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Instructional leadership is a school leadership approach that places great emphasis on enhancing the quality of teaching and learning. This study explored the enabling factors of instructional leadership in subject coordinators.

The participants in this qualitative study were 24 subject coordinators in elementary schools in Israel. Data collection was based on semi-structured interviews, and data analysis included three stages: sorting, coding and categorizing.

The findings identified three significant enabling factors of instructional leadership in subject coordinators: pedagogical knowledge, relationship capability and support from the principal.

This study suggests that the enabling factors of instructional leadership in subject coordinators differ from those of instructional leadership in principals because of their different places in the school structure and explains the enablers of instructional leadership in subject coordinators as middle leaders.

Examines the complex and varied instructional leadership tasks of high school assistant principals and factors that enhance or restrict the enactment of these tasks. Research on the assistant principal is not extensive and that on the assistant principal as an instructional leader is virtually non‐existent. It has been one of the main purposes of this study to investigate the instructional leadership roles of the assistant principal and to expand the information to the field of educational administration and research. The findings from this study would be particularly beneficial to practising secondary school administrators in designing a better job description for their assistant principals or in making a decision as to whether their students might be better served by the addition of an assistant principal.

Instructional leadership is an educational leadership approach in which principals are regularly and actively involved in a wide range of activities aimed at improving teaching and learning. The current study sought to answer how the principal's role in promoting parental involvement is part of their instructional leadership responsibility.

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 24 Israeli principals. Data analysis was a three-step process: sorting, coding, and categorizing.

This study revealed that principals encouraged two types of parental involvement: academic-oriented, designed to support student learning and achievement, and non-academic-oriented, designed to accomplish other goals. From the instructional leadership perspective, principals should mainly prioritize academic-oriented parental involvement. Implications and further research are discussed.

The question of how the role of principals in encouraging parental involvement can become a part of principals' instructional leadership has not yet been explored. The present study narrows this gap in the existing research literature.

Previous studies found that principals must be involved in both instructional leadership and organizational management, yet they did not explain how the former supports the latter. To narrow this gap in the available research-based knowledge, the current study explored the contribution of organizational management to instructional leadership.

This study was qualitative in nature. The study participants were 28 principals of elementary schools in Israel. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews. Data analysis, based on coding, aimed to cluster the eight organizational management functions according to how each function supports instructional leadership.

The present study revealed that the eight functions of organizational management support four main aspects of instructional leadership: (1) Developing a positive learning climate; (2) Improving teaching quality; (3) Realizing the school instructional vision; and (4) Enabling instructional leadership.

The findings of this study reinforce the argument that although instructional leadership is the critical component of effective school leadership, it should be supported by other frameworks.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the findings from a small-scale, exploratory, study of principals’ instructional leadership practice in Malaysian primary schools. The dimensions and functions of instructional leadership, explicitly explored in this study, are those outlined in the Hallinger and Murphy’s (1985) model.

This study is part of a larger international, comparative research project that aims to identify the boundaries of the current knowledge base on instructional leadership practice and to develop a preliminary empirically based understanding of how principals conceive and enact their role as instructional leaders in Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. Using a qualitative research design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 primary school principals in Malaysia. The sample comprised principals from 14 Government National schools (SK), nine principals from Chinese schools (SJKC) and seven principals from Tamil schools (SJKT). The qualitative data were initially analysed inductively, and subsequently coded using ATLAS.ti to generate the findings and conclusions.

The findings showed that the Malaysian principals, who were interviewed, understood and could describe their responsibilities relating to improving instructional practice. In particular, they talked about the supervision of teachers and outlined various ways in which they actively monitored the quality of teaching and learning in their schools. These data revealed that some of the duties and activities associated with being a principal in Malaysia are particularly congruent with instructional leadership practices. In particular, the supervision of teaching and learning along with leading professional learning were strongly represented in the data.

This is a small-scale, exploratory study involving 30 principals.

There is a clear policy aspiration, outlined in the Malaysian Education Blueprint, that principals should be instructional leaders. The evidence shows that principals are enacting some of the functions associated with being an instructional leader but not others.

The findings from this study provide some new insights into the principals’ instructional leadership practices in Malaysia. They also provide a basis for further, in-depth exploration that can enhance the knowledge base about principals’ instructional leadership practices in Malaysia.

The purpose of this paper is to understand what the principal and principal supervisor each bring and contribute to their collaborative work that is consequential for the principal’s learning and development as an instructional leader.

Multiple case study methodology is used to gather data from 12 principal supervisor/principal partnerships over a 16 month period in one Mid-Atlantic school district. Data sources included interviews, observational data and documents provided by participants in the study.

In productive principal supervisor/principal partnerships, findings demonstrated that the principal supervisor and the principal each brought specific antecedent characteristics to their partnership and each made contributions to the development of a productive partnership during their collaborative work. When these partnership qualities were present, principal supervisors and principals engaged in joint work, leading to robust changes in principals’ instructional leadership practice.

This study examined the work of principals and principal supervisors in one large Mid-Atlantic school district.

Findings from this study have implications for districts’ assignments of principal supervisors, principal supervisor/principal selection and professional development of principal supervisors. Further, districts should create the conditions for principal supervisors and principals to establish learning-focused professional partnerships in three stages, culminating in the engagement of joint work for improvement to facilitate principals’ changes in instructional leadership practice.

