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Secondary school leadership provides multiple challenges in terms of the diversity of tasks, multiple demands on time, balancing communities and attending to instructional programming. An emerging scholarship suggests the importance of a distributed instructional leadership approach to high school leadership. However, what has been less thoroughly explored is how secondary school leadership is distributed leaders across a school district. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the social structure and positions urban high school principals occupy in the district system.

This study was conducted in one urban fringe public school district in southern California serving diverse students populations. The data were collected at three time points starting in Fall 2012 and ending in Fall 2014 from a district-wide leadership team including all central office and site leaders. All leaders were asked to assess their social relations and perception of innovative climate. The data were analyzed through a series of social network indices to examine the structure and positions of high school principals.

Results indicate that over time high school principals have decreasing access to social capital and are typically occupying peripheral positions in the social network. The high school principals’ perception of innovative climate across the district decreases over time.

This longitudinal study, one of the first to examine high school principals from a network perspective, sheds new light on the social infrastructure of urban high school principals and what this might mean for efforts at improvement.

Educational reform is a complex undertaking and the interactions between leaders as they go about a change are consequential for realizing desired outcomes. Advice relationships are one such interaction and can play a key role in driving knowledge transfer and development and as such are an important social capital asset supporting organizational change. Building on the growing scholarship around a social network approach to understanding educational leadership and systems change, the study draws from network concepts to examine advice relationships within a district-wide leadership team as the leaders engages a reform initiative, and what accounts for the development of these important relational ties.

Quantitative data were collected through an annual survey at six points over six years from the leadership team in one public school district in the Western United States, including perceptions of organizational learning, beliefs about reform, and reform-related advice relationships.

Using multilevel mixed modeling, findings reveal downward trends in leaders' advice-seeking and -receiving ties over time and that seeking and receiving advice is positively related to organizational learning, beliefs about reform impact, or beliefs about their efficacy in implementing the reform. However, views about reform-related resources are negatively associated with seeking and receiving advice ties over time.

This study contributes to the literature on the social side of change specifically related to leadership, reform, organizational learning, and leader beliefs about reform implementation. Further, the work offers practical implications for potential social infrastructure design for joint work.

As accountability policies worldwide press for higher student achievement, schools across the globe are enacting a host of reform efforts with varied outcomes. Mounting evidence suggests reforms, which encourage greater collaboration among teachers, may ultimately support increased student learning. Specifically, this study aims to investigate the relationship between human and social and student achievement outcomes.

In exploring this idea, the authors draw on human and social capital and examine the influence of these forms of capital on student achievement using social network analysis and hierarchical linear modeling.

The results indicate that teacher human and social capital each have a significant and positive relationship with student achievement. Moreover, both teacher human and social capital together have an even stronger effect on student achievement than either human or social capital alone.

As more schools across the globe adopt structures for teacher collaboration and the development of learning communities, there is a need to better understand how schools may capitalize on these opportunities in ways that yield improved student learning. Our work sheds new light on these critical foundational elements of human and social capital that are individually and collectively associated with student achievement.

The study analyzes how equity-focused knowledge brokers, working at different levels of the US education system, understand and discuss capacity building in education systems, such as schools, districts, state and local education agencies, to answer this research question: How do equity-focused knowledge brokers support capacity building in education systems?

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five well-known equity-focused organizations that broker evidence-based knowledge and resources to educational systems, practitioners and policymakers. The research team members qualitatively analyzed 18 h of recordings, using their co-developed codebook based on the research questions and prior research on knowledge mobilization.

Four strategies to build capacity within the educational systems were identified. Pursuing sustainable educational change, brokering organizations built capacity with context-specific strategies: (1) engaging various roles within educational systems, (2) fostering communities and partnerships, (3) supporting educators and policymakers’ agency and efficacy and (4) creating a wider culture of external support beyond the systems themselves.

This study shows how knowledge brokers employed context-specific strategies targeting whole systems instead of individuals to ensure that the organization and individuals within had the mindsets, capability, and conditions to engage with and adapt the brokered knowledge and resources. Findings build on existing literature showing how knowledge brokers build capacity through well-known approaches, such as workshops/training, online tutorials and other online resources.

The role of relationships in the process of leadership and change is central, yet the social aspect of the work of reform is often background in favor of more technical approaches to improvement. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to argue that social network theory and analysis provides a useful theory and set of tools to unpack the complex social work of leadership.

In this paper the authors begin by reviewing social network theory in education to date. The authors identify strengths and gap areas and use findings and data from existing social network studies of educational leadership to highlight major concepts.

Along with empirical examples, the paper proposes four important strands of social network analysis for future research in educational leadership: multiplex networks; multi-mode networks; longitudinal networks; and real time networks.

This paper builds on recent scholarship using social network analysis in educational leadership and suggests that social network theory and methods provides unique and important analytic purchase in the study of educational leadership.