School leadership and professional learning community: case study of two senior high schools in Northeast China

Abstract

This article presents findings of a qualitative study on school leadership and professional learning community in two high achieving senior high schools in Northeast China. The findings show that teachers participated in school-based communities of professional learning, such as Teaching and Research Groups, Lesson Preparation Groups, and Grade Groups. While the term professional learning community (PLC) was not commonplace, the actual practices of PLC characterized by collective enquiry and collaborative learning became the norm in the two schools. School leaders demonstrated strong instructional leadership and visionary stewardship for school continuous improvement. They played a critical role in developing and communicating a shared vision, shaping a culture of trust, supporting and monitoring collegial learning. Teacher leadership was evident in collaborative teams and expertise leadership was acknowledged. Emotional bonds and shared responsibility in these teams strengthened professionalism. Concerted efforts were made to create aligned structures and processes that support collective enquiry, and to develop a culture of collaborative learning that builds collective capacities. Developing and sustaining the embedded PLC process within a school seems to provide a promising infrastructure for supporting school improvement in the Chinese school context.     

An Australian perspective on school leadership preparation and development: credentials or self-management?

This paper provides a review of school leadership preparation and development in Australia through considering the requirements for becoming a principal, how leadership preparation and development occurs, and consideration of recent developments to provide an Australian standard for school leaders. Australian educators have relied mostly on a self-identification and self-managed system in which individuals decide that they want to pursue leadership opportunities and then seek out the support and experiences to help them. Support is available and provided through system, university, and service organization programmes, and the support of colleagues and senior leaders in schools. Whilst there is an extensive range of support provided by systems, universities and service organizations, there is little evidence of their impact on schools. At the school level there needs to be far greater support in identifying and developing leaders. Developments in creating a national leadership standard might lead to some type of credentialing programme that could allow individuals to benchmark their development, and ensure that preparation and support programmes are of the highest quality. An alternative view is to reinforce greater individual responsibility for leadership development and career progress, encourage schools and systems to focus less on individual leadership and more on collective leadership, and consider more innovative ways of providing leadership development.     

From school leader to educational leader

ABSTRACT

This study builds on research which contends that just as effective principals must lead across a broad purview of responsibilities in order to build successful schools, so too must middle leaders. Decentralisation of school management has resulted in an expansion of school principals’ responsibilities, contributing to a further distribution of leadership responsibility to middle leaders. This conception of middle leadership requires a shift in understanding of the nature of middle leaders’ work. There is vast potential for middle leaders to contribute to their schools beyond subject administration, yet the research base yields limited insight on such work and on how middle leaders can be supported to accomplish it. This research finds that middle leaders who expand their leadership responsibilities do so in contexts that utilise school mission, policy enactment and organisational design as platforms for enhanced middle leadership.     

Stewarding the Discipline With Cross-Boundary Leadership

ABSTRACT

Proposals to prepare disciplinary stewards and optimize the conditions for collective stewardship can be framed in two ways. The dominant frame emphasizes disciplinary caretaking and lends comparatively less attention to reform and transformation. A second frame is grounded in the social ecology of particular disciplines, their fast-changing university homes, and society’s complex needs, problems, and opportunities, especially those that no longer fit inside the long-standing boundaries of particular disciplines and their specialties. Reformist and transformative stewardship in this second frame prioritizes the development of adaptive, connected disciplines characterized by new boundaries and bridging mechanisms for interdisciplinary research, teaching, and outreach/engagement. This frame also provides the opportunity to explore the difference between an academic discipline and a helping discipline. Questions remain about how leaders will persuade, support, and reward career-oriented, specialized faculty members to engage in all such acts of stewardship for Kinesiology alongside their customary concern for their respective sub-disciplines.     

新时期学习型班级建设与学生领导力研究简

学习型班级是以班级成员为中心,以班级成员管理自治为运行机制的新型班级组织。它是开放的组织管理体系,其动力机制和运行机制是一种“竞争力匹配与调和”模型。实践中,可以通过重新树立学生领导力权威、营造“可以犯错”的学生领导力执行氛围、重新确立学生领导力执行的目标等途径和手段来实现班级组织转型和学生领导力变革。新时期,提升学生领导力水平,树立学生自治意识是首要前提,维护学生领导权威是重要保障,变革班级组织架构是关键步骤,完善班级纪律规定是基础环节。只有改变传统“德育式”和“法治化”的教育实践方式,才能实现“通过教育的纪律”、学生个体的纪律化和“美化集体的纪律”。     

Effective Leadership is Not Enough: Critical Approaches to Closing the Racial Discipline Gap

A review of student discipline and suspension data disaggregated by race highlights how school leader biases influence disciplinary decisions. Yet, the majority of principal preparation programs have failed to develop structures and norms that result in critical conversations pertaining to race and racial inequities. This article is written from a stance that school leaders must move away from traditional leadership approaches and toward a social justice leadership orientation that creates critical spaces and discourses, empowers communities, and enables the adoption of social justice practices in all aspects of the school. After reviewing literature on critical race theory and social justice leadership, three leadership action areas are recommended to support principals and assistant principals in closing the racial discipline gap.     

