As educational policy trends converge in many countries, such as demands for greater accountability, decentralization, and more culturally sensitive practices for an increasingly diverse student body, there is growing interest in cross-national comparisons and generalizations about leadership qualities and practices that result in successful schools. US and Cross-National Policies, Practices and Preparation: Implications for Successful Instructional Leadership, Organizational Learning, and Culturally Responsive Practices fills that need by bringing together triads of scholars from the International Study of Successful School Principals (ISSPP) to make direct comparisons among policies and practices in the U.S. with those in other national contexts, and then to draw implications for improving leadership preparation. This book provides theories and empirical case study examples of instructional leadership, organizational learning, and culturally responsive practices as they are shaped by political, economic, and cultural factors in seven different national contexts. The seven countries featured in this book are the U.S., Australia, Denmark, England, Sweden, Norway, and Cyprus. The book begins with an overview of the ISSPP, including its underlying theoretical framework, its research methodologies employed, its limitations and how analyses of the project’s data and findings evolved from the first phase of the study to its current focus.

This book offers cross-national comparisons and generalizations about leadership qualities and practices that result in successful schools. It compares policies and practices in the U.S. with six other countries and includes theories and case study examples.

While considerable evidence indicates that school leaders are able to make important contributions to the success of their students, much less is known about how such contributions are made. This book provides a comprehensive account of research aimed at filling this gap in our knowledge, along with guidelines about how school leaders might use this knowledge for their own school improvement work. Leadership practices known to be effective for improving student success are outlined in the first section of the book while the remaining sections identify four “paths” along which the influence of those practices “flow” to exercise an influence on student success. Each of the Rational, Emotional, Organizational and Family paths are populated by conditions or variables known to have relatively direct effects on student success and also open to influence by effective leadership practices. While the Four Path framework narrows the attention of school leaders to a still-considerable number conditions known to contribute to student success, it leaves school leaders the autonomy to select, for improvement efforts, the sub-set of conditions that make the most sense in their own local circumstances. The approach to leadership described in this book provides evidence-based guidance on what to lead and flexibility on how to lead for purposes of improving student learning.

Successful School Leadership identifies the characteristics, behaviours and practices of successful and effective school leaders through the adoption of a systemic view of the quality of school organizations. Edited by Petros Pashiardis and Olof Johansson, chapters explore the similarities and differences between successful and effective school leaders and across various socioeconomic contexts. Capitalizing on the experiences of the international contributor team, this book will inform the preparation and further development provided to school leaders in an era where ministries of education, universities and multinational organisations (such as the OECD) are increasingly interested in the leadership of our schools. Systematic analyses of multi-perspective data provided from around the world and offers the readers a comprehensive picture of the key behaviours and practices central to successful and effective school leadership. An original contribution to the theoretical perspectives on the subject is derived through insights from empirical research, case studies, and bibliographical literature from the field.

The SAGE Handbook of School Organization provides a substantial review of the history, current status and future prospects of the field of school organization. Bringing together chapters exploring key issues, important debates and points of tension, the Handbook highlights school and system organisational structure, processes and dynamics coupled with insights into important theoretical foundations from diverse perspectives. This volume is designed to provide a much-needed, critically informed and coherent account of the field, against a backdrop of increasing complexity in which schooling as an institution and schools as organisations operate.

Questioning Leadership offers a diverse mix of cutting-edge research in the field of educational leadership, with contributions from expert and emerging leadership scholars. It contextualises school leadership within broader social and historical contexts and traces its influence on school performance through time, from its relatively modest role within a systems theory paradigm to its growing influence from the 1980s onwards, as exercising leadership came to be perceived as being largely responsible for improving educational outcomes. This book invites the reader to challenge the current orthodoxy of leader-centrism and instead reflect more broadly on the various structural and institutional interrelationships that determine how a school functions successfully. It poses challenging questions, such as: Is leadership really necessary for high-quality school performance? Can schools function effectively without leadership? Is it possible to describe the work that principals do without using the word ‘leadership’? How do we challenge the assumption that leadership simply exists and that it is seen as the appropriate default explanation for school performance? This book does not assume that leadership is the key to organisational performance, although it acknowledges the work that principals do. It goes against current orthodoxy and offers varied perspectives on how leadership might be repositioned vis-à-vis organisational and institutional structures. It also suggests some new directions for leading and learning and throws open a discussion on leadership that for too long has been captured by the assumption that the leader is the cause of organisational performance and learning outcomes in schools. At a time when leadership’s dominance seems unshakeable, this is a bold book that should appeal to postgraduate students of educational leadership and management, those undertaking training in educational administration and current school leaders interested in exploring the value of leadership for educational organisations.

The International Handbook of Leadership for Learning brings together chapters by distinguished authors from thirty-one countries in nine different regions of the world. The handbook contains nine sections that provide regional overviews; a consideration of theoretical and contextual aspects; system and policy approaches that promote leadership for learning with a focus on educating school leaders for learning and the role of the leader in supporting learning. It also considers the challenge of educating current leaders for this new perspective, and how leaders themselves can develop leadership for learning in others and in their organisations, especially in diverse contexts and situations. The final chapter considers what we now know about leadership for learning and looks at ways this might be further improved in the future. The book provides the reader with an understanding of the rich contextual nature of learning in schools and the role of school leaders and leadership development in promoting this. It concludes that the preposition ‘for’ between the two readily known and understood terms of ‘leadership’ and ‘learning’ changes everything as it foregrounds learning and complexifies, rather than simplifies, what that word may mean. Whereas common terms such as ‘instructional leadership’ reduce learning to ‘outcomes’, leadership for learning embraces a much wider, developmental view of learning.