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The primary purpose is to present empirical measures of variables relating to practices engaged in by site‐based teams, and then to use these variables to test a model predicting significant outcomes of site‐based decision making. The practice variables of site‐based management (SBM) teams are essential in promoting research within a distributed leadership framework.

A path model is computed to test the relationships between factors relating to the support received by site‐based teams; site team communication and decision‐making practice, and perceived outcomes of SBM. Measures are based on survey data collected from 367 team members in 50 schools from fifteen school districts in a northeastern state in the US.

Results show that different factors relating to the support provided to site‐based teams and practices employed by these teams emerge as statistically significant predictors of various outcomes. Results suggest that the resources provided to support site teams, e.g. the devolution of decision‐making power, results in enhanced stakeholder influence, but whether this influence results in better decisions or improvement in teaching and learning depends on the communication and decision‐making practices site teams employ within a distributed leadership framework.

This study sought to identify site team decision making and communication processes that reflect how site teams conduct their work, defining how members of site teams perceive the “rules of the game.” In doing so, it offers a new and different perspective on how such processes impact outcomes associated with shared decision‐making processes, and thus a better understanding of the complex dynamics of school‐site decision making and the distribution of leadership in schools.

This case study focuses on the perceptions of frontline educators, including social workers and settlement workers, across all levels of two Canadian school boards in Central and Southwest Ontario. These jurisdictions attracted significant numbers of Syrian newcomers since January, 2016, both those sponsored publicly and privately, but also directly among Syrians themselves who had heard about the ‘great reputations’ of these school boards. The case study describes how educators responded innovatively – on the fly – to meet new needs, through policies, structures, staffing, partnerships and curricular changes. We documented educators’ stories, hopefully capturing the optimism as well as the stress created by welcoming the newcomers. Our findings and implications remain tentative as in ‘too soon to tell’, thus the expressions of dilemmas in leadership and policy as we witnessed successes towards Syrian integration into schools, communities and Canadian society.

This book provides a deeper understanding of what it means to promote social justice and equity work in schools and communities around the world. Throughout this book, narratives describe how authors continue to reshape the agenda for educational reform. They remind us of the significance meaningful relationships play in promoting and sustaining reform efforts that address the injustices vulnerable populations face in school communities. Their voices represent the need for engaging with obstacles and barriers and a resistant world through a web of relationships, an intersubjective reality (see Ayers, 1996). As authors engaged in thinking about addressing injustices, they describe how their thoughts transformed into actions moving beyond, breaking through institutional structures, attempting to rebuild and make sense of their own situations (see Dewey, 1938).

This chapter presents facets of the current challenges relating to policy, leadership and praxis, as perceived by school principals and both Turkish and Syrian teachers working with refugee and Turkish students in Syrian refugee schools in Ankara. Adopting a qualitative methodology, we explore the experiences, challenges and strategies of the educators in these new school types. In order to investigate this this phenomenon, we adopted the post-migration ecology framework proposed by Anderson et al. (2004) and the conceptualization of five dimensions of multicultural education (content integration, knowledge construction process, prejudice reduction, equity pedagogy and empowering the culture and organization of the school) developed by Banks and Banks (1995). The relevant policy, despite its focus on full integration, is still developing and lack clear technical guidelines for specific issues at school level. The data revealed three themes: perceptions towards the refugees, policy into practice in the schools and the consequent challenges, strategies and needs. Although humanistic ideals are manifest in all the participants’ experience with the new phenomena of refugee education, their needs are multifaceted. They are motivated by a pedagogy of compassion, containment and humanistic universal commitment. The principals employ a style of encouraging social justice and moral leadership, whereas the teachers practise the multicultural pedagogy dimensions with trial and error. Incorporation of Syrian educators and their experience and assistance to the Turkish school staff is also discussed.

Using sociolinguistic methods and ethnography, looks at the continuous and in process relationship between everyday talk and school leadership. Through close discourse analysis of three distinct situations, demonstrates how administrative talk shapes and is shaped by a school’s contexts, creating constant possibilities for educational leaders. Discusses implications for understanding how and why moral leadership is tenuous and problematic using Dewey’s notion of mortality as the nurturing of educational ideas: that is, in practice, moral leadership is not always reflexive or progressive.