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Research on principal supervisors (PSs) is an emerging field, and principal supervision for racial equity has not yet been studied or theorized. Conducted in partnership with practicing district leaders, the purpose of this paper is to examine current PS leadership in three districts at various points of engagement in equitable leadership practices and set forth a framework for conceptualizing systems equitable leadership practice.

This collaborative study emerged from an EdD course project in which groups of practitioner–scholars identified and collected qualitative interview, survey and artifact data about problems of practice in their districts. University researchers supported data collection and conducted analyses across settings, building on Ishimaru and Galloway’s (2014) equitable leadership practices framework.

Equitable PS leadership practices were variable. No district engaged with “proficiency” across all drivers of equitable leadership practice, but the district that engaged in equitable PS practices most deeply framed the work of schooling as a race-explicit endeavor, suggesting that framing is a fundamental driver.

This paper builds on PS and equity-focused leadership research by adding a systems-level equity focus.

Findings suggest that districts should focus on equity framing as the foundation for principal support and development.

This researcher/practitioner–scholar collaboration shows how practitioner–scholars provide focus and expertise to the field unavailable to traditional researchers.

This study aims to analyze the experiences of a closed cohort of aspiring leaders and connects the university and school district partnership relationship to building the leadership capacity of the cohort. This study builds on previous literature in district-university partnerships and leadership preparation. Powerful learning experiences (PLEs) and interpersonal-intrapersonal leadership development models serve as frames to examine how aspects of successful leadership preparation programs were present.

This qualitative study was conducted with a team of researchers from the university and school district and relies on data from semi-structured interviews with students from the closed cohort.

Researchers identified three major themes of aspiring leaders' preparation experience: confidence building, reflection and mindset change.

This study contributes to the emerging literature on PLEs by illustrating how this type of partnership creates opportunities for powerful learning experiences for aspiring school leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a Year 1 account of a partnership between a university and rural school district focusing specifically on how the project has helped to bridge the theory to practice divide and strengthen university‐district ties.

A design‐based research paradigm was utilized to investigate how creating more authentic and contextually relevant university‐school partnerships and embedding leadership preparation in the context of practice may help build stronger bridges between theory and practice.

The findings highlight that holistic approaches to leadership preparation, developing relationships, coordinating meaningful professional development, realism in design and experiences, and introspection are all ways that cohort members, as well as other district personnel, have been able to build stronger bridges between theory and practice.

The findings can assist universities and districts in developing and supporting partnerships that contribute to relevant, practical, and meaningful leadership preparation.

The authors' analysis highlights that aspiring leadership students who do not engage in meaningful and contextually relevant activities will not be able to bridge the theory to practice gap when working in the actual leadership field. Authentic experiences provide realistic views and understandings of the requirements, challenges, and rewards of educational leadership positions.

Conceptualizing schools as learning organizations provides a potential avenue to meet the pressing challenges of school improvement in the USA. District and school leaders play an important role in creating and sustaining the conditions for a learning organization, yet little is known about how leadership responds to learning-resistant contexts in their mission to improve schools. This study aims to examine the relationship between the district and school leadership and schools as learning organizations. The focus is on the conceptualization of schools as learning organizations and the challenges involved in creating and sustaining conditions and processes in which to improve schools.

This paper uses semi-structured interviews with district and school leaders in the state of Georgia and data from completed dimensions of a learning organization questionnaire (DLOQ) study to analyze how district and school leaders conceptualize or make sense of schools as learning organizations and overcome challenges associated with creating and sustaining a learning organization in learning-resistant contexts.

The analysis find that participants perceive their school or district as a learning organization when the structure allows others to work together to learn and grow for the benefit of students.

This study is unique in that it adds to a growing number of studies that examine schools as learning organizations using the DLOQ and sheds light on the nature of learning-resistant contexts.

Collective efficacy and teacher leadership, two constructs central to school reform, were examined in this quantitative study of three school districts. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between teacher perceptions of the extent of teacher leadership and the extent of collective efficacy. Research was guided by the following questions: Do teachers who perceive a strong sense of collective efficacy also perceive a greater extent of teacher leadership in their schools? Are there differences in perceptions of collective efficacy and the factors of teacher leadership, specifically, sharing expertise, shared leadership, supra-practitioner, and principal selection?

Data were collected utilizing two instruments, the Teacher Leadership Inventory (TLI) (Angelle and DeHart, 2010) and the Teacher Efficacy Belief Scale – Collective Form (Olivier, 2001). Descriptive statistics and ANOVA were run to examine mean differences by district in teacher collective efficacy and the extent of teacher leadership in the school (n=363). In addition, ANOVA were run to examine district differences in the four factors on the TLI. A one-way ANOVA contrasted the overall collective efficacy mean scores of Districts A, B, and C. Demographic data were also collected from participants.

