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The purpose of this paper is to explore the best practices of school leaders, teachers, pupils, parents and the community in selected transformed schools in Selangor, Malaysia.

This qualitative multiple-case study explores the best practices in two selected transformed schools through in-depth interviews, observations and document reviews. The data were collected from 2 school heads, 6 teachers with administrative responsibilities and 20 teachers. The themes were elucidated via open, axial and selective coding based on the grounded theory approach.

The analysis identified various best practices exhibited by school leaders, teachers, pupils, parents and the community. Four themes were found to be common as best practices in both selected schools, which were adaptive and multi-dimensional leadership, winning-the-hearts, extensive use of Information and Communication Technology in school operations, and a culture of acquiring and sharing professional knowledge. The unique theme for School A was the emphasis on the social, emotional and ethical well-being of the students, while extensive parental involvement and support was a unique theme identified in School B.

The findings of this paper may be used as guidance tool for policy makers and educational planners regarding school transformation in Malaysia, and as well as in other countries. Such practices can be learned, adapted and replicated by other schools in order to transform. The findings also have direct implications to current teachers, school leaders, parents and the community.

This study contributes to the growing body of research on the best practices and school transformation in Malaysian transformed schools. There is a decisive need to explore the best practices of transformed schools in Malaysia based on their own cultural and contextual needs in order to help schools that aspire for transformation.

This paper aims to present the progress of the implementation of sustainability in business schools in line with the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) and its principles of responsible management education.

By analyzing the content of the Sharing of Information on Progress reports from PRME signatories, this study identified significant developments in the strategies business school use to implement sustainability. However, it seems that a framework that business schools can apply to accomplish that goal is still lacking. This paper proposes a framework that addresses four components of the integration process and stresses the important role of stakeholders. The authors discuss the results from 2021 in comparison to the results of a previous analysis of the first 100 signatories from 2010 and analyze the findings in relation to the developed framework.

This study shows that business schools have improved their sustainability engagement in many areas (e.g. education offerings and teaching methods, campus practices and engaging stakeholders). However, less attention has been paid to other aspects, such as reviewing and assessing, capability development or communication, which could slow the transformation process. The authors discuss further implications of the findings for enhancing the PRME signatories’ ability to implement the underrecognized aspects.

While the analysis focuses on the status and progress of the integration of PRME within business schools during the past decade, the framework may enable higher education institutions to analyze their potential to implement change and plan future transformation strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a formative intervention project that was developed for the Municipal Secretariat of Education in São Paulo, Brazil for the broad development of all levels of educational management (teacher educators, coordinators, principals, teachers and students). Thus, the creative chain of activities is a key theoretical framework for promoting critical collaboration in order to cross the boundaries of educational management organization.

The authors use data from the Management in Creative Chains Project (Liberali, 2012), as a way to enable the wide development of all levels of educational management. Data comprise formative meetings in which different educational managers system take part in two settings, the regional board with 25 schools and one of the participating schools. The analysis is based on thematic content and argumentative organization, and on critical situations and the potentials they entailed.

The study guides to the conclusions of the process of creative chain as a possibility to expand management in the educational system and its community.

Every time there is a change in the mayors, there are changes in the way of addressing school management in the city. However, after the project, considerations about the needs of the communities became part of the public policy regardless of who is in charge of the city and its educational system.

This study can be used for transformation in the management and teaching and learning activities and improvement of the school-community relation.

Socially this study can lead to improvement in the quality of life in the community and at school.

Differently from a top down educational management, which enables a reproductive chain, educational management in a creative chain, considering the community needs, enables subjects to become interdependent to expand and transform the activities in the educational system and hence the communities’ reality.

Through description and consideration of 12 models developed as part of the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP), a new model of successful school leadership is developed.

The paper is necessarily descriptive in nature. For the first time, 12 ISSPP models are described together, and these descriptions are then used inductively to create a new successful school leadership model.

The open systems approach adopted depicts schools as a continuous cycle of input-transformation-output with feedback loops that inform each stage of the cycle. The inputs are the variables that lead to transformation. The transformation stage is the actions or processes that individuals, groups and organisations engage in because of the inputs, and these lead to a range of student and school outcomes. Feedback loops connect the stages, and the whole model is open to the influence of five contextual forces: economic, political, socio-cultural, technological and system, institutional and educational.

