present injustices for Latinx pupils in K12 schools. The authors provide a discussion and implications on preparing school leaders given a growing conservative movement to squelch social justice issues from P20 education.

Preparing school leaders for social justice: An analysis of educational leadership preparation programs in Jamaica

The purpose of this study was to explore the extent to which the curricula across three educational leadership preparation programs in Jamaica are addressing issues of social justice and social justice leadership in their preparation of aspiring school leaders. The methodological approach used was content analysis to determine the presence or absence of specific concepts within leadership preparation programs’ curricula. Increasingly, several scholars in education have been using this technique to explore how different concepts are addressed across leadership preparation programs. Findings revealed that the three leadership preparation programs gave minimal attention to preparing current and aspiring school leaders to engage in social justice leadership. Implications are offered for local policymakers and their reconceptualization of the job requirements of principals, leadership preparation programs, and faculty teaching in these programs.

Human Resources for Quality Management in School Education : Managerial Leadership Towards Development of Leaders

Effective human resource management is an integral part educational leadership and educational leadership has always played an instrumental role in assuring and developing the quality of schools and standard of an Institution. In the 21st century the evolving nature of school environment has placed new demands on educational leaders where competency development and knowledge of school management, finance, legal issues and state mandates are primary focus for preparation of school leaders. There prevails a widespread belief that raising standards of leadership and management practices can enhance the quality of the Institution. In this context this article has focused on managerial leadership in the development of effective leaders. It is essential to develop knowledge, attributes, and skills required to lead effectively and adapt to the changing demands of the role. In this context the author has highlighted on the importance of training and developmental procedure for an effective leader based on educational beliefs and integrating the values of a democratic society and has focused on managerial leadership towards the development of leaders.

School Leadership under Covid-19 Pandemic: A Critique of the South African School Context

Abstract The advent of COVID-19 exposed the lack of readiness for school leaders to cope with demands of leading during a pandemic. Globally, school leaders were not trained to deal with a crisis of COVID-19 proportions. Leaders in the twenty-first century need to have the required skills like the twenty-first century leadership skills and Fourth Industrial Revolution skills. This study investigated how school leaders are handling the challenges of school leadership under the COVID-19 pandemic in the 4IR era. This study adopted a qualitative research approach. An analysis of local and international literature was done to identify gaps. The study revealed that school leaders and teachers have inadequate information and communication technology skills. Leadership preparation programmes are lagging behind in preparing school leaders to lead in a crisis. Furthermore, the study revealed that school leaders and teachers do not establish communities of learning to learn leadership skills from each other. The study has concluded that there is no alignment between the level of readiness for school leaders and leadership skills of the twenty-first century.

What do excellent school leader preparation programs look like?

Principal leadership is a crucial element in high-performing schools. Research reveals that principals are second only to teachers in impacting student achievement at school. Accordingly, how school leaders are prepared has received increasing attention in recent years. Drawing from the findings of recent reports highlighting exemplary programs and best practices, authors Bonnie C. Fusarelli and Lance D. Fusarelli identify several research-based best practices for improving principal preparation. They include recommendations to scale up best practices nationwide.

Learning Improvement Science to Lead: Conditions that Bridge Professional Development to Professional Action

