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The purpose of this paper is to review English-language publications about school principalship in China published between 1998 and 2013 and to present an overview of the authorship, topics, methodologies and key findings of these publications.

The methodology includes an exhaustive review of journal articles and book chapters about Chinese school principalship published in the English language. In total, 39 articles and 17 book chapters are identified for the 1998-2013 period. Qualitative analysis is conducted to determine the basic patterns of authorship, topics, methods and key findings. The changes or continuities in these patterns during the study period are also discerned.

The paper identifies several continuous and discontinuous patterns in each of the review categories and provides a better understanding of on-going research into the practice of school principalship in China. The results also suggest areas that require deeper exploration.

This paper explores the landscape of school principalship in China as reflected in the international literature and indicates the ways that this landscape has changed or remained the same over the years. As such, the paper contributes to the thin knowledge base concerning school principalship in China and sheds light on the enduring local-global tension in the evolution of education systems.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a preliminary model of instructional leadership in the Chinese educational context and explore the ways in which Chinese school principals locate their instructional-leadership practices in response to traditional expectations and the requirements of recent reforms.

In-depth interviews were conducted with 22 selected primary school principals in Shenzhen and Guangzhou. A qualitative analysis was conducted to categorize the major leadership practices enacted by these principals.

An initial model of instructional leadership in China with six major dimensions is constructed. The paper also illustrates and elaborates on three dimensions with the greatest context-specific meanings for Chinese principals.

The paper explores the ways in which Chinese principals enact their instructional leadership in a context in which “the west wind meets the east wind”; that is, when they are required to accommodate both imported reform initiatives and traditional expectations. The paper contributes to the sparse existing research on principals’ instructional leadership in non-western cultural and social contexts.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: to sketch the current policy context that frames the education of migrant children in Shanghai; to explore the work lives of school leaders in the privately owned but government-supported schools; and to understand the socio-cultural and educational factors that shape the leadership practices in these schools.

This paper drew from publicly accessible policy papers and interview data with four principals leading migrant children’s schools in Shanghai.

Migrant children’s schools have received increasing policy recognition and attention. Principals of these schools have strived to adopt various leadership strategies to enhance the quality of education as received by migrant children. However, due to the institutional barriers such as hukou, multiple challenges continue to face migrant children and leaders leading migrant schools.

This is one of the first few papers that collected data from principals leading migrant children’s schools. The paper contributes to further understandings about leadership in high-needs school context and about education quality and equity in relation to programme for international student assessment success in Shanghai.

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize findings from five systematic reviews of research on principal leadership in East Asia contained in this special issue. The goal is to identify commonalities as well as differences concerning both approaches to research and the enactment of school leadership within this rapidly developing and increasingly influential region of the world.

The review uses thematic analysis of both structural elements and substantive findings drawn from the composite review papers.

The synthesis of the research reviews found considerable variability across the five societies in terms of the volume of work accessible to international audiences, topical foci, the conceptual and methodological sophistication, and findings. Three content patterns were discerned via the thematic analysis of the five reviews: first, influences on the principalship (incorporating personal, cultural and political sub themes); second, principal leadership practices (including qualities and styles, vision, indirect influence on student learning and shared decision making); and third, principal development (including preparation, training and professional development).

In a broader sense, this synthesis paper seeks to assess the development of the field of applied study in East Asia over the past two decades. As such, the paper highlights implications for further building the knowledge base both in the region and globally.

This synthesis, as well as the five reviews, represent the first effort to mark the boundaries of knowledge about school leadership in these East Asian societies. As such, they lay a foundation for the future development of the field in the region, and in so doing also make a contribution to a more diverse global literature in the field.

Worldwide interest in principal instructional leadership has led to global dissemination of related research findings despite their concentration in a limited set of western cultural contexts. An urgent challenge in educational leadership and management lies in expanding the range of national settings for investigations of instructional leadership. The current study addressed this challenge in the context of Vietnam, a nation with a very limited formal knowledge base in school leadership (Hallinger and Bryant, 2013b; Hallinger and Truong, 2014). The purpose of this paper is to describe the perspectives of Vietnamese primary school principals toward their role as instructional leaders, illuminate instructional leadership practices perceived as important by the principals, and develop a preliminary model of instructional leadership within the Vietnamese education context.

This study was a qualitative inquiry that sought to illuminate the perspectives of Vietnamese principals toward their role as instructional leaders. The research employed semi-structured interviews with 27 primary school principals. Data analysis employed grounded theory in order to synthesize results gathered from the principals into a preliminary conceptual model.

The study yielded a preliminary model of principal instructional leadership in Vietnam. The authors’ model evidences similarities to western models of instructional leadership by including dimensions focusing on setting direction, managing curriculum and instruction and developing the school learning climate. Differences also emerged in terms of two additional constructs, building solidarity and managing external relationships. Other distinctive practices of Vietnamese instructional leaders also emerged in the findings which the authors suggest can be linked to the institutional, political and socio-cultural context of education in this society.

Key limitations arise from the focus on primary schools, small size of the sample, absence of data from the Northern region of Vietnam, and lack of verification of principals’ perspectives with data from other stakeholders.

This study is one of the first empirical studies of Vietnamese school leadership submitted for publication in international refereed journals and the first study that has that sought to conceptualize the instructional leadership role of principals in Vietnam. Moreover, the study illustrates how conceptualizations of school leadership are shaped by features of specific societies. This lends credence to scholarly admonitions concerning the lack of universality of leadership theories.