Findings from this study illustrate the value of establishing a learning-focused partnership between principal supervisors and principals in three stages to facilitate robust stages in principals’ instructional leadership practice. A new conceptual framework displays the stages of partnership development that occur in productive principal/principal supervisor partnerships.

Decades of research on different leadership styles shows that effective school leadership is the degree of influence or synergy between teachers and principals around the core business of schools, instruction. While various styles, such as transformational, instructional, shared instructional, point to the similar measures of high organizational quality, the inconsistency in how these styles are defined and relate make it unclear how principals systematically improve schools. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study used the 1999-2000 schools and staffing survey, n=8,524 of US principals, since it includes a nationally representative sample of administrators who responded to a comprehensive set of leadership measures around a time of school restructuring reforms. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to identify different styles, and to measure the extent of their relationship. These factors were used to test a theory about why principals practice each of these styles to a different degree based on levels of shared instructional leadership.

Based on the theoretical framework, principals should have a similar high influence over resources, safety and facilities regardless of degree of shared instructional leadership since these tasks address foundational school needs. However, principal and teacher influence over these resources differed across levels of shared instructional leadership more than principal-directed tasks of facilitating a mission, supervising instruction and building community.

Differences in the practice of styles by shared instructional leadership did not fit changing, higher ordered needs as theorized instead seemed to vary by a hierarchy of control, the way in which principals shared influence with teachers.

For decades educators have espoused the importance of the principal as the instructional leader of the school. The purpose of this study was to identify the relationship between principal leadership behaviors and teacher instructional practice descriptors. This relationship was observed among schools participating in a systemic school improvement process. The study included eight elementary, eight middle, and eight high schools in the USA. Teachers in each school were surveyed on the principal’s instructional leadership abilities. Student and teacher engagement data were collected through school‐wide observations using the instructional practices inventory. Instructional leadership dimensions were found to correlate highly with instructional practice descriptors. This study confirms the significance of instructional leadership and provides specific insight into the nature of that leadership.

Over the past several decades, instructional leadership has gradually gained increasing currency as a key role of school principals throughout much of the world. This is also the case in Malaysia where educational research, policy and practice have brought the instructional leadership role of the principal front and center. The purpose of this paper is to assess the conceptual models, research methods, and foci of scholars in the study of principal instructional leadership in Malaysia over the past 30 years.

Systematic methods were used to identify all studies conducted in Malaysia that had used the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (PIMRS) (Hallinger, 1982/1990/2015) as the data collection instrument. This search yielded a database of 120 studies completed between 1989 and 2016 written in both English and Bahasa Malay. Common data were extracted from the 120 research reports, coded and entered into a MS Excel spreadsheet for analysis. Quantitative methods were employed to analyze modal trends and synthesize patterns in the data across the studies.

The search identified 120 PIMRS studies, 90 percent of which had been conducted since 2005. This represented a surprisingly large corpus of studies. Over 75 percent of the Malaysian studies of principal instructional leadership had been conducted as graduate (master and doctoral) theses, relatively few of which had achieved publication in journals. The authors’ analysis found that most studies had used lower order (i.e. bivariate, direct effects) conceptual models and relied heavily on descriptive and simple correlational statistical tests. The lack of consistent results within the database of studies was attributed largely to limitations in research design and quality.

The 120 PIMRS studies conducted in Malaysia comprise a surprisingly large corpus of research on principal instructional leadership. Indeed, the Malaysian corpus is second only to the USA in terms of the number of PIMRS studies of principal instructional leadership. Nonetheless, limitations in the research models and methods employed in these studies suggest a need for stronger methodological training before Malaysian scholars can achieve the goal of contributing useful knowledge to the local and global knowledge base. Specific recommendations are offered for strengthening the quality of research.

The recent expansion of higher education in Malaysia – like other developing societies – has yielded progress in the scope of research production. However, numerous challenges remain in transforming the potential for useful knowledge production from graduate research into reality.

This is the first review of research on principal leadership conducted in Malaysia. The review follows efforts by scholars to systematically identify the boundaries of knowledge in educational leadership and management within East Asian societies (e.g. China, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan and Hong Kong). Moreover, this is the first review of research that examines the use of the PIMRS in a single society.

The purpose of this study was to examine the integration of instructional and transformational leadership models of leadership in sustaining quality teaching and learning in schools. The study sought to establish how principals integrate instructional and transformational leadership in enhancing learner performance.

The study employed qualitative methods of collecting and analysing data. The principal sources of data were six face-to-face semi-structured interview questions with school principals from selected schools in rural South Africa. Qualitative evidence was collected from six principals selected through purposive sampling. The selection of participants was based on the criteria that there was evidence of employing instructional and transformational leadership.

Findings from the study provided evidence that instructional and transformational leadership approaches were used to change under performing schools. There was evidence of individualised consideration and principals supporting teachers through providing rewards and motivation. It was established that principals build a school culture that promotes successful academic improvement. The study showed that the integration of instructional and transformational models of leadership leads to a climate that promotes a culture of teaching and learning.

The study covered six schools in South Africa. Findings from the study have implications that principals are cornerstones to achieving quality teaching and learning in schools.

The study was conducted in schools that were seen to adopt instructional and transformational leadership. This study is among the most important studies that were conducted in South Africa on the role of leadership in enhancing a culture of teaching and learning.

The study has critical implications for policy making and influences on school leadership in general and the adoption of strategies, policies and models that can improve teaching and learning. The study highlights the importance of integrating leadership models.

This is an original study conducted in South Africa and data was conducted through face-to-face interviews to seek for opinions from participants in their original settings.