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The present study aimed to predict department heads' wisdom in Tehran universities based on their metacognitive beliefs and gender.

The study employed a nonexperimental design. The statistical population consisted of all male and female heads of departments in Tehran universities, among whom 150 participants were selected using Morgan's table and via the random sampling method. The research instruments were the Meta-Cognitive Beliefs Questionnaire (Wells, 1997) and the Wisdom Scale (Schmit et al., 2012). The data were analyzed using multiple regression analysis and independent-samples t-test.

The total scores of male and female principals were significantly different in the two scales and some of their subscales. The metacognitive beliefs scale and its components were good and significant predictors of the principals' wisdom. Cognitive self-awareness was the best positive predictor, and positive beliefs about worries were the best negative predictor for their wisdom.

Wise department heads are usually more empathetic, and this makes their decisions for the well-being and satisfaction of their colleagues as well as the students. Therefore, when faculty members are more satisfied and relaxed, they can do their teaching better and establish more effective relationships with their students. They should also be more motivated to do scientific research studies. Because wise managers are happier and more relaxed, they can focus more on solving educational problems in their department, and this, in turn, improves the educational quality of their department. The higher the quality of the university educational system, the less stress and the more mental health the students will have. Students in such educational environments are more focused on learning courses and gain better expertise. These students will provide more specialized services to the community in the future.

Wisdom is associated with better contributing to a happy life, and as a result, we have a healthier and more productive society.

It can be concluded that positive metacognitive knowledge, such as cognitive self-awareness via affecting the principals' mental awareness and regulating thoughts, and negative metacognitive experiences, such as worrying about the future, low meta memory and sensitive-obsessive control negatively affecting their affective and cognitive states, affect the principals' decisions and behaviors in educational settings. According to the results of this research, university presidents can hold workshops to increases metacognitive skills to their administrators and teachers. Also, the results of the present study can help the heads of university departments to establish more constructive and effective relationships with the faculty members and students by strengthening their metacognitive skills.

In Germany, principals’ working environments are data-rich for school improvement purposes in a rather low-stakes test-regime. An effective use of externally as well as internally generated data, also known as data wise leadership, is considered to be a key competence of successful principals. The purpose of this paper is to describe data use practices in German schools, especially focussing on schools facing challenging circumstances.

The paper draws on findings from two projects funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. A standardized questionnaire study was conducted to measure the usage of available data for school improvement quantitatively. The perceived usefulness, the reflection upon, and the use of information sources by principals were measured. Moreover, semi-structured interviews with school leaders from schools in deprived areas were conducted, transcribed and analyzed by means of qualitative content analysis.

The results showed that internal sources of information were used frequently while (international) student assessment, statewide comparative tests, and school inspections proved to be of relatively little use for the principals’ professional practice. Moreover, there was a discrepancy between the perceived usefulness of information sources and the actual use of the data.

In contrast to the USA, for example, research on educational leadership and principals’ data use – particularly at schools in challenging circumstances – is rather limited in Germany. This paper seeks to take up this desideratum.

Classifying moving objects in video sequences has been extensively studied, yet it is still an ongoing problem. In this paper, we propose to solve moving objects classification problem via an extended version of two-dimensional principal component analysis (2DPCA), named as category-wise 2DPCA (CW2DPCA). A key component of the CW2DPCA is to independently construct optimal projection matrices from object-specific training datasets and produce category-wise feature spaces, wherein each feature space uniquely captures the invariant characteristics of the underlying intra-category samples. Consequently, on one hand, CW2DPCA enables early separation among the different object categories and, on the other hand, extracts effective discriminative features for representing both training datasets and test objects samples in the classification model, which is a nearest neighbor classifier. For ease of exposition, we consider human/vehicle classification, although the proposed CW2DPCA-based classification framework can be easily generalized to handle multiple objects classification. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of CW2DPCA features in discriminating between humans and vehicles in two publicly available video datasets.

In this study the authors use longitudinal data from a randomized experiment to investigate the impact of a feedback and coaching intervention on principals’ leadership behaviors. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In total, 52 elementary and middle school principals (26 receiving teacher feedback, 26 receiving feedback and coaching) were randomized into a year-long feedback and coaching study. Measures of leadership actions were collected from principals and teachers during the fall, winter, and spring. The authors use instrumental variables approach to examine the impact of treatment.

Behavioral change may take longer than is presented in this study, which implies that these findings represent a lower-bound. As an intervention leadership coaching is costly and this research does not explore alternatives to help principals make feedback data actionable.

It is unlikely that providing school leaders with feedback alone will induce behavioral change. Other systems and supports – such as leadership coaching – are needed to help principals make sense of feedback data and translate data into actionable behaviors.

Few leadership studies use exogenous variation in treatment conditions to examine leadership outcomes. This study builds upon our causal knowledge of leadership behaviors and presents a viable intervention to improve school leadership.

