Jingping Sun - Böcker

This book presents successful principals’ values, practices and qualities observed in nine countries and across different cultural contexts. The work reports evidence about successful school leadership along with indications of how they navigate the complex layers of influences on schools, teachers and students in building and sustaining success. This is mostly qualitative case study evidence resulting from the 20-year ongoing International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP), the largest and longest-running mixed-method qualitative research project in the world about successful principalship. The book includes individual reviews of the case studies conducted in individual countries (e.g., UK, US, Australia, Spain) as well as an overarching meta-synthesis of the research evidence across all countries.It addresses four broad questions:How was principal leadership “success” defined in each of the countries and cases?What leadership practices were used by successful principals to achieve and sustain success?What were the personal qualities of successful principals in different organizational and national contexts?How did the enactment of successful leadership practices vary over time and across contexts?The book appeals to a wide audience, such as university faculty and graduate students in educational leadership programs; school administrators; school middle managers, and policymakers.

While considerable evidence indicates that school leaders are able to make important contributions to the success of their students, much less is known about how such contributions are made. This book provides a comprehensive account of research aimed at filling this gap in our knowledge, along with guidelines about how school leaders might use this knowledge for their own school improvement work. Leadership practices known to be effective for improving student success are outlined in the first section of the book while the remaining sections identify four “paths” along which the influence of those practices “flow” to exercise an influence on student success. Each of the Rational, Emotional, Organizational and Family paths are populated by conditions or variables known to have relatively direct effects on student success and also open to influence by effective leadership practices. While the Four Path framework narrows the attention of school leaders to a still-considerable number conditions known to contribute to student success, it leaves school leaders the autonomy to select, for improvement efforts, the sub-set of conditions that make the most sense in their own local circumstances. The approach to leadership described in this book provides evidence-based guidance on what to lead and flexibility on how to lead for purposes of improving student learning.