The views expressed in this report are the authors' and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department for Education and Skills. important perspective to this international review. 5 Rationale This is a wide-ranging review of theory and evidence about the nature, causes and consequences for schools and students of successful school leadership. We undertook the review for several purposes. One purpose was to provide a state-of-the-evidence description of what is already known about successful leadership. We anticipated that such a description would be of some immediate use and guidance to those already in leadership positions and those with responsibilities for the development of leaders. A second purpose for the review was to help frame the large-scale study of successful leadership now underway with the sponsorship of the DfES and the National College for School Leadership. The review helped us to clarify the most important questions for inquiry, offered conceptual lenses on key variables of interest to our study and was a source of information about promising research methods. Third, we believe that, given widespread dissemination, the review will help build a demand and audience for the results of our large-scale study as they become available. Finally, the review may spark an interest in leadership on the part of those who have not, to this point, given it much thought. Evidence included in the review is of two types. One type of evidence was original empirical research undertaken using a wide variety of methods. While an extensive body of such evidence is included in the review, we did not attempt to be exhaustive; that would clearly have been unrealistic in a paper of this length. Rather we gave special weight to work reported in the past decade, as well as to work of higher quality judged by conventional standards. We also made use of recent comprehensive reviews of research published in peer-review sources. The use of this type of evidence allowed us to reflect work reported over a relatively long period of time and to be more comprehensive in our coverage than would have been possible had we limited ourselves to individual studies alone. Use of the reviews also allowed us to judge, more 6 accurately, emerging conclusions warranted by significant amounts of evidence. We provide more detail about our sources of evidence in the concluding section of Chapter One.

/pdf/successful-school-leadership-what-it-is-and-how-it-k8ex5u29zc.pdf

Successful School Leadership: What It Is and How It Influences Pupil Learning

The emergence of the global era has raised the ante on cross-cultural understanding. Although education has been a traditional means of cross-cultural transmission, relatively little effort to date has gone into understanding how culture influences the content or processes of educational practice. Internationally disseminated theories of educational leadership have been dominated by Western cultural and intellectual frameworks and have ignored a range of other frameworks. It is time to open up our thinking about theories and methods of organizing and administering education throughout the world. There are potential benefits to theory as well as to practice in widening the cultural and intellectual lenses being used in the field. Our purpose in this article is to understand how one might begin to explore educational leadership concepts and practices across cultures. We discuss how culture has been studied in fields of management outside of education. Then we examine the role that a cultural lens could play...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15327930pje7302_6

Unseen forces: The impact of social culture on school leadership

Can Leadership Enhance School Effectiveness

Although educational administration has experienced impressive development over the past three decades, the fact that a robust comparative branch of the field has failed to emerge is equally conspicuous. This article acknowledges and highlights the need for comparative educational administration and argues that the development of conceptual frameworks is imperative in building a comparative dimension. A conceptual framework is described and justified based on a cultural and cross-cultural approach focusing on the school level as the baseline unit for analysis. Specifically, the proposed framework is architectured around the interrelationship between the core concepts of culture, organizational structures, leadership and management processes, curriculum, and teaching and learning. Finally, implicatitons of the model are discussed, including the need for the framework to be operationalized by the development of appropriate research instruments.

Comparative Educational Administration: Developing a Cross-Cultural Conceptual Framework

/pdf/successful-leadership-a-review-of-the-international-2htfvrfksx.pdf

Successful Leadership: A Review of the International Literature

Identifies several features in East Asian schools which coincide with commonly recognized characteristics of effective schools in the Western literature: community support, teacher professionalism, attention to quality and high expectations. Attributes this to the East Asian culture and discusses three major dimensions of the East Asian culture: the individual‐community dimension, the effort‐ability dichotomy and the holistic‐analytic tendency in analyses. Traces the origin of such cultural dimensions in the ancient literature and explores the implications of such cultural dimensions in school management. Briefly highlights two major challenges to the adoption of an effective schooling system in East Asia.

/pdf/school-effectiveness-in-east-asia-concepts-origins-and-28rbedp7wo.pdf

Kai‐ming Cheng

Papers

School effectiveness in East Asia: Concepts, origins and implications

Do large cities have a productivity advantage in China? From the perspective of green total factor productivity growth