Models are an important way to make sense of complex phenomena. A new model of successful school leadership, with an open systems approach, provides a different frame to consider the findings of the ISSPP and potentially allows the ISSPP research to inform practice and connect with other school leadership views in new ways.

Contemporary public service innovations to an important degree are initiated and enabled by digitalization. Digitalization stimulates entry of new firms (start-ups) based on innovative implementation of digital technology for public services. The interwoven digitalization and innovation processes involve interaction and interdependencies between private business actors and public service providing actors. In this paper, the authors take the perspective of a start-up business actor that tries to develop and implement a viable business model in the very dynamic context of digital transformation of public education. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the instability of a startup firm’s business model during public service innovation can be explained. The research question is: “How can business modeling by a start-up firm be explained by tensions between its business model and public service provision models?”

Based on an abductive logic, the authors choose a single-case study of a start-up firm’s development in 2010-2018 and its interaction with public actors. Information about the firm acquired in the first phase of the study showed that it frequently changed its business model. A general analytical framework was developed to aid in efforts to answer the research question.

The case showed that a business model could be seen as a temporary outcome of a business modeling process, and that also concurrently public actors change their public actors’ service provisioning models. Public-private interaction reveals tensions that drive business modeling.

The study contributes to empirical knowledge about private-public interaction in the dynamic and complex context in which digital transformation in society drives public service innovations. The conceptual contribution rests more generally in the analytical framework and how it frames public actor’s “service provision modeling” as a driver of business modeling.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate students’ perceptions of the challenges that they face and the factors that facilitate and impede teaching and learning within the context of transformation at the University of the Witwatersrand. The paper also explores students’ perceptions of transformation directly and their ideas related to facilitating this process. The authors reflect briefly on colonialism and apartheid in South Africa and the state of higher education after 18 years of democracy.

A qualitative, explorative, descriptive survey research design was employed to gain a deeper understanding of how students experience living, learning and teaching in higher education. A sample of 194 students with a mean age of 22.40 participated in the study.

The results revealed positive facilitative factors such as quality of teaching, social support, material resources and practical/clinical training; as well as negative hindering factors that included high workload, English as a medium of instruction and limited access to “other” resources which impacted the learning processes. There was a general feeling of dissatisfaction with the current status of the school regarding transformation.

This study makes novel contributions to the literature, especially related to the South African context. For instance, white students in professional degree programs reported that their inability to speak indigenous African languages hindered their provision of services to clients. This finding contrasts with previous literature that suggests that students who speak English as a first language have greater advantages than multilingual students whose mother tongue is not English.

Today, education shows an urgent need for transformation to better respond to the complex and interdependent nature of current learning and social challenges we are facing. This chapter is based on the evidence of schools and district initiatives that claim for systemic change with a strong focus on wider interconnection and collaboration between learners, professionals and organizations.

Networks for Change is a programme launched in 2017 by the Barcelona Education Consortium that intends to create professional networks of schools in the city. The programme seeks a deep change in the whole system: to influence how teachers learn from one another to lead a collective transformation of schools, moving towards inclusive, significant and profound learning of all students. To achieve this, the programme articulates 25 territorial networks of schools, spread over the 10 districts in the city of Barcelona, grouping a total of 283 schools (ages 3–18), 1,700 leadership teams and 10,000 teachers. The network sessions are facilitated by one district leader, existing a team of 13 facilitators in the programme. Each school assigns an internal and volunteering leadership team that is responsible to assist to the network meetings, so as to empower internal change processes in schools.

The present study evaluates the impact of the programme on the development of territorial networks, as well as on the changes emerged in school communities. The instruments used combine a quantitative and qualitative approach including a questionnaire for teams of leaders involved in the programme, a questionnaire for teachers from schools and a focus group with programme facilitators of the 25 networks.

The main results show that the Networks for Change programme is already becoming a response to the widely contrasted need to weave sustainable relationships between teachers from different schools in the system at the same time that it is strengthening the collaborative capacities of educational actors in the city’s neighbourhoods and territories. Likewise, and to take a step further in the development of the programme, it is suggested emphasizing the increase of transversality in the networks as cross-sector collaboration, distributing the leadership of the programme through its actors and establishing direct ways for the impact to schools and their transformation. Right now, the network mainly fulfils a function of generating learning among its participants, although the desired horizon is to extend this learning to the entire ecosystem and at the same time generate systemic change in the neighbourhoods in order to enhance and document real impact on learners.

