Pretend play provides enriched environments for multiple cognitive and social purposes. The quality of children's pretend play depends on the process, including children's back and forth proposals and responses about the play frames. Proposing and responding to play ideas with metacommunication use, leadership-followership interactions are…

Purpose: The study aimed to explore the authority and power of kindergarten superintendents in public education to elucidate their leadership dynamics. Design/methodology/approach: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 Israeli kindergarten teachers about the authority and power of their superintendents. Thematic analysis was used to…

A mosaic approach to leading practices leverages collaboration and makes it possible to renew the social fabric of a school. In this article, the authors use the notion of a 'mosaic of leading "practices'" to unsettle top-down, hierarchical, positional conceptions of leader"ship" that focus on "participants." The…

Purpose: The concept of distributed leadership (DL) has been widely advocated within higher education (HE). Yet, there have been few empirical investigations and little theory development outside Western contexts to date. This study presents a unique conceptualisation of DL and tests it empirically in India. Design/methodology/approach: This study…

Instructional leadership is a school leadership approach that prioritizes enhancing the quality of teaching and learning. This study explores how the principal's instructional leadership influences the school's middle leadership. The study participants were 24 principals from elementary schools in Israel, and data collection involved conducting…

Leadership in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) is changing globally. We investigated ECEC leadership and leaders' interpretations of power and its realization between leaders and followers, a little researched topic in the field. Our theoretical framework consists of ECEC contextual knowledge and prior research attached with Michel…

This study is focused on exploring ways to disrupt imbalanced power dynamics in educational settings, specifically elementary schools. It includes reflections of the researcher's journey and experiences as a teacher in District of Columbia public and charter schools and how those experiences shaped who she became when she entered school…

In China, higher education institutions (HEIs) have a governance arrangement in which the university president and the party secretary occupy key roles. However, their legal roles as institutional leaders are vaguely specified in existing legal frameworks. Based on a four-dimensional theoretical model, this paper (i) clarifies the leadership roles…

This article examines the dynamics of friction and tension in contemporary dance, focusing on the precarious working conditions within the Flemish dance sector. Recent studies have highlighted how such conditions often foster unspoken tensions and perpetuate a culture of silencing. In particular, high-profile cases in the Flemish arts have…

This integrative literature review offers a portrait of the "middle leader" in lower secondary school, emphasising practical insights. Initiated by a Danish case study, it shows the middle leader as a formally appointed teacher with an add-on responsibility for pedagogical development in collaboration with colleagues and management. By…

The purpose of this article is to unpack and discuss distributed leadership (DL) as an analytical framework for equal pedagogical co-leadership (EPCL) in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). This is done by employing a theoretical discussion, grounded in national and international research on pedagogical leadership (PL) and distributed…

This study examines the role of distributed leadership behaviours in the empirical relationship between school principals' commitment and trust with their well-being. Two main theories and the cultural and political context informed the design of this study. The theoretical background is based on Job Demands and Resources Theory and Self…

Although a growing body of theoretical work indicated that the cultural orientation of societies shapes their understanding of leadership, there is a lack of empirical research to explore how individual cultural value orientations shape teachers' expectations for school leadership. This empirical research addresses this gap by examining the…

Using multigroup structural equation modelling, this study investigated the relationships between paternalistic leadership, emotional labour and teacher efficacy, as well as the moderating roles of gender and region among a group of Chinese primary school teachers. The overall results revealed that both authoritarianism and benevolence dimensions…

The purpose of this study is to verify whether students' academic achievement is enhanced not only by the leadership of school organization members represented by a principal but also by the comprehensive power of community-wide distributed leadership. A questionnaire survey was conducted from July to September 2018. The participants were 1,157…