This study examines the deployment of excellent retired principals (ERPs) as system leaders to facilitate systemic professional capital building in Taipei City, Taiwan. It explores the unique approach of the Taipei City government and contributions of ERPs in driving educational reforms.

This study combines the perspectives of system leadership and professional capital, and analyzes the roles and practices of ERPs in promoting professional capital in Taipei's local education system. It draws on qualitative data gathered through interviews and document analyses.

The findings reveal that the Taipei City government adopted a systemic approach by appointing designated retired principals as system leaders. The findings are categorized into three themes. ERPs serve as systemic capacity-builders, enhancing leadership across the local education system; ERPs act as collaborators and bridge-builders, fostering joint work and a collective sense of professional responsibility; and ERPs function as facilitators and advisors, cultivating decisional capital by providing informed decision-making support based on their experiences and wisdom. These roles challenge the notion of late-career decline, highlight the ongoing contributions of ERPs to the education system, and extend professional capital beyond teacher development, influencing system-wide collective capacity-building, collective responsibility, and policy enactments.

This study contributes to understanding how exceptional retired principals can drive systemic reform and build systemic professional capital. It expands previous research by highlighting the unique Chinese cultural context in Taipei City and continued contributions of retired principals to the education system.

We have just marked the quincentennial anniversary of Niccolo Machiavelli, one of the greatest, if not the greatest of political theorists. His views and observations on the art of political leadership have direct relevance to the problems of democratic government today and his writings are being read with renewed interest. In this article the writer (who may or may not have his tongue in his cheek) sets forth a direct interpretation of Machiavellian philosophy as it may be applied to the “real life” political role of the school principal. Principals and other practising school administrators will have strong reactions to the position set forth in this article which was written expressly for this purpose. The article has been used by the Author for several years in his graduate course at the University of Alberta, “The Social and Political Environment of Educational Administration.”

The current reform movement in education has significant implications for the development of future models of site‐level leadership. Much of the recent attention in the educational administration literature about necessary leadership qualities and the preparation of effective school principals, however, does not consider the relationship of such personal qualities of the leader to other contextual variables and socio‐political processes that may also influence principal behaviour. Current theoretical orientations and research on the principal as leader and suggestions for future research which will facilitate the preparation of effective school administrators are examined. The article rests on the belief that given the current demands for implementing school‐level reforms, perhaps too much in terms of leadership is being ascribed to one individual role.

Leadership coaching is an increasingly popular development tool for school principals. However, specific coaching behaviors are rarely conceptualized or examined in prior research. This study presents a coaching behavior framework and then analyzes actual coaching conversations between principals and coaches to illustrate how specific coaching behaviors create opportunities for principals to reflect and think critically about their leadership.

Building on theories of interpersonal learning, the authors develop a framework of coaching behaviors to distinguish coaching inquiries and assertions that facilitate critique and reflection and, therefore, activate opportunities for learning. The authors use this framework to code transcripts of 55 principal coaching sessions. The authors analyze the prevalence of certain coaching behaviors and then examine qualitative patterns in how the use of certain behaviors shapes the nature of coaching conversations.

Only about one-third of coded coaching behaviors in the analytic sample are categorized as coaching inquiries and assertions that activate opportunities for learning. In the qualitative comparisons of extracts from coaching conversations, the authors find coaches' use of these behaviors produced richer, more meaningful dialogue.

Unlike much of the past research on leadership coaching, this analysis examines what happens in conversations between coaches and principals. This framework could be applied to a broad range of coaching programs intended to promote professional learning.

Fibre-reinforced additive manufacturing (FRAM) with short and continuous fibres yields light and stiff parts and thus increasing industry acceptance. High material anisotropy and specific manufacturing constraints shift the focus towards design for AM (DfAM), particularly on toolpath strategies. Assessing the design-property-processing relations of infill patterns is fundamental to establishing design guidelines for FRAM.

Subject to the DfAM factors performance, economy and manufacturability, the efficacy of two conventional infill patterns (grid and concentric) was compared with two custom strategies derived from the medial axis transformation (MAT) and guided by the principal stresses (MPS). The recorded stiffness and strength, the required CPU and print time, and the degree of path undulation and effective fibre utilisation (minimum printable fibre length) associated with each pattern, served as assessment indices for different case studies. Moreover, the influence of material anisotropy was examined, and a stiffness-alignment index was introduced to predict a pattern’s performance.

The highest stiffnesses and strengths were recorded for the MPS infill, emphasising the need for tailoring print paths rather than using fixed patterns. In contrast to the grid infill, the concentric infill offered short print times and reasonable utilisation of continuous fibres. The MAT-based infill yielded an excellent compromise between the three DfAM factors and experimentally resulted in the best performance.

This constitutes the first comprehensive investigation into infill patterns under DfAM consideration for FRAM, facilitating design and processing choices.