This research aims to explore leadership approaches that foster deeper learning and facilitate the transition from traditional schooling to a model aligned with the demands of the post-industrial digital knowledge society.

Employing a mixed-methods approach, the authors conducted surveys among school principals within a network of schools embracing deeper learning based on ten distinct but interlocking criteria that define this particular model of deeper learning. Through in-depth follow-up interviews with school leaders, the authors investigated the factors and obstacles that support sustainable implementation and scalability of deeper learning, with a specific focus on the role of transformational leadership.

During the implementation of transformative practices like deeper learning, school leaders demonstrate diverse perspectives on the necessary changes for their successful integration. Leaders inclined toward a “transactional” leadership style concentrate on changes within individual classrooms. Conversely, leaders exemplifying “transformational leadership” possess a broader vision and address systemic factors such as teacher collaboration, assessment regulations and the effective utilization of time and space within schools. To achieve widespread adoption of deeper learning across schools and the education system, it is essential to recruit more transformational leaders for formal leadership positions and reorient leadership training toward transformational approaches.

The deeper learning model developed for this intervention encompasses a four-stage process: Teachers initially collaborate in small teams to co-design interdisciplinary, deeper learning units. The actual units consist of three sequences: knowledge acquisition, where students gain knowledge through direct instruction supplemented by personalized learning on digital platforms; team-based co-creative and co-constructive tasks facilitated by teachers once students have acquired a solid knowledge base and the completion of authentic tasks, products or performances in sequence III. While small groups of intrinsically motivated teachers have successfully implemented the model, achieving broader scalability and dissemination across schools requires significant “transformational leadership” to challenge traditional norms regarding teacher collaboration, assessment practices and the efficient use of time and space in schools.

This paper presents a structured model of deeper learning based on ten distinct but interlocking quality criteria tested within a network of 26 schools. The model has demonstrated transformative effects on participating schools, albeit primarily observed in smaller substructures of large secondary schools. Teachers who previously worked independently have begun to collaboratively design learning experiences, resulting in “hybrid” classrooms where physical and digital spaces merge and extend to include maker spaces and out-of-school learning environments. Traditional summative assessments have been replaced by various forms of embedded formative assessment. However, these innovations are currently driven by small groups of intrinsically motivated teachers. The research provides insights into the type of school leadership necessary for comprehensive scaling and system-wide dissemination of deeper learning.

The paper sought to clarify the concept of learning organisation/community; to identify the barriers that are perceived to obstruct the creation of learning communities out of traditional schools; to identify how principals go about the task of converting their schools; and the special characteristics of leadership required to transform schools successfully.

The study was dependent on an extensive review of the literature and generated data from structured interviews of principals from the New South Wales (Australia) public education system.

Respondents lacked a clear understanding of a learning organisation despite their actions to implement the concept in their own schools; the concept may indeed be too abstract to enable a suitable workable definition; there is, nevertheless, a strong belief that the concept has much to offer; leadership is the key factor in transforming schools; and traditional school structures and cultures, lack of implementation time, and difficulty in obtaining the support of staff and parents are seen as the main barriers to implementation.

The paper explores extensively the possible implications of the study and addresses these to schools and school systems, principals, teachers and parents.

The study begins by defining and conceptualizing Transformative Leadership Conversation (TLC). The conceptualization addresses the meaning of transformation, sensemaking and learning dialogue, and the conversation structures of framing, questioning and listening, and affirming. Next, the authors build a theoretical argument from self-determination theory on the function of TLC. The study concludes with an empirical test of the structure and function of TLC.

There were two parts to the empirical study. First, the authors designed and tested a scale to measure TLC by its structural features (e.g. questioning, listening and affirming language). Second, the authors used a correlational design with ex-post facto data to test the primary assumption that TLC activates autonomous motivation and action. Data came from a random sample of 2,500 teachers in a southwestern state. Useable responses were obtained from 1,615 teachers, for a response rate of 65%.

The empirical tests reveal that the 12-item and 6-item measure of the School Leader Transformative Conversation Scale present valid and reliable evidence on the frequent use of TLC. Consistent with the hypothesized model, TLC had a direct, positive relationship with teacher vitality. It also had a negative relationship with autonomy frustration and a positive indirect effect on teacher vitality by reducing the negative effect of autonomy frustration.

TLC advances a new conceptual lens to study school leadership as a discursive process. The concept opens lines of inquiry that have not yet been examined in school settings.