Search results

The current study seeks to explore the links between principal self-efficacy, openness to change, well-being, and transformational leadership. Specifically, we tested a mediated-effects model where principal self-efficacy and openness to change were treated as independent variables, well-being as mediator, and transformational leadership as dependent variable.

Survey data were collected from 351 principals employed in Turkish schools and analysed using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling.

The results suggested the direct empirical relationship of principal self-efficacy and openness to change with transformational leadership, and indirect through professional well-being.

Our study enriched our understanding of school leadership by elucidating the potential mechanisms that underpin the implementation of transformational leadership practices.

School leaders can significantly influence the conditions that affect teacher retention. Yet, leaders in rural and high-poverty schools often face limited opportunities to develop their abilities to enhance these conditions. In this case study, we examine how participating in a professional community supported school leaders' efforts to increase teacher retention and student learning outcomes.

We used case study methodology to study 14 leaders from rural, high-poverty or underperforming schools with greater-than-average levels of teacher turnover. The leaders were participating in a three-year research-practice partnership intended to assist them in using improvement science to address problems of practice related to teacher retention and student learning outcomes in their schools. We collected and analyzed data from interviews, exit surveys, artifacts and participant observations over a one-year period.

Participating in this professional community helped the leaders create the conditions for increased teacher retention and student learning outcomes by providing them with opportunities to collaborate with their peers, receive leadership coaching, exchange ideas and learn in a safe space.

These findings confirm and extend extant school leadership development research. A particularly interesting finding was the role of the professional community in reducing the leaders' feelings of isolation while providing them a safe space to learn. The findings also illustrate how universities and school districts can partner to provide professional learning opportunities that enhance school leaders' professional knowledge, leadership practices and well-being.

Guided by Habermas’s three cognitive interests, this paper reviews the studies on school leaders’ emotional labor. It seeks to provide a typology of how researchers inquire about school leaders’ emotional labor by focusing on different understandings, topics and characteristics.

This is a narrative review with 38 studies finally selected for analysis. Guided by Habermas’s three cognitive interests, all the studies were examined carefully and were found to fall into different clusters of understanding of school leaders’ emotional labor.

The review revealed three understandings of school leaders’ emotional labor, namely instrumental understanding, practical understanding and emancipatory understanding. The instrumental understanding treats school leaders’ emotional labor as a tool to effectively control the schools; the practical understanding regards emotional labor as a way to build and maintain relationships and as the process of meaning-making; the emancipatory understanding perceives emotional labor as a site for school leaders’ reflection and action for achieving a more just and self-determined leadership.

This review contributes to the growing literature on school leadership and emotional labor by providing a theory-guided typology and synthesis of the existing understanding of school leaders’ emotional labor, which lays a knowledge base and points out directions for future scholarly inquiries. It also provides practical suggestions for educational policy, school leaders’ practice and leadership training.

Since teaching practice is the most important within-school determinant of student learning outcomes, a deepened understanding of how and why school leadership contributes to effective teaching is needed. This article aimed to systematically review the knowledge that has been accumulated about the indirect relations between school leadership and instructional practices.

The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guided the selection of relevant articles from the databases Scopus and Google Scholar. Twenty-six published works met the eligibility criteria and were included in the narrative synthesis and content analysis.

The most frequently measured mediators of the effects of school leadership on teaching practice were teacher collaboration, professional learning and teacher self-efficacy. Most studies simultaneously modeled multiple mediated pathways from school leadership to teaching practice. However, only a few analyzed studies used time lags when examining relationships between constructs.

This is the first study to systematically review knowledge on pathways through which school leadership is related to classroom instruction. Thus, this review provides a comprehensive understanding of processes through which school leadership achieves its effects on instructional practices.

This study explores factors that influence the initiation of leadership coaching relationships that include externally employed coaches and school administrators.

This qualitative research study includes semi-structured interviews, observations and documents collected across three academic years within the context of a university-based leadership coaching program. Participants included six leadership coaches and six school administrators who participated in the program.

Qualitative analysis indicates that gender and race, prior professional experience, pre-existing professional relationships and the complexity of the district’s organizational structure influence the initiation of the coaching relationship.

Confidentiality restrictions imposed by the program limit opportunities for member checking and other forms of triangulation. Additional data collection using more expansive research methods would help address this limitation.

This study contributes to the sparse literature about leadership coaching with school administrators by describing how different factors influence initiation coaching relationships.

Resilience and purpose have been associated with work well-being. However, limited empirical evidence exists on the liaison between these constructs and Portuguese school leaders' psychological and physical distress and work well-being. This study explored the relationships between resilience, purpose, and well-being in 921 teachers who perform leadership roles in Portuguese schools.