课程领导问题探析

课程领导是课程与领导两范畴的结合,并且它与管理有着十分紧密的联系。课程领导中领导者必须运用领导的理论、方法与策略来完成课程设计、课程实施、课程评价等任务;课程领导必须打破指令型的管理思维模式,将课程活动视为一种课程领导者与所属成员共同探究课程问题的互动过程。课程领导是一项复杂的组织活动,它所承担的主要职能是决策、组织与引导。成功的课程领导者会认真考虑所属成员的需求与教育的实际情况,设计出完善的课程计划,促进教育行政人员、教师、学生与家长共同参与课程改革。     

论女性心理与柔性化领导方式

当今社会,柔性化领导方式成为适应现代领导实践要求的领导方式,而女性领导在这方面具有独特的优势。女性领导比男性领导具有较强的亲和力、较强的协调能力、较高的忍耐力和责任感,善于进行共情式领导,刚柔相济,能够以柔克刚。女性领导要有效地实施柔性化领导,就要以人为本,建立有效的激励机制;重视调控组织成员的情绪情感;加强人际沟通与协调,团结合作;提高非权力因素的影响力。     

Redefining leadership in schools: the Cheshire Cat as unconventional metaphor

ABSTRACT

Moving away from the study of the principal as the central leader figure in schools, this article argues for an alternative narrative for school leadership. It draws on empirical data from a doctoral study to propose a new way of thinking about the school leader through the unusual metaphor of the Cheshire Cat.

Examining the stories of 11 school leaders from one independent PK-12 Western Australian school, including middle leaders who are often absent in school leadership literature, this article provides insights into school leaders’ perceptions of themselves as leaders, and their private processes of decision making. These leader stories challenge the notion of school leadership as an archetypal story of a central figure, showing that it can instead be quiet, subtle, fluid, and even deliberately invisible.

The visible-invisible Cheshire Cat school leader enacts collective vision, action, and transformation by acting as a deliberate and skilled collaborator in a complex, networked web. This reimagined school leader is one who makes careful decisions about how to best serve their communities, how to foster trust, and how to distribute power and agency, including when to appear and disappear, when to step forward and step back, when to direct and when to empower.     

The Leadership of Transition: Correction, Conciliation and Change in South African Education

This paper focuses on educational leadership in the context of social transition to post-apartheid democracy in South Africa. Transitional leaders manifest behaviours, attitudes, values and strategies that are deeply related to the contexts within which they work. Social norms and political climate may not be supportive of educational leaders wishing to rise to the challenge of unplanned transition; however this paper focuses on leaders who take up this challenge. Narratives of three educational leaders, two white and one black, provide an understanding of the complexities and challenges involved in bringing about change that goes against the grain of social, community, or institutional expectations. Five common strands that bind the narratives of the three leaders are revealed. These commonalities are: a sense of moral purpose, a sense of human frailty, a sense of racial inclusion, a sense of political complexity, and a sense of personal growth. In conclusion, seven propositions that may form the building blocks for new ways of thinking about leadership in post conflict societies are presented.     

Getting emotional: a critical evaluation of recent trends in the development of school leaders

Emotion is a growing focus for contemporary thinking about leadership in public policy and corporate arenas. In British education systems, three imperatives are evident: the idea that transformation is essential; leadership succession in crisis; and, more recently, that leaders must be able to run organisations that address the emotional well-being of staff and students. Viewed as a key outcome of schooling, its importance is mirrored in school leadership, especially professional development. This article considers whether this represents a step-change in leadership development praxis or is, instead, an invasive form of emotional engineering redolent of long-established orthodoxies of control and domination. If so, it is argued, leadership development as the advocacy of emotional acumen presents moral technology as a new form for intervening in leaders' emotional selves, thereby distracting them from addressing fundamental aspects of education for which they are primarily responsible.     

