This article looks at high-performing education systems in Asia through the lens of leadership and leadership development. It proposes that the top-performing education systems systematically build the leadership capacity for improvement and that this is part of an implementation science geared to maximizing performance. Drawing upon initial…

Implementing change in higher education is complex and challenging and its results are difficult to measure. This article will argue that university senior management can make change happen but it is rarely straightforward and never easy. It reviews the ways in which leaders aiming to enhance practice can implement enhancement activities,…

The role of the principal is rapidly changing. Once seen as building managers tasked with bus schedules and student discipline, principals now lead a range of school-level reform efforts. But not all principals are equipped to lead dramatic student achievement gains or know which actions to prioritize. Research on school leaders in urban areas…

Restructuring large schools into smaller, more personalized learning communities focused on developing students academically, socially, and emotionally has the potential to produce better outcomes for students. Although small school reform in large urban high schools has been the focus of the research literature on school reform in the last…

While the literature on professional learning communities (PLCs) has proliferated, much of it derived from and contextualised in Anglo-American settings, the concept and practice of PLCs in Asian contexts of strong hierarchies have largely been ignored. Based on literature and documentary analysis, this paper investigates the systemic…

Educational disparities between indigenous Maori students and those of the majority continue to be a major issue in New Zealand. Te Kotahitanga, an iterative research and development programme, which commenced in 2001, supports teachers to implement a relationship-based pedagogy in their classrooms in order to improve Maori students' achievement…

Much has been written about the education policies and practices that countries and schools are putting in place. At the other end of the spectrum, accountability systems and assessments such as the Program for International Student Assessment shed light on the results that are achieved. Much less is known, however, about how policies and…

Traditionally schools in the past were mostly homogenous, but with demographic shifts, schools are becoming more ethnically diverse, disadvantaged, and multilingual. In contrast, the teaching population still reflects that outdated homogenous template: "predominantly white and female," middle-class, and unilingual. This exploratory study examined…

Much of the research into teacher appraisal and performance management has focused on the experience of the classroom teacher. In this article, I will: (1) concentrate on the perspectives of the senior managers in secondary schools; (2) consider their views of the purpose of performance management; (3) compare their methods of implementation of…

Technological innovation is driving fundamental changes in all aspects of our lives. This is especially true of digital content, as our use of e-books, downloadable music, streaming television and movies, and online social networks has exploded. However, the explosive growth in our use of digital content seems so far to have eluded many of the 50…

In this school-university partnership, university faculty team with high school teachers to advance content literacy for immigrant students. Using a narrative research design, we retell stories, chronologically structured by comentoring developmental phases, to retrace our individual teams' activities. With a distributive perspective of…

The implementation of the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) began in English primary schools at the start of the autumn term, 1998. The purpose of the strategy is to improve standards in literacy. This is the fourth report on NLS by the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED). It provides a detailed account of the implementation and impact of…

The National Center for Research in Vocational Education (NCRVE) partially supported 10 new or extensively revised leadership development projects at 7 institutions of higher education designed to improve the leadership attributes of graduate students in vocational education. The projects adopted as instructional objectives one or more of the…

Responsiveness-to-intervention (RTI) is the front-running candidate to replace current practice in diagnosing learning disabilities, but researchers have identified several questions about implementation. Specific questions include: Are there validated intervention models? Are there adequately trained personnel? What leadership is needed? When…