Search results

The persisting tension over the relative importance of theory and practice creates a crevasse between scholars and practitioners. The purpose here is to problematize divisions between cultural norms found among scholars and practitioners.

Both authors, higher education scholars, experienced temporary assignments as public school leaders and reflect on their experiences moving back and forth between school leadership practice and academia. This qualitative and autobiographical work draws on a combination of hermeneutics in the dominant educational leadership literature and the co‐authors' experiences recorded in journals, saved memos and other school data records. These data sets and continuing access to their professional and scholarly colleagues provided the basis for analyses.

Draws on three main points: curricular balance; faculty composition; and research, and, while it strongly encourages faculty to seek ways to connect or reconnect with the field, opines that, if the field's curriculum for development and preparation with research is balanced, then faculty will connect with practice.

Research carried out in the program is of high quality, driven by practice, and useful to practitioners and/or policy makers.

In this paper, the authors present a case study of successful school leadership at County Line Middle School. The purpose of the paper is to identify how particular leadership practices and beliefs were adapted to increase student achievement in this rural, high-poverty school in the southeastern USA.

After purposefully selecting this school, the authors adapted interview protocols, questionnaires, and analysis frameworks from the International Successful School Principalship Project to develop a multi-perspective case study of principal leadership practices at the school.

The findings illustrate the practices which led to students at this school, previously the lowest-performing in the district, achieving significantly higher on state standardized tests, getting along “like a family,” and regularly participating in service learning activities and charity events. A particularly interesting finding was how the principal confronted the school's negative self-image and adapted common leadership practices to implement a school-wide reform that suited its unique context.

While the findings of the study explicate the specific ways the principal adapted leadership strategies to enhance student learning, this study also highlights the need to understand how principals become familiar with their community's needs, cultures, norms, and values, and exercise leadership in accordance with them.

The case offers an example of the need for context-responsive leadership in schools. In particular, it illustrates how this principal enacted leadership strategies that successfully negotiated what Woods (2006) referred to as the changing politics of the rural. To realize this success, the principal utilized his understanding of this low income, rural community to guide his leadership practices. Critically, part of this understanding included the ways the community was connected to and isolated from dominant sub-urban and urban societies, and how to build enthusiasm and capacity through appeals to local values.

While it is widely acknowledged that school leaders need to consider their school and community contexts when making leadership decisions, less research has focussed on understanding how this can be achieved. This case provides rich examples of how this was accomplished in a rural, high-poverty middle school.

In this paper, the authors recap the history and evolution of ISSPP research in the USA with research teams that grew from one location in 2002 to seven teams at present. The authors also examine the unique context of public education in America by describing its governance, key policies and funding as well as increasing student diversity due to changing internal student demographics and global population migrations. In particular, the authors describe how decentralization in American public education that has led to long-standing systemic inequities in school resource allocations and subsequently to marked gaps in performance outcomes for children from poor communities, especially for those of color. These existing inequities were the reason the USA research team was the only national ISSPP team from the original network of eight countries that choose to study exclusively leadership in challenging, high needs schools that performed beyond expectations.

The authors describe the common multi-case case study methodology (Merriam, 1988) and interview protocols employed in order to gather multiple perspectives on school success in high-needs communities and the principal's contribution to that success. Leithwood and Riehl's (2005) framework of core leadership practices for successful school leadership was used to analyze our data across all cases.

The authors present key findings from cases across the USA and synthesize common trends across these findings.

The authors conclude the paper with a discussion of their overarching impressions from almost two decades of study, the importance of national and local context in examining school leadership and, lastly, suggestions for future research.

This article contributes to findings from the longest and largest international network on successful leadership.