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Schools in resource challenged communities require principal approaches that break patterns of low expectations and low student achievement. This study identifies Alabama’s “outlier” schools that have been consistently successful in attaining higher student outcomes than their neighboring schools despite their similar community conditions. Then, it describes the perspectives and practices of principals leading these outlier schools. The purpose of this paper is to discuss findings on principal leadership in five of Alabama's outlier schools.

In a sequential, explanatory mixed-methods design, the authors first use state administrative data to identify which Alabama schools had better results than their peers as evidenced by standardized testing between 2016 and 2020. Then, through semi-structured interviews, they examine the beliefs and approaches of five principals who are currently leading an outlier school. The frame of contextual leadership provides a deeper understanding of how these principals navigate successful schools in the midst of challenging community influences.

The evidence demonstrated that (1) community factors of low education, high unemployment, single-parent households and generational poverty are associated with considerably lower levels of student growth and achievement; (2) measured school and community factors do not explain student growth and achievement in these outlier schools; (3) outlier principals have a realistic view of their community’s challenges but focus on supporting students through a context sensitive, relational approach that emphasizes assets over limitations.

While research has attended to leadership in turnaround schools and effective schools, there is little literature on principals leading in positive outlier schools. This study contributes to the literature on school leadership in resource challenged contexts by identifying high performing, resource challenged schools and then showing the perspectives and practices of principals who lead in schools that have consistently achieved better than expected student outcomes. It extends the construct of “outlier leadership” in education and connects it to contextual leadership in schools.

The purpose of this research is to report on research that explores the use of structured self‐reflection to nurture moral consciousness as a means of enhancing the moral leadership capacity of existing school principals.

Given that this research focuses on each participant's subjective reality, the epistemology of pragmatic constructivism was chosen to guide this qualitative study supported by the theoretical perspective of symbolic interactionism. Furthermore, a case study was chosen as the appropriate orchestrating perspective and an opportunistic sample of six school principals formed the participants in this case study.

Data from this research support the view that the moral consciousness of each of the participating principals in this study was clearly enhanced by their experience of structured self‐reflection.

Due to the demanding nature of structured self‐reflection this approach takes a considerable amount of time. Also, as the reflection process is a very personal experience, the amount of time taken will vary noticeably amongst the participants. In addition, the ethical implications in facilitating structured self‐reflection are an extremely important implication. Participants must be made fully aware of the nature of such an experience so that not only can they voluntarily choose not to participate but also that they avoid reflecting on past experiences that engender sadness or anxiety within them should they choose to participate.

Given the strong moral expectations now demanded of contemporary leaders, which implies that this is not a natural trait, structured self‐reflection affords a clearly achievable means for nurturing a leader's moral consciousness as an essential step in their professional development in moral leadership.

The paper addresses the acknowledged blank spot in moral leadership research by providing a practical and effective way for positively influencing the leader's moral leadership development.

The purpose of this study is to examine student perspectives about the principal from an intentionalist perspective. The following claims are made: One, that student mentality appears as a knowledge construction and reified mode of consciousness out of which students perceive and interpret principals’ practices. This mental mode is composed of unconscious and conscious negative images and representations that are shared as general background knowledge to students’ collective intentionality about the principal. Two, that through metaphor we can discover this phenomenon in the reification of consciousness ‐ the objectification of the principal and self‐objectification of students in the relationship based on an information fetishism in the communicative form of gossip. And three, furthermore, that student mentality is supported and reproduced in the traditional hierarchical organization of schools, institutionalized routine practices of principals, and extended through social knowledge networks that students share with other members of the school. Provides a metaphorical analysis of this mental configuration, identifies the social networks and school contexts that contribute to and sustain its construction and suggests that leadership needs to become better informed and sensitively aware in their reflective practices of intentional leadership.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how socio-religious dynamics influence (and are influenced by) principals in Islamic schools.

