A cross-case analysis of five case studies of team-based technology leadership in middle schools with laptop programs identifies systems of practice that organize teams' distributed leadership. These cases suggest that successfully implementing a complex improvement effort warrants a team-based leadership approach, especially for an improvement…

As a new decade dawns, teachers stand at the center of a policy vortex. They serve as the primary focus of one of the Obama administration's four pillars of educational reform--effective teachers and leaders. Educational reformers of all stripes have focused tremendous energy on thinking of ways to identify effective teachers and in turn recruit,…

During the past two decades, Taiwan's Ministry of Education has responded to globalization by restructuring school curricular, instructional, and decision making practices along western lines in an attempt to attain legitimacy on the world stage. As a result, Taiwanese principals, once kings within their schools, now must share power with other…

The context of leadership in the public school has become increasingly complex with the pressures of high stakes testing and accountability, changing student demographics, and financial challenges. Stakeholders must work together to develop effective strategies to increase student academic performance. Successful superintendents must optimize…

Instructional and transformational leadership is reportedly required to improve the mathematics outcomes of students in low socio-economic status school communities. This study of 43 schools in two networks of schools in rural Victoria explored leadership practices and found evidence to support both these leadership approaches along with…

Complexity is a feature common to all vocational education and training (VET) governance arrangements, due to the wide range of students VET systems caters for, and the number of stakeholders involved in both decision making and funding and financing. In this article, Pierre and Peter's framework of governance is used to examine complexity in VET…

Background: Teachers have limited insight in students' perspectives on education, although these perspectives influence quality of learning. As students' and teachers' perspectives differ considerably, there is a need for teachers to learn more about students' experiences and ideas about education. Participatory design might be a good strategy for…

Purpose: This article describes and reports the results of testing a new conception of how leadership influences student learning ("The Four Paths"). Framework: Leadership influence is conceptualized as flowing along four paths (Rational, Emotions, Organizational, and Family) toward student learning. Each path is populated by multiple…

Purpose: To fill the gap in theoretical and empirical knowledge on late career in principalship, the aim of this study was to explore the career experiences, needs, and behaviors of principals at this stage. Research method: Life history and semistructured interviews were conducted with 20 late-career principals, 20 schoolteachers, and 10…

In this article we discuss students', teachers' and school principals' perceptions of democratic school leadership reforms in Kenya. The article is based on a study that was conducted in two phases. In phase one (conducted between September and December 2007), interviews were undertaken with 12 school principals in which understandings of…

This study was conducted to determine how instructional supervision was carried out in schools. The study begins with a brief outline of the decentralization of the inspection system in Botswana. It proceeds to present a brief global historical background of instructional supervision before findings on instructional supervision are discussed.…

For nearly three decades, the quality management philosophy known as Six Sigma has brought competitive advantage to organizations implementing it. The typical approach, however, has been to have leaders from operations, engineering, quality, and marketing manage this strategic initiative. Human resource's role has been to default to the…

Teachers encounter countless obstacles to ensure their needs are met when represented by the traditional union-administration working relationship. Unions hold established opinions and ideas on school policy about matters in the public school arena. The tradition of unions and district officials keeping one another placated in an adversarial…

The author's career experiences--as an impartial observer of community building, as an advocate working from within urban communities, and as a catalyst working from the outside--have given him a unique perspective into the dynamics of institutional/community engagement. "Basically, they have left me with three overriding convictions. First,…

In the fast paced, fluid contemporary world, and in a headlong rush to invent the future, there is a tendency to jettison aspects of the past as flotsam and jetsam, unworthy of a place in steerage into the future. This paper argues that is some respects the ordinary heroes and heroines who enact school leaderships, and from their practice…