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The issue of training and appointment of school administrators has consumed substantial attention from educational scholars for several decades. The literature has witnessed a growing amount of research effort in investigating and identifying the effective ways of training and appointing school principals. However, there are also political, social and cultural aspects to this endeavour, which potentially influences the practices pertaining to training and appointment of school principals. This chapter represents scholarly efforts to discuss issues on the training and appointment of school administrators in Turkey within its historical and political background. Thus, first, it focuses on the historical journey of the field of educational administration in Turkey. This journey has been categorised under three phases: The Ottoman Era, Early Years of Turkish Republic and the 1950s Onwards. Second, this chapter discusses school principalship in Turkey with a specific focus on political and legal dimensions. Finally, the chapter ends with an overall evaluation of the practices and policies pertaining to school administration curriculum in Turkey.

Literature on vice‐principals that aims to get a better understanding of their roles, role perceptions in school management, and their attitudes towards school management have revealed that the vice‐principalship is one of the least researched and least discussed. The purpose of this paper is to explore the facets of job satisfaction among Turkish vice‐principals.

Data were collected via a survey administered to 159 vice‐principals working for elementary schools in a city in the eastern part of Turkey and results were gathered by May 2010. A two‐part survey questionnaire was used to elicit responses from vice‐principals. The instrument consists of 31 items and asks respondents to indicate the extent of their agreement with each of the items on a four‐point Likert scale. In this study items were designed as a five‐point scale. There is a section to collect personal information. It was included together with an item asking for their career orientation.

The results confirmed that the job satisfaction of vice‐principals had four job facets: “professional commitment”, “sense of synchrony”, “sense of efficacy”, and “level of personal challenge”. The results showed that the facets of “sense of efficacy” and “sense of synchrony” were major sources of job satisfaction, and that the vice‐principals who had any educational administration degree felt themselves more effective and more synchronic. The vice‐principals who did not plan to be a principal felt themselves less effective when coping with work stress and balancing their work and personal lives.

The paper provides a better understanding of vice‐principals’ roles, role perceptions in school management, and their attitudes towards school management, and extends knowledge about the facets of job satisfaction among Turkish vice‐principals.

The role and effects of basic emotions in organisations have been an important issue of researchers. In this chapter, the authors aimed to see how school principals conceptualise the emotion of shame and to reveal the role of shame and its effects on the behaviours of school principals’ work in schools through data obtained from six principals working in state schools in Turkey. Results showed that principals conceptualise the feeling of shame in terms of moral base in the formation of interpersonal relations in school organisations. The study also showed that shame experienced by school principals has restorative effects on school leaders’ behaviours. The authors claimed that this effect of shame on school principals could be affected by the collectivist nature of the Turkish culture.

There is research evidence emerging to show that Chinese principal leadership appears to have a limited effect on the large-scale and deep school changes, but reasons for this have not been well explored. The purpose of this paper is to offer a conceptually framed explanation. By using China as an illustrative case, the authors propose using a macro-institutional framework to examine how principal leadership is mediated institutionally and why the leadership of change is especially difficult for Chinese principals.

In order to facilitate a contextualized understanding, the three institutional pillars developed by Scott's (2001) were used as a macro-institutional framework to explain difficulties confronting principal leadership in China when making deep and sustainable school changes from regulative, normative and cognitive perspectives.

The appeared change inertia and school changes on surface can partially be attributed to the cultural and institutional contexts of Chinese principal leadership. For principals, professional incentives and their change initiatives are institutionally and culturally constrained. Consequently, Chinese principals are left with very limited professional space to focus on making visible and endurable student-centered school changes.

This is a first macro-institutional application to address principal leadership of change from the context of China. The regulative, normative and cognitive aspects are analytically useful to differentiate and manifest the institutional complexity and intricacy which are mediating principal leadership impact on school changes. This also illuminates the exploration of context sensitive leadership research to capture context features and understand context-embedded logics.

The International Study of Principal Preparation (ISPP) informs principal preparation in relation to change in schools. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The three-stage ISPP study utilized a mixed-methodological approach. Data were gathered in Kenya, South Africa, and Alberta, Canada utilizing a survey instrument that contained items that focussed on: problematic leadership responsibilities, prior leadership development experiences, and perceived adequacy of leadership preparation experiences.

Leadership preparation in Kenya and South Africa was relatively unstructured, compared to structured university-based leadership preparation in Alberta. The assumption in Kenya and South Africa was that classroom teaching was adequate preparation, while Alberta respondents perceived teaching and leadership as discrete knowledge sets. Content of preparation experiences in Kenya and South Africa was mainly about teaching and learning, while in Alberta it was more about instructional leadership. Kenyan principals felt prepared for the principalship. Alberta principals stated that they were ill prepared to deal with day-to-day responsibilities. Senior South African principals felt they were not prepared for school improvement while younger principals felt they were adequately prepared.

Findings suggest that providers utilize cross-cultural partnerships that incorporate technology-mediated dialogue and action research. Cross-cultural learning should be considered co-learning. Preparation should include partnerships between western institutions and informal groups of principals in settings such as Kenya and South Africa. The study informs policymakers, researchers, and school leaders.

The cross-cultural comparisons in this paper inform understandings of the principalship in relation to organizational change in schools.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on distributed leadership in schools and explore the implications arising from this model of leadership for those in formal leadership positions. It considers how the role of the principal, in particular, is affected and changed as leadership is more widely shared within the organization.

The paper draws upon a wide range of research literature to explore the available empirical evidence about distributed leadership and organizational outcomes. The analysis focuses particularly on the evidence base concerning distributed leadership and student learning outcomes.

This analysis of the available evidence highlights the potential for distributed leadership to make a difference to organizational change and improvement. It suggests that principals need to relinquish power and authority; that there is an inevitable shift away from leadership as position to leadership as interaction and that principals will need to build a high degree of reciprocal trust to negotiate successfully the fault lines of formal and informal leadership practice.

The paper contributes a contemporary overview of literature about the impact of distributed leadership and analyses the implications for the role of the school principal.