VET leadership for the future – characteristics,contexts and capabilities

This paper examines leadership in Australia’s vocational education and training (VET) sector. VET leaders make a vital and growing contribution to learners, industry and society, yet research on their work is limited. This has direct implications for ensuring leadership is most effective, and for framing evidence-based capacity development. The current research draws together reviews of complex and often competing contexts, analyses of prior research, and results from a national survey of 327 practising VET leaders. Analysis of what VET leaders report doing in their jobs suggests that while they are attuned to the education-focused demands of their roles, they now need new capabilities to respond to internal and external developments. To identify the powerful forces which shape leadership, the study established criteria seen to mark out effective performance in each role. It highlighted a set of indicators identified by VET leaders as those most important in making judgements about the effective delivery of each role. Identifying indicators of effective performance is important, as it is these which, ideally, drive leaders’ aspirations and behaviours. The future capacity of VET in Australia will be underpinned by the capability and regeneration of its leadership. New programmes need to focus on concrete ‘change management’ skills, working through complex real-world problems and leading change in ambiguous environments. The more authentic and active modes of learning were advocated by VET leaders, who expressed an overwhelming preference for practice-based and self-managed, as opposed to formal, forms of professional learning.     

The Metal Trades

Universities and schools are struggling with the critical issues surrounding teacher quality, student learning, and the gap between research and practice. This study employed a collective case-study design to explore the impact of leadership teams and school-university partnerships on teacher leadership, professional development, and overall participant dispositions of three grant-funded projects connected by their approach to implementing school reform. Analysis of interviews, focus groups, observations, and project documents yielded three primary themes: transformation of teacher roles, improved meaningful professional development, and increased collective efficacy. Discussion of the findings addresses implications regarding teacher leadership, professional development, and school-university partnerships, especially as they impact teaching and learning.     

教师增权赋能的实现机制——分布式领导活动中的要素及作用机理

分布式领导强调通过组织活动过程中领导者、追随者、情境三个要素的整合和互动形成领导实践,这有利于教师增权赋能的实现。对协作式分布、协调式分布、集体式分布三种分布式领导形式在具体实践过程中的深入研究,有利于从组织和个人两个层面深入分析目前我国中小学教师增权赋能存在的抗拒要素。解冻-变革-再解冻的螺旋式作用是切实践行分布式领导理论中互动、分享和扩散的有效机制并最终实现教师增权赋能。     

领导集体情商：组织情商的关键

情商理论与组织行为理论的交叉产生了“组织情商”学说,组织情商是个体情商概念的拓展,在一个组织中,领导班子集体能否建立高效合作的团队,能否有效地利用群体的智能的机制,是组织形成核心竞争力的人事基础,是组织取得成功的关键。因此,领导集体情商是组织情商的关键之所在,在新的历史条件下,提高组织情商,必须首先提高领导集体情商。     

组合战略:获取竞争优势的另一种选择

波特认为差异化和成本领先这两个基本战略通常是不相容的,通常企业要在两者中做出选择,否则就会“夹在中间”。文章认为差异化和成本领先并不互相排斥,并讨论了差异化可以成为企业获得成本领先的可能性条件框架,以及在超竞争环境下差异化和成本领先的组合是获取持续的竞争优势的选择。     

Authentic leadership strategies in support of mentoring processes

The aim of the study was to determine whether teacher-mentees perceive their mentors as authentic leaders and if so, how these perceptions affected their leadership strategies. The sample included 60 Israeli teacher-mentees from different school levels and different sectors, who volunteered to participate in the study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore participants' perceptions of mentoring processes that had influenced them professionally. Based on a confirmatory approach in qualitative analysis, using ATLAS.ti 5.0, we found that the influential mentors were perceived as authentic leaders who acted within four dimensions that were consistent with authentic leadership theory: self-awareness, balanced processing, relational transparency and internalised moral perspective. In addition, it was found that the influential mentors had contributed to the mentees' development of leadership strategies that included envisioning, engaging, evaluating, reflecting and monitoring. These findings may contribute to the development of preparatory programmes that can focus on development of authentic leaders among mentors, and may assist in developing middle-level leadership among their mentees. The present study indicated that mentoring characterised by authentic leadership could contribute to the broadening of leadership circles and to the construction of middle-level leadership through advancing mentees' leadership strategies within their educational spheres.     

国外学校变革中的教育性领导及其建构

有效的学校领导是学校质量和学校变革的关键因素。学校领导者是学校组织变革和发展的中心。发达国家在学校组织变革过程中越来越强调学校领导者的作用,强调学校领导者应该成为教育性领导。发达国家的研究者们揭示了教育性领导的内涵,从三个维度解释了教育性领导的职能及其相互关系,包括教学领导、课程领导和学习领导,同时还指出了教育性领导的建构策略。     

Schools and Industry: Some Organizational Considerations (Part 1)

This article explores the concept of interculturalism and its complementary relationship with the Aboriginal Australian idea of ‘both ways’. The need for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal staff to learn to be intercultural teachers and leaders, as well as the needs of the system to work interculturally to achieve educational outcomes, is emphasised. This article suggests that in order for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal educational leaders to work within an intercultural world, new leadership capabilities must be learned and acquired.