Background: As more education practitioners adopt techniques of improvement science to address problems of practice, there is an increasing demand for leaders with the knowledge and capacity to lead improvement efforts. However, little research explores how school leaders learn to lead improvement science in their school context or the challenges they may face in doing so. To ensure leaders are supported in learning increasingly common school improvement frameworks, there is a need to understand better the contextual conditions that may influence how practitioners come to learn and lead improvement science in their school contexts. Purpose: The purpose of this research paper is twofold: first, to understand how contextual conditions throughout a learner’s journey into, during, and after an educational leadership program could influence aspiring and current leaders’ efforts to lead improvement science. Second, the study aimed to explore the broader question of how context influences a practitioner’s ability to mobilize new knowledge into action. The researchers introduced the concept of “improvement science fluency” as a methodological contribution to specify the capabilities required to learn and lead improvement science effectively. The research question guiding the inquiry was: “What are the conditions that influenced the development of educational leaders’ improvement science fluency?” Research Design: The study focused on participants who completed a 10-week improvement science course as part of an educational leadership preparatory program at a large public university in Southern California. The research team conducted semistructured interviews with 17 participants who met the inclusion criteria of recalling and using the course concepts in their work since graduating from the program. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and coded using a weighted coding schema to assess participants’ improvement science fluency in guiding principles, tools, and dispositions. The research team analyzed the data to identify conditions that influenced participants’ application and adaptation of improvement science, categorized as professional experiences prior to the course, experiences within the course, and conditions in the organizational environment post-course. Contrasting cases were considered to enhance the robustness of the analysis and acknowledge potential variations within the dataset. Conclusions/Recommendations: The findings provided insights into the contextual factors that challenge or support the application of improvement knowledge to action, offering implications for designing and enhancing school leadership preparation programs to cultivate effective educational leaders for sustainable school improvement. The study emphasizes that organizational role and slack play a crucial role in shaping practitioners’ authority, opportunities for practice and application, and access to continued training and coaching, ultimately impacting their fluency in improvement science. To effectively support moving improvement knowledge to action, the paper recommends: (1) activating prior knowledge to prepare for future learning; (2) attending to the importance of the learning problem and its relevance to practitioners’ roles, scaffolding for role by providing support for practicing new knowledge within professional contexts; (3) addressing the organizational context to create an environment conducive to innovation; and (4) offering follow-up learning opportunities through sustained communities of practice. The study concludes that changing practice is not solely a matter of will and skill but requires careful attention to the broader context before, during, and after the learning experience to support innovations in practice effectively.

What Do School Administrators Think About Race? A Critical Race Mixed-Method Study

Purpose: This study intends to be a catalyst in preparing school leaders to go beyond the call of social justice, to step into the role of anti-racist school leaders who advocate and actualize systemic changes in the educational landscape. Research Methods: Data were gathered using a mixed method approach, starting with an online survey (ARDSA) of 223 school administrators across Texas followed by in-depth interviews with a representative sample of 19 school administrators. Data analysis techniques included quantitative analysis of surveys to determine school and district administrators’ perceptions of racism in schools and need for professional development followed by qualitative analysis to look for patterns and themes. Findings: Women agreed significantly more than men on Perceptions of Racial Inequities, Perceptions of Equitable Expectations, Addressing Racism, Critical Self-Awareness about Race, and Professional Development on Antiracism. Black and Latinx participants placed higher value on Engaging in Dialogues about Race with close connections more than Whites. Latinx and White participants agreed more with the items on remaining silent when witnessing or hearing about racism. Themes that emerged from the qualitative phase of this study included: Fear of Talking about Race, and Lack of Preparation from Educational Leadership Programs to Address Matters of Race. Implications: School districts and educational leadership preparation programs should be intentional about professional development, curriculum, and experiences that support leaders in developing critical awareness about race, understanding positionality and its role in school leadership, critical policy analysis, and engaging in courageous conversations that center race.

Wisdom of the Outsiders Within: How Career Technical Education Leaders Can Inform Educational Leadership Preparation

This study examines insights from Career and Technical Education (CTE) leaders that help to better inform the preparation of all school leaders. CTE leaders find themselves in the interesting position of being inside the PK-12 system but at the outside edge. This outsider within perspective not only gives CTE leaders a unique understanding of schools but also on the preparation of school leaders. These practitioners helped to identify three key areas of focus for leadership preparation: a new focus on college and career readiness, the importance of instructional leadership, and an expanded understanding of community.

Preparing School Leaders and Developing Rural Leadership Capacity: A Collaborative Effort on the Great Plains

This qualitative study explores the early implementation of a university school leadership preparation program and school district collaborative effort to develop school leaders and sustain leadership capacity in nine rural school districts. Emerging findings drawn from survey, focus-group, and participant observation data include (a) the development of a strong leadership network of professional relationships that included peers and district mentors, (b) a sense of individual leadership growth and targeted professional development preparing participants for their next leadership role, and (c) an emerging statewide rural school leadership development network.

How are Principal Preparation Programs Preparing Leaders for Family and Community Engagement?

This qualitative content analysis of course descriptions and syllabi examines how family and community engagement are addressed in principal preparation programs. Relying on a conceptual framework that centers four areas of practice, the analysis determined only half of programs had a substantial focus on families and communities. Many programs that did address FCE relied on outdated literature and standards or lacked authentic skill-development experiences to prepare school leaders for collaboration with family and community members. The results suggest many aspiring principals are leaving educational leadership programs ill-equipped to lead more democratic approaches to schooling and unaware that such models exist.