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize findings from studies of principal instructional leadership conducted in five East Asian societies. The authors first identify similarities and then differences in approaches to instructional leadership across the societies. Then the findings of the synthesis are compared with broad findings from the global literature on principal instructional leadership.

The paper employs a thematic approach to synthesizing findings from the five qualitative studies.

The authors identified numerous similarities in practices of instructional leadership across the five societies. These included first, a top-down approach to defining the mission and goals of schools whereby principals worked within a fairly narrow zone of discretion. Second, principals devoted relatively little attention to coordinating the curriculum due to working within strict national curriculum frameworks. Third, principals executed their instructional leadership practices with an ever-present sense of the need to honor hierarchical relations and maintain harmony among staff and other stakeholders. Differences across the five societies centered on the extent to which the instructional leadership role of principals was explicitly defined and the extent to which they received training for the role.

This synthesis sought to build upon reviews of research published in a special issue of this journal two years ago. The synthesis and this body of research papers have contributed toward moving empirical research on educational leadership broadly, and instructional leadership in particular, forward in East Asia.

Principals' well-being worldwide is under increasing threat due to the challenging and complex nature of their work and growing demands. This paper aimed at developing and validating a multidimensional Principal Well-being Inventory (PWI) and examining the state and consequences of principal well-being.

This paper involves four independent samples of principals working in schools from Hong Kong and Mainland China. The research design consisted of four phases with four sequential empirical studies. Phase 1 was to establish the content validity (literature review and Study 1); Phase 2 was to test the construct validity (Study 2 and Study 3); Phase 3 was to build the criterion validity (re-use the data from Study 3) and Phase 4 was to test the cross-validity of the PWI (Study 4).

Based on published literature and four successive empirical studies, a 24-item PWI was created via a theoretical-empirical approach of test construction. Validity was confirmed through construct-, content-, criterion- and cross-validity testing. The PWI covers the six important well-being dimensions – physical, cognitive, emotional, psychological, social and spiritual – to present a general picture of principals' occupational well-being associated with job nature, well-being literacy, leadership and context.

The inventory will aid efforts to promote principal well-being as an essential component of schoolwide well-being, quality education and a wellness society.

During the post-COVID-19 period, this project is deemed both critical and timely so that quality education will not be sacrificed due to factors affecting principal well-being.

This theoretically and empirically validated inventory serves as a robust tool for comprehensively understanding principal well-being and a fuller exploration of their well-being literacy, drivers and outcomes.

This article aims to set the scene for this Special Issue on beginning principals and to inform one's understanding of how new principals manage their work lives to make a difference in their schools.

Based on recent literature on beginning principals, the paper draws together and analyses issues encompassing principals' formal preparation, recruitment, licensure and socialisation.

This article outlines the broader context that frames the lives of beginning principals across societies. It does this through focusing on three fairly general topics: the current expectations of principals and potential principals, which also touches on a shortage of principal candidates in some societies; the life of beginning principals, including strategies suggested by research for “surviving” those hectic first years; and issues related to principals' preparation and learning. These topics encapsulate the focuses of the articles that follow.

The paper contributes to the understanding that the quest for beginning principalship cannot be restricted by national or societal borders; it is one that calls for greater international cooperation and insight.

This paper aims to explore developments over the past 25 years in the knowledge base on instruction-oriented middle leadership in schools. The authors document the trends in the literature since middle leadership began to attract scholarly interest in the late 1990s and explore the shifting structural and content patterns in the knowledge base.

The authors use a topographic methodology to analyse both structural elements and major results drawing from 147 peer-reviewed journal articles.

The authors draw on the review's outcomes to propose a model that frames a core set of middle leaders' instructional leadership practices. They also identify the personal, departmental, organizational and external influences shaping middle leadership practices and identify a lack of research conducted outside Anglo–American societies. This gap in the literature suggests the need for the increased study of middle leadership in different national settings and systems and how these influence the practice and enactment of middle leaders around instruction. There is also a need to employ a greater range of methodologies to understand middle leaders' instructional roles.

The paper lays a foundation for the future development of middle leadership for instruction and highlights signposts to guide future inquiry.

The paper contributes to the middle leader knowledge base by focussing on their enactment of instructional leadership.

Despite the continuous growth of empirical studies exploring professional learning communities (PLCs) across different education systems, little is known about PLC instruments developed and used in existing research. This article aims to capture a full picture of existing PLC instruments developed since 1990. In so doing, the authors also pay attention to the seminal work of Karen Seashore Louis in alignment with the theme of the special issue.

Based on the authors’ searching databases, the authors identified eleven PLC instruments and 26 applied studies using the PLC instruments since 1990. Following this, the authors closely reviewed the identified studies and their relationships (i.e. which one influences which).

The authors’ review illuminates the measurement domains, conceptual origins and methodological soundness of the existing instruments and captures the impact of Louis's work on the applied studies using PLC instruments.

Given that PLCs are seen as a policy measure to sustain and scale up school improvement internationally, the authors’ review provides a better understanding of what and how researchers have measured the effect of PLCs on school improvement. As the first of its kind, the authors believe that their findings can give researchers valuable ideas about how to develop and use a PLC instrument.