Findings indicate a clear and strong relationship between collective efficacy and teacher leadership. District B was markedly stronger in teacher leadership and collective efficacy than the other two districts. The highest percentage of participants indicating they have a leadership role were from District B. Findings from this study also indicate that teachers perceive the informal aspects of teacher leadership as a greater indicator of collective efficacy. District B, which reported significantly higher collective efficacy than did District A or C, also reported a significantly lower extent of principal selected teacher leadership. Formal roles such as department heads and grade level chairs were not perceived as extensive indicators of teacher leadership as were teacher roles in collaboration or extra role behaviours.

This study took place in three small districts in a southeastern US state. Generalizability to larger school districts should be approached with caution. This study may be limited in that teacher leaders may have a greater tendency to complete a survey on teacher leadership than teachers who do not take on leadership roles.

This study provides support for developing shared leadership which can impact the collective beliefs of the faculty in a positive manner. Results from this study affirms those leaders who believe in the power of professional learning communities, shared decision making, and other indicators of teacher leadership. Success of teacher leaders depends, in large part, on the principal's philosophy of power sharing in the context in which they work. Teachers can be given the power to lead but they must also be willing to accept the roles this power brings.

While several studies have been conducted on collective efficacy in schools, most of these studies have been quantitative. Studies of teacher leadership have tended to focus on the formal roles of teacher leaders with a qualitative. Using quantitative methodology for collective efficacy and teacher leadership, this study approaches teacher leadership from an organizational perspective, examining the extent to which both informal and formal, or principal selected, teacher leadership exists across the school. The authors also argue that teacher leadership is a construct greater than administrative roles assigned to teachers but also includes informal leadership, primarily through their influence on organizational effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how US school leaders make sense of external mandates, and the way in which their understanding of state and district accountability policies affects their work. It is posited that school leaders’ responses to external accountability are likely to reflect a complex interaction between their perception of the accountability policies, the state and district contexts in which those policies are situated and their own leadership beliefs and practices.

The authors use both principal and teacher survey data to explore the question of how perceptions of external policy are associated with instructional leadership behaviors. Cases of seven principals are employed to flesh out the findings from the survey analysis.

It is concluded that external accountability policy may have a positive impact on instructional leadership – where they see those policies as aligned with their own values and preferences, and where they see their district leaders as supportive of school‐driven accountability initiatives. In these cases, school leaders internalize the external accountability policies and shape them to the particular needs that they see as priorities in their own school. Where one or the other of these factors is weak or missing, on the other hand, leaders demonstrate more negative attitudes to external accountability and weaker instructional leadership.

This analysis draws on a unique, large‐scale data base and uses a mixed methods approach to answer the question.

The purpose of this paper is to help the researchers sought to take a closer look at the technology challenges facing district superintendents in today’s leadership climate.

The authors chose semi-structured interviews as the data collection method. Through 45 min, one-on-one, semi-structured telephone interviews, the researchers were able to collect data about overcoming the challenges of being a modern technology-savvy superintendent.

Through the analysis, the authors identified four themes related to the challenges faced by these district leaders, including meeting the needs of stakeholders, supporting professional development, fostering mindset changes and addressing a fear of the unknown.

This study only relied on interviews and did not examine evidence from the field, such as site visits or artifact examination.

This study provides the field with insights into the role of the change-ready district leaders who foster lasting technology-infused transformation.

While challenges for any district leader wishing to make long-lasting change exist, there are district leaders today who embody second-order change leadership when overcoming the challenge of school technology leadership. These technology-savvy superintendents play an important role as whole-system change agents.

This study highlighted that there many district leaders today who embody second-order change leadership in helping move their districts forward.

Despite the rapid growth of executive coaching in the business world and nascent interest in education, there is no solid research base around how coaching impacts leadership. Following the development of analytical case studies of coach and school leader dyads, we use causal process analysis to trace the complex pathways in which coaches impact leader development. In this process, we attempt to move beyond lists of traits and activities of effective coaching practice to develop a theoretical framework layered with thick description of leadership coaching situated within the context of a high poverty mid-sized urban school district. Findings include insights into the structures and practices that promote strong trusting relationships between the coach and coachee, how this relationship is central to deepening the impact of the coach’s work, and how co-leading provides the means of both modeling and guiding leaders toward personal and school improvement.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of instructional leaders in promoting culturally responsive practice in ways that make schooling more inclusive and humanizing for minoritized students and communities.

The data pull from a six-month long case study of a mid-sized, Midwestern school district that was attempting to implement culturally responsive leadership practices. After axial coding, findings emerged from interview data and field notes.

Instructional leaders can play significant and useful roles in promoting culturally responsive teaching and pedagogy in schools. Districts can establish positions in which instructional leaders can work to strengthen the culturally responsive pedagogy of every teacher in a district.

This study has implications for both research and practice. Culturally responsive school leadership (CRSL) exists in multiple spaces and at various levels in a district. CRSL is not only a school-level function, but it can also be a district-level practice. Culturally responsive instructional leaders (in this case, not principals, but coaches) can have significant impact in promoting culturally relevant pedagogy.

This contribution moves beyond school leadership and examines how district leadership practices and decisions foster culturally relevant practices and the challenges in employing this equity work.