Participants filled out an online self-report questionnaire, providing information on sociodemographic variables. Additionally, they responded to four questionnaires evaluating purpose (PURP), resilience (RES), psychological distress (PsyD), physical distress (PhyD), and work well-being (WWB). Data were analysed through structural equation modelling and mediation analysis.

The findings show that psychological and physical distress negatively predict school leadership work well-being, whereas resilience and purpose positively predict work well-being. The mediating analysis revealed one indirect mediation effect: resilience buffered the psychological distress and work well-being relationship.

The main findings align with existing literature and uniquely contribute to understanding the interplay between resilience, purpose, psychological and physical distress, and work well-being. This study provides empirical support for a conceptual model claiming that purpose and resilience promote school leaders' work well-being.

As school districts evolve in their ability to actively support schools and educators, they must simultaneously contend with external policies that create additional demands on time and resources. This includes accountability policies aimed at increasing district and school capacity. This study uses Malen and Rice’s (2004) dual dimensions of capacity building to look at how district and charter leaders responded to the demands of Michigan’s Partnership Model, a district-based approach to school turnaround, focusing on how they tried to build capacity in response to the policy and whether and why these capacity building approaches were perceived as productive.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22 out of 29 Partnership leaders between October 2019 to March 2020 in the second year of policy implementation. Data were analyzed using a combination of index-coding and thematic analysis.

Most leaders perceived the resources associated with the reform as useful, but the productivity of capacity building efforts was limited because some resources were not adequately matched to what they perceived as a core problem: the recruitment and retention of teachers. Engagement with the reform resulted in building informational and social capital because it fostered collaboration and continuous improvement processes, but leaders perceived technical partnerships as more productive than community partnerships.

Turnaround reforms like the Partnership Model that increase resources for districts and schools likely offer a better chance at success than those that simply focus on accountability threats without accompanying support because they give leaders new opportunities to coordinate and align resources, processes and ideas.

The problem of introducing novice teachers into the profession and professional development of future teachers is urgent due to the social significance of the professionalism factor in Russian continuous teacher education. Special attention on the part of the country's government, as well as local authorities, is paid to projects related to the effective adjustment of novice teachers in the professional pedagogical environment. This process implies joint work of school, university, ministry and department leaders and staff.

The leading mechanisms for the professional development of novice teachers are modernisation of initial teacher education and reflexive management technologies in schools. The creation of qualitatively new content and conditions of scientific and methodological support for novice teachers requires the development of network and productive innovations in the education system. It also implies the development of organisational models for the professional development of novice teachers, implemented at different levels.

Scholars have been sounding the alarm of novice teacher turnover crises for decades. South Africa is soon to be facing an educational catastrophe because of a shortage of experienced teachers. Globally and in South Africa, novice teacher attrition is high, and teachers entering the classroom often described feeling isolated and unsupported.

This qualitative study was underpinned by an interpretative phenomenology approach. The author reviewed the literature and newly emerged findings of novice teacher mentoring support needs through the theoretical lens of the Ubuntu philosophy “I am because we are” which emphasises the importance of interconnectedness and community. Using semi-structured interviews, this study aimed to explore novice teacher mentoring needs from an Ubuntu perspective.

Novice teachers report feeling overwhelmed with the complexities of teaching in their early careers and express the desire to be formally mentored by a knowledgeable “elder” teacher. This paper argues that a competent mentor who values Ubuntu in their mentoring could offer collaboration, respect, compassion and support to novices that may keep them in the profession. This paper further explores the potential benefit of a prescribed Ubuntu-orientated mentoring programme to formalise mentoring for novices. In addition, it explores the school micro-community from the Ubuntu principles to support novices.

While there is a plethora of studies about mentoring novice teachers, literature from an Africanised Ubuntu perspective is scarce. Perhaps the time has come to find African solutions to our African problems.

This study explores how one novice teacher navigated his first-year teaching sixth-grade social studies.

One-sixth grade novice teacher was observed during his unit on the Islamic Empire. The teacher was interviewed before the unit began to understand his approach to combating Islamophobia and interviewed again after the unit so he could reflect on the unit and discuss if he believed he had accomplished his original goal. Classroom artifacts (handouts, slide decks, etc.) were collected.

The findings highlight the various forces that impacted the decisions the teacher made in the classroom. Lack of support from administration and various colleagues left the teacher feeling overwhelmed and unable to accomplish his goals. While the teacher started the unit with a clear purpose for teaching against Islamophobia, he ultimately taught a unit where students memorized discrete pieces of information.

This study adds to previous research on the need for providing administrative support for novice teachers to be able to teach in ambitious ways by highlighting the numerous shortcomings.