Preparing school leaders for the fourth industrial revolution: An assessment of their continuous professional development needs

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) radically altered career and institutional development. Hence, this study assessed the CPD needs of school leaders to prepare them for 4IR. The human capital development (HCD) theory was adopted. A survey approach was used. Random and snowball sampling approaches was used to select 284 school leaders. School leaders exhibited moderate proficiency in basic IT applications. The type of school only significantly affects information management and evaluation (IME) skills among school leaders. Primary and secondary schools have different CPD needs for school leaders regarding IME. The study concluded that school leaders should receive training on 4IR attributes, basic IT applications, and cutting-edge 4IR technologies.

Queering School Leadership Preparation Curricula for Gender Justice in Public Schooling

Recent education policies and laws such as a new rule to Title IX by the U.S. Department of Education (2020) and the Parental Rights in Education (HB 1557, 2022) also known as the “ Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida have important implications for how educational leaders are expected to address issues of gender, sexuality, and school-based sexual violence in public schools. The purpose of this article is to examine how education laws, policies, and practices privilege heteronormative values in our public schools and how the lack of educational preparation of school officials are complicit in the maintenance of hegemonic racial, gender and sexuality structures in public schooling. Structural intersectionality grounds this study and maps the corporeal consequences of systems of oppression while political intersectionality describes the strategies used to fight against those systems of oppression (Crenshaw, 2014). The study uses a qualitative narrative inquiry methodology to examine coursework data of doctoral students in an education leadership program to interpret their understanding of gender justice in teaching and leadership in public schools. Critical policy analysis as a discursive analytic is used in this study to reveal the interrelatedness of theory and method. The implications of this study bear important implications for understanding the need for gender justice curriculum in school leadership preparation programs and offers thoughts on how queering curricula can be an act of education activism.

Forging Partnerships: Preparing School Leaders in Complex Environments

This study examines how two autonomous organizations collaborate toward preparing school principals. Studies exploring the early phases of partnership creation are missing from the current literature. As universities continue to partner with school districts to prepare principals, understanding the early development process is important. This study focuses on the beginnings of a university school district partnership using Gajda’s five principles of collaboration and Kezar’s Stage Model for Collaboration. Findings suggest that while the collaboration successfully enrolled students, challenges in the collaboration’s initial phase impede a smooth transition from partnership planning to implementation.

School Leadership During COVID-19

In one university-based school leadership preparation program, aspiring school principals were asked to intern virtually with principals during the COVID-19 school closures. During this internship experience, they interviewed principals about leading during a pandemic and wrote reflective responses explaining what they learned about leading during the pandemic. This case study examines the reflections and lessons learned of leading schools during COVID-19 from 27 aspiring principals in two cohorts of a university-based school leadership preparation program. The researchers employed an abductive qualitative analysis for each aspiring principals' reflection using both deductive and inductive coding methods. Findings revealed fourth themes: (1) the need for structure and organization, (2) attending humanistic needs, (3) struggling to respond to policy changes; and (4) finding meaning and uplifting morale. This study can be used to help inform and guide educational leadership preparation and development programs on how to redirect coursework and field-based experiences to better prepare aspiring school principals to lead during school closures.

The Nexus between School Leadership Preparation and Student Achievement

The major objective of this study is to assess the most common school leadership practices in the Dire Dawa Administrative region and their relationship with student achievement. To this end, it used a cross-sectional and correlational study design. Sample schools were selected using purposive sampling techniques and principals and vice-principals were selected using the availability sampling method. Accordingly, 16 schools and 48 principals participated in the study. Data was collected using a self-developed questionnaire, interview and document analysis. The reliability of the self-developed questionnaire was .77. Student achievement data for the three years the principal/vice principal was assigned were collected from the regional education bureau data set. The collected data was analyzed using narrative analysis, descriptive and inferential statistics. The relationship between leadership preparation and student achievement was analyzed using correlation and simple regression. The findings indicated strong relationship between leadership development and student achievement with r=0.18 at a p<0.05 level of significance. The relationship is moderate but significant at a p<0.05 level of significance and with rho=0.426. Whereas the most common leadership preparation strategy employed is experience sharing, with other strategies such as short-term training and job assignments being less common.

