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Collective teacher efficacy (CTE) is a promising construct for understanding how schools can foster student achievement. Although much of the early research on CTE took place in North America, researchers from other parts of the world are now delving into this topic. The current study explores whether these powerful collective beliefs function similarly across diverse cultural and linguistic groups: Arab and Jewish teachers in Israel, and teachers in Turkey and the USA.

Participants included 4,216 teachers from Israel, Turkey and the USA, representing four cultures: Arab, Jewish, Turkish and American. We tested configural invariance using multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (AMOS) and alignment optimization (Mplus) to identify the groups in which specific parameters are noninvariant, and to compare the latent factor means.

Configural invariance showed adequate fit of the model structure across the four groups. Based on invariance tests, using the alignment optimization method, CTE scales held different meanings for specific items across the four cultures, where the USA and Arab cultures were the sources of these differences. Furthermore, in comparing the two-dimensional CTE belief scale across the four groups, latent means revealed the highest mean ranking for the USA and the lowest for Turkey.

This research makes a significant theoretical contribution by examining and comparing the concept of teachers' collective efficacy in multiple cultures. This comparison can also contribute to instructional teaching practices worldwide.

This conceptual paper explores a novel model explaining teachers' perceptions of their effective leader through the lens of implicit leadership theory (ILT), using the concepts of school principals' sense-making and cognitive complexity (CC).

The sense-making framework and CC theory were used to explain ILT, which focuses on individuals' perceptions of leaders' prototypical and anti-prototypical attributes.

The theoretical model suggests that school principals as sense-makers with high levels of CC will be perceived by teachers as effective in terms of leadership prototypes, whereas teachers' perceptions of principals with low levels of CC will be related to leadership anti-prototypes.

This paper suggests a model for a multidimensional understanding of the relationship between principals' sense-making and CC and their influence on teachers' perceptions of an effective leader.

Opening avenues for future research into employee perceptions of different leadership characteristics, this model emphasizes the cognitive aspects of school principals within implicit leadership theories. This theoretical model should be further examined empirically, and other types of CC, such as social and behavioral aspects, or affective complexity and self-complexity, should be considered.

The purpose of this paper is to test an innovative model for exploring the direct and indirect relationships between principals’ cognitive complexity (CC), schools’ absorptive capacity (ACAP), a teacher’s affective commitment and a teacher’s intent to leave.

Data were collected from a survey of 1,664 teachers at 107 Arab elementary schools, randomly selected from the database of the Israeli educational system. To test the proposed model, multilevel structural equation modeling was conducted.

The analysis confirmed that schools’ ACAP and a teacher’s affective commitment are prominent mediators between principals’ CC and a teacher’s intent to leave.

Understanding the factors that contribute to a teacher’s intent to leave could help school principals and policy makers retain effective teachers in today’s schools.

This study adds to the body of research directed at identifying school principals’ characteristics, as well as work-related factors, which may decrease a teacher’s intent to leave and are amenable to leadership intervention.

The study aims to test an innovative model that explores the direct and indirect relationships between principals' innovative behavior, climate of organizational learning and a teacher's intent to leave his or her school and take a voluntary absence.

Data were collected from a survey of 1,529 teachers from 107 Arab elementary schools randomly selected from the database of the Israeli educational system. To test the proposed multilevel model, we conducted multilevel structural equation modeling (ML-SEM).

The analysis confirmed that organizational learning climate is a prominent mediator between principals' innovative behavior and a teacher's intent to leave and his/her voluntary absence.

This research advances our understanding of leaders' innovative construct in an educational context and adds to the body of research directed at identifying administrative support and work-related factors that may negatively relate to a teacher's absenteeism or intent to leave and are amenable to leadership intervention.

Research suggests that cultural dimensions affect teachers' perceptions and behaviors. Based on Hofstede's cultural dimensions and organizational innovation climate literature, we examined the effects of the cultural values of collectivism, masculinity, power distance, uncertainty avoidance and short-term orientation on teachers' perceptions of school innovative climate and their affective commitment.

Arab and Jewish Israeli teachers studying toward their MA degree (N = 268) were randomly selected from three colleges to fill out questionnaires pertaining to these cultural values, innovative climate and their affective commitment.

Only the cultural value of collectivism positively affected perceptions of innovative climate. Negative relationships were found between the latter and uncertainty avoidance, as well as masculinity. Perception of innovative climate, in turn, related positively to teachers' affective commitment.

This study adds to the body of research directed at identifying antecedents to affective commitment as well as to studies examining cultural effects on innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine a model linking school principals’ strategic, interpersonal skills and teachers’ participation in decision making (PDM) to predict teachers’ skill flexibility (SF) during the implementation of educational reform.

From 113 randomly selected elementary schools in Israel that had undergone a reform called “New Horizon,” 1,482 teachers participated in the study. Data were analyzed through the multilevel structural equation modeling.

Results showed that only principals’ strategic skills lead to teachers’ PDM, which in turn predicts teachers’ SF. Furthermore, based on the upper echelon theory (Hambrick and Mason, 1984), principals’ strategic skills promoted teachers’ SF through teachers’ PDM.

This research enables expanding the theoretical upper echelon model, both in the context of leaders’ skills and in their relation to change outcomes.

Using of strategic skills will help principals influence teachers to participate in decision making, adapt to the reform and promote their ability to use skills according to changing needs.

The results of this research emphasize the strategic role of school principals as the leaders of organizational change and promoters of its outcomes.

This study explores a conceptual framework that addresses a school principal's self-regulated learning (SPSRL) as well as possible avenues for future conceptualization of, and research into this issue.

The conceptual framework of SPSRL is based on an extensive literature review of the research on student’s and teacher’s self-regulated learning models.

A novel conceptual and practical SPSRL framework for planning, performing, monitoring and self-reflection is elaborated.

This novel SPSRL conceptual framework provides school principals with a means to shape and develop processes, strategies and structures to monitor and evaluate their learning, enabling them to react effectively in uncertain and dynamic environments. This framework may open the way to future research into possible contributions of the SPSRL construct with other variables related to principal effectiveness. The suggested framework should be examined empirically in various sociocultural contexts, possibly substantiating its conceptual validity.

The SPSRL conceptual framework can improve school learning, which might connect the individual (the school principal) and organizational (teachers) learning levels.

Organizational learning (OL) has been conceptualized as a critical component in school change processes. Nevertheless, OL in the school context is still somewhat obscure and difficult to comprehend, thus it is rarely translated into operational structures and processes and later permanently sustained. The purpose of this study is to present the organizational learning mechanisms (OLMs) framework as an institutionalized arrangement for collecting, disseminating, analyzing, storing, retrieving and using information that is relevant to the performance of school systems.

First, the authors examine the previous research on OLMs as a conceptual framework for OL in schools; then the authors present the various validated measures of OLMs in schools; and finally, the authors suggest implications for principals, as well as future explorations of the issue.

While the literature on OL in schools acknowledges the mystification of the term and the difficulty in translating it into operative procedures in dynamic and complex contexts, OLMs, as an integration of structural and cultural frameworks, are conceptualized as scaffolding for the development of learning schools.

The OLMs’ (structural and cultural) framework of information processing may help schools develop and sustain learning communities aimed at fostering the continuous growth of students and faculty members alike.