This book provides insights into the everyday practices of school leaders as told through the real-life stories of principals. The editors and their contributors blend practice with theory, helping aspiring leaders to discover that school leadership is not simply putting prescribed solutions into action, but a constant encounter with quandaries that demand thinking, responding, and adjusting to the situations at hand. Readers build their capacities to view quandaries from multiple lenses, consider a variety of responses, and draw conclusions based on perspectives that may vary from those initially identified. The chapter authors encourage a sharper self-awareness of what scholars value and envision about education, encouraging them to think about how to navigate decision-making through a variety of theoretical frameworks and practices while balancing their own leadership platform development.

Focused on the particular needs of superintendents of districts of fewer than ten thousand students, the chapters teach students critical frameworks for thinking through and addressing the problems and practices superintendents encounter daily, allowing them to form a detailed and practical understanding of administration and leadership.

This book explores school leadership through a cross-cultural comparative lens, drawing on data from 16 countries located on five continents. The book gives a voice to both primary and secondary school principals, who discuss the nature of their work and explain their understanding of school leadership, strategies used to support their leadership, and how they 'do leadership' in a time of unprecedented change. The book highlights a number of important elements in school leadership: that it is personal and internally-motivated; change oriented and entrepreneurial; dependent on the qualities and motivations of school teachers; dependent on environmental factors related to economy, geography, political stability; heavily influenced by policies within and outside the field of education; and dependent on partnerships within and outside education. The book provides an authoritative cross-cultural account of what school leaders regard as school leadership. It will be essential reading for students, researchers and policy-makers in the fields of educational leadership and management, in particular those with an interest in comparative and international research, school leadership, and education policy.

This book takes a unique organizational approach towards understanding the concept of ethics in educational systems. It provides a global perspective and connects theory and praxis through team-based simulations, case studies and scenarios, thus presenting an integrative approach towards tackling teachers' withdrawal behaviors.

The most trusted guide to school culture, updated with current challenges and new solutions Shaping School Culture is the classic guide to exceptional school leadership, featuring concrete guidance on influencing the subtle symbolic features of schools that provide meaning, belief, and faith. Written by renowned experts in the area of school culture, this book tackles the increasing challenges facing public schools and provides clear, candid suggestions for more effective symbolic leadership. This new third edition has been revised to reflect the reality of schools today, including the increased emphasis on high-stakes testing, federal reforms such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), state sponsored improvement programs, and other major issues that impact organizational culture and the role of school leaders. Each chapter features new examples and cases that illustrate persistent problems, spelling out key cultural implications and offering concrete examples of overcoming the challenges while maintaining a meaningful learning environment. The chapter on toxic schools continues to provide the field's most trusted advice on navigating this rocky terrain, and the discussion's focus on how to manage negativity remains especially integral to besieged school administrators across the U.S. Recent years have jolted the nation's school system with a number of new developments that spell problems for the cultural tapestry of schools. This book provides expert perspective and sage, doable advice for administrators tending to external pressures while sustainingï¿1⁄2or evolvingï¿1⁄2a more positive school culture. Navigate new challenges including Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and waning confidence and faith Turn around a toxic school culture with confidence and success Foster a culture of passion, purpose, and meaning Adopt a more active form of symbolic leadership to support students, faculty, staff, parents, and community Test scores as the primary metric, relentless reforms, waning public support, and timid initiatives wrapped in bureaucratic packaging: while among the most prominent issues administrators face are only the tip of the iceberg. Shaping School Culture charts a route through competing pressures to help educational leaders hew a positive learning environment for schools.

The Journal of School Leadership is broadening the conversation about schools and leadership and is currently accepting manuscripts. We welcome manuscripts based on cutting-edge research from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives and methodological orientations. The editorial team is particularly interested in working with international authors, authors from traditionally marginalized populations, and in work that is relevant to practitioners around the world. Growing numbers of educators and professors look to the six bimonthly issues to: deal with problems directly related to contemporary school leadership practice teach courses on school leadership and policy use as a quality reference in writing articles about school leadership and improvement.

The unwavering culture of continuous improvement efforts to bring about school change has irrevocably changed the role expectations for the school leader. The school leader in the 21st century is increasingly perceived as an instructional leader expected to implement whole-school reform models that can shape teacher practice and influence student outcomes. The significant changes in role expectations for school leaders present considerable challenges to an educational system that was not designed to incorporate these conceptualizations. In light of the increased acceptance of changed leadership expectations, the elements that are needed for developing, supporting, and sustaining instructional leaders who can lead systemic change efforts are frequently not present, are fragmented, or are observed at various developmental stages throughout the pK-20 pipeline. This book is centered on the learning and changed behaviors of school leaders, who engaged in a sustained job-embedded professional learning community, facilitated through a university-district partnership. The learning from the findings, suggested that job-embedded learning with their peers, can be instrumental for these principals to build the capacity to lead systemic change efforts. The findings further suggested that creating conditions for new understanding to occur, and sustained opportunities to apply new learning in context to their role, entailed a collaborative effort by a partnership involving two separate institutions with different priorities. The author makes a case for the educational pipeline, to prioritize the support and understanding of complex systemic change efforts and innovations, as they are linked to school improvement.

The rapid growth of diversity within U.S. schooling and the heightened attention to the lack of equity in student achievement, school completion, and postsecondary attendance has made equity and diversity two of the principle issues in education, educational leadership, and educational leadership research. The Handbook of Research on Educational Leadership for Equity and Diversity is the first research-based handbook that comprehensively addresses the broad diversity in U.S. schools by race, ethnicity, culture, language, gender, disability, sexual identity, and class. The Handbook both highly values the critically important strengths and assets that diversity brings to the United States and its schools, yet at the same time candidly critiques the destructive deficit thinking, biases, and prejudices that undermine school success for many groups of students. Well-known chapter authors explore diversity and related inequities in schools and the achievement problems these issues present to school leaders. Each chapter reviews theoretical and empirical evidence of these inequities and provides research-based recommendations for practice and for future research. Celebrating the broad diversity in U.S. schools, the Handbook of Research on Educational Leadership for Equity and Diversity critiques the inequities connected to that diversity, and provides evidence-based practices to promote student success for all children.

The Journal of School Leadership is broadening the conversation about schools and leadership and is currently accepting manuscripts. We welcome manuscripts based on cutting-edge research from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives and methodological orientations. The editorial team is particularly interested in working with international authors, authors from traditionally marginalized populations, and in work that is relevant to practitioners around the world. Growing numbers of educators and professors look to the six bimonthly issues to: deal with problems directly related to contemporary school leadership practice teach courses on school leadership and policy use as a quality reference in writing articles about school leadership and improvement.

This volume offers a holistic, empirically grounded examination of the factors which influence educational leaders’ ethical judgments in their day-to-day work in schools. Drawing on a range of quantitative studies, the text utilizes organizational psychology to explore multiple ethical paradigms. It considers social aspects including ethnicity, gender, hegemony-minority relations, and leadership styles which influence and drive ethical judgment patterns employed by educators and principals. The book ultimately demonstrates the Ethical Perspectives Instrument (EPI) as an effective tool for the assessment of various ethical viewpoints and their interactions, suitable for application to diverse cultures and socio-educational circumstances. An important study of the leaders’ ethics and preparation in handling marginalized populations, this book will be valuable for academics, researchers, and graduate students working in the fields of educational leadership, organizational psychology, and the sociology of education.