Second Most Important Decision

For principal preparation program success, the selection of an aspiring school administrator’s internship placement/mentor principal is second in importance only to the decision about whom to select into the program. In this article, we review the scant literature on internship placement assignment processes, none of which are specific to rural places. We then describe the Principal Preparation for Excellence and Equity in Rural Schools (PPEERS) program – a partnership of 12 rural districts and a large public university – and explain the process by which the partnership co-designed their internship placement protocol and Assignment of Internship Placements tool. We then introduce the protocol, which involves program leaders traveling to each rural partner district across a wide geographic area to meet with the superintendent and District Point Person – the cabinet-level administrator who is the lead district liaison for PPEERS – to consensually select a mentor principal/internship site for each Intern, using the internship tool, which identifies factors to select for and to avoid. After describing the protocol and introducing the tool, we outline our action research methods. Utilizing a two-phase reflective inquiry process, we drew on perceptions of leadership coaches, district partners, and program leaders to reflect on contextual considerations, the impact of the tool, and ways to improve our placement practice. Contextual considerations reflect realities of rural districts, including limited placement choices in small districts, limited number of principals who fit the mentor principal criteria, and micropolitical considerations. Improvements to our process include considering the entire leadership team of a school when selecting placements; including additions to the tool regarding consideration of equity, diversity, and inclusion, as well as addition of a “Goldilocks school” element; and ideas for increasing mentor principal readiness and intern knowledge of curriculum and pedagogy when placed in a school level that is unfamiliar to them. In these ways the partnership can leverage rural partner assets and address contextual challenges. We conclude with implications for rural school leader preparation programs.

Preparing School Leaders to Advance Equity in Computer Science Education

<p><strong>Background and Context:</strong> Most large-scale statewide initiatives of the Computer Science for All (CS for All) movement have focused on the classroom level. Critical questions remain about building school and district leadership capacity to support teachers while implementing equitable computer science education that is scalable and sustainable.</p> <p><strong>Objective:</strong> This statewide research-practice partnership, involving university researchers and school leaders from 14 local education agencies (LEA) from district and county offices, addresses the following research question: What do administrators identify as most helpful for understanding issues related to equitable computer science implementation when engaging with a guide and workshop we collaboratively developed to help leadership in such efforts?</p> <p><strong>Method:</strong> Participant surveys, interviews, and workshop observations were analyzed to understand best practices for professional development supporting educational leaders.</p> <p><strong>Findings:</strong> Administrators value computer science professional development resources that: (a) have a clear focus on “equity;” (b) engage with data and examples that deepen understandings of equity; (c) provide networking opportunities; (d) have explicit workshop purpose and activities; and (e) support deeper discussions of computer science implementation challenges through pairing a workshop and a guide.</p> <p><strong>Implications:</strong> Utilizing Ishimaru and Galloway’s (2014) framework for equitable leadership practices, this study offers an actionable construct for equitable implementation of computer science including (a) how to build equity leadership and vision; (b) how to enact that vision; and (c) how to scale and sustain that vision. While this construct applies to equitable leadership practices more broadly across all disciplines, we found its application particularly useful when explicitly focused on equity leadership practices in computer science.</p>

Educational Leadership and the Impact of Societal Culture on Effective Practices

Research into what is effective leadership in different cultures provides guidance for leaders moving from one culture to another (House et al, 2014). There is a paucity of empirical research into how culture impacts effective educational leadership in culturally diverse communities, which provides the direction and focus for this study. The cultural backgrounds of staff can impact what they expect about i) how leaders communicate, ii) what actions help build trust and collaboration and iii) how decisions can or should be made (Hofstede, 1991; Meyer, 2014). This study analyses the extent to which school leaders adapt their behaviours in response to the cultures of their staff. Findings suggest that leaders in schools do adapt their actions, most often using different communication styles but also methods of building collaboration and trust, and decision-making structures. Culture impacts what are effective leadership practices (Dorfman et al, 2012) and educational leaders need to understand these potential impacts if they work in culturally diverse communities. This is important to consider for school leaders and leadership preparation programmes.

Exploring the Perceptions of Omani School Principals About Their Leadership Preparation: A Mixed-Methods Study

ABSTRACT This study aimed to explore school leadership preparation and development in Oman. Based on quantitative and qualitative data collected through surveys and focus group interviews, the study investigated how a sample of public school principals perceived their principalship preparation. The investigation included leadership learning experiences, adequacy of leadership preparation, problematic leadership areas, and conceptions of effective preparation. The study findings showed that while Omani principals felt they were adequately prepared for principalship, certain leadership aspects have remained problematic for them. Participants expressed their preference for organized training combining theoretical and practical elements but specifically valued experiential learning activities.