This qualitative case study took place in Semarang, Indonesia. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews with school leaders along with school site observations. To frame the study, we drew from both Indonesian and international scholarship to understand extant perspectives on the context and on the ways that principals influence socio-religious thinking and practices in schools.

Findings suggested that principals' personal experiences and beliefs are central to the ways that socio-religious thinking and practices are manifest in their school. Principals practice more progressive or conservative leadership by influencing the degree to which the school is (a) an open or closed system, (b) inclusive or exclusive in their practices and (c) plural or unitary in their teaching. In making decisions along each of these continua, principals in Islamic schools “curate” a socio-religious educational environment.

This paper contributes to the literature on principals and socio-religious dynamics in schools by discovering specific continua of practice that collectively suggest a more conservative or progressive interpretation of Islam. As this area is understudied in educational leadership, the study makes a foundational empirical contribution, suggests theoretical constructs heretofore unexplored, and advances the notion of principal as curator of educational practice.

This chapter explores the concepts of awareness of self and others and their application to equity-oriented educational leadership. Drawing from the literature, the authors define key concepts and how these concepts affect the work of school leaders. The authors then present an analysis of the career development of three principals who each struggle with how they will define themselves in relation to the community in which they work. Collectively these cases illustrate the importance of attending to self-awareness and cultural knowledge in the preparation of equity-oriented educational leaders. All participants’ names have been changed to protect their identity.

This chapter presents a cross-cultural comparison across the Commonwealth, namely, Australia, Canada, and Kenya. The three cases explore these indigenous principals’ perceptions of leadership development and how effectively these experiences prepared them to meet the challenges within their complex school communities. The chapter presents a discussion of the historical educational legacies of imperial rule, leadership preparation opportunities that were available to aspiring and novice leaders, the challenges the principals encountered in their leadership role in the school and within their communities, and these leaders’ beliefs and attitudes toward leadership. A final synthesis is presented, which identifies a number of commonalities in leadership approaches across these very different cultural contexts: the school communities were endeavoring to rediscover their cultural history, heritage, and beliefs and were frequently developing positive relationships with elders and others who held, and were willing to pass on, the historical and cultural knowledge and expertise. The leaders themselves held strong beliefs about the importance of cultural identity in order to forge new and contemporary pathways to success for their students. They all had a heightened ethic of care ethos that extended beyond the confines of the school building and office hours. These leaders adopted entrepreneurial leadership approaches to think and act innovatively rather than simply managing schools and were dedicated to promoting educational success for all students within their care. Leadership development implications included the need for formal, informal, and experiential experiences, as well as, for the inclusion of specific knowledge and skills that would enable leaders to effectively and sensitively lead within predominantly indigenous school communities.

This research seeks to explore the inevitable internal struggle experienced by school leaders when making ethically‐informed judgments. The study acquired principals' intimate reflections about professional decision making in response to personal versus organizational and/or professional value discrepancy as identified in the ethic of the profession and its model for promoting students' best interests.

A modified phenomenological research method, appropriate for an educational research context, was used to capture administrators' perspectives about moral practice and decision‐making experiences. The primary data collection strategy was participant interviews by means of purposeful sampling.

A clash between personal beliefs and values and organizational/professional expectations was very real for participants. The experience was generally frequent, but varied among principals. The struggle can be characterized as a phenomenon of intrapersonal moral discord experienced as part of the process of deciding ethically when faced with difficult moral choices.

The study contributes to the understanding of moral conflict in school leadership as an intrapersonal moral phenomenon, and how the conflict is resolved in practice, while providing insights into a more recently defined and theorized professional ethic for educational leadership. The study offers empirically derived knowledge for theory building and offers conceptual clarification of the moral leadership construct.

Moral judgment was complicated and contextually defined for participants. Administrators reported various ways of dealing with the nuances of personal and organizational value incongruity in order to engage in ethical decision making, including relying on, in some instances, a fundamental professional injunction.