Session Information
26 SES 07 B, Diverse Settings and Challenging Cirrcumstances
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper reports findings from a large scale quantitative survey research project on the impact of leadership on pupils’ academic outcomes in secondary schools in Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil. This research was designed to increase knowledge of principals’ work by examining associative and causal relationships between school leadership and student outcomes for the first time in Brazil. Descriptive analyses and structural equation modelling were used to explore the underlying dimensions of leadership practices and identify direct and indirect causal patterns between these and school conditions/culture and change in pupil outcomes. The project findings revealed differences in strategies between principals leading schools in different socioeconomic contexts and between the relative effectiveness of the schools.
Objectives
The research had three main objectives: i) to investigate how school leadership is conceptualised and practised in public high schools in Rio de Janeiro state; ii) to analyse and examine key indicators of ‘effectiveness’ as perceived by the school principals; iii) to identify successful principal leadership strategies and their relationship to student outcomes.
The research mapped the relative ‘effectiveness profiles’ of school principals in public high schools in Rio de Janeiro State in terms of i) measurable student examination results over a consecutive three year period under the leadership of the same principal; ii) the socio-economic profiles of students and; iii) the existing and historic ways of appointing principals. This last aspect (iii) above) is a particularly important contextual aspect, since of the 1290 principals, 36% were political selections, 18% were selected on merit and the remainder were elected by a range of stakeholders. The research, therefore, can be said to have been conducted in a period of policy changes and the findings are informing SEEDUC (Rio de Janeiro State Education Department).
Perspectives/Theoretical Framework
Raising standards in schools is an issue of major global concern to governments and a key policy focus (OECD, 2014; McKinsey, 2012). Five factors are key to knowledge about how to improve schools: i) there are no set formulae or ‘magic bullets’ (Day et al, 2010); ii) the single most important variable is the quality of teachers and their teaching (Kennedy, 2010); iii) the second most important variable is the school principal (Leithwood et al, 2006); iv) involvement of the community outside school is important (Barber et al, 2012); and v) successful school principals are both transformational and instructional (Marks and Printy,2003).
Major categories of successful leadership practices have been identified in a series of recent reviews (e.g., Leithwood et al, 2006; Robinson et al, 2009; Day et al, 2011). This work has developed a classification system i.e. Setting Directions, Developing People, Redesigning the Organization and Managing the Instructional Program that identified 13 practices as “the basics” of successful school leadership. These leadership practices are common across contexts in their general form but highly adaptable and contingent in their specific enactment. As Ray, Clegg and Gordon (2004) explain, leadership is a “reflexively automatic” activity and such activity is never unaffected by context.
These particular leadership practices, along with others, are most effective when they are widely distributed across the organisation (Bell et al, 2003). Where leadership is stretched across those in many formal and informal leadership positions there is greater potential for organisational growth and change (Spillane et al, 2001: 8). Contemporary studies have explored the relationship between different forms of distributed leadership practice and pupil outcomes (Harris, 2004, 2005; Gronn, 2000, 2002; Spillane et al, 2001). This research, therefore, aimed also to investigate to what extent instructional, transformational and distributed leadership theories developed principally in USA, Australian and European contexts might be applied to leadership in Brazil schools.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bell, L, Bolam, R, Cubillo, L (2003) A Systematic Review of the Impact of School Leadership and Management on Student Outcomes, Institute of Education. Day C., Sammons P., Harris A, Hopkins D., Leithwood K, Gu Q., Brown E., 2010. Ten Strong Claims for Successful School Leadership in English Schools NCSL. Day, C., Sammons, P., Leithwood, K., Hopkins, D., Gu, Q. & Brown, E., with Ahtaridou, E., (2011). Successful School Leadership: Linking with Learning and Achievement. Maidenhead: McGraw Hill Open University Press. Gronn, P. (2000) Distributed properties: A new architecture for leadership, Educational Management and Administration, 28 (3), 317-338. Gronn, P. (2002) ‘Distributed leadership as a unit of analysis’, Leadership Quarterly, 13, 423-451. Harris, A. (2004) ‘Distributed leadership: leading or misleading’, Educational Management and Administration, 32(1): 11–24. Harris, A (2005) Crossing boundaries and breaking barriers: Distributing leadership in schools Pamphlet published by the Specialist Schools Trust www.sst-inet.net Kennedy, M. M. (2010) Attribution Error and the Quest for Teacher Quality, Educational Researcher, Vol. 39, No. 8, pp. 591–598. Leithwood, K., Day, C., Sammons, P., Harris, A. and Hopkins, D. (2006) Seven StrongClaims about Successful School Leadership. Nottingham: National College for School Leadership. Leithwood, K., Harris, A., & Strauss, T. (2010). Leading School Turnaround. San Francisco, CA: Wiley. Marks, H. and Printy, S. (2003) Principal leadership and school performance: An integration of transformational and instructional leadership. Educational Administration Quarterly, 39 (3): 370-397. McKinsey (2012) How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better. McKinsey & Company. OECD (2014) TALIS 2013 Results: An International Perspective on Teaching and Learning. Brussels: OECD. Barber. M., Donnelly, K. and Rizvi, S. (2012) Oceans of Innovation: The Atlantic, The Pacific, Global Leadership and the Future of Education. Institute for Public Policy Research. Ray, T. Clegg, S.R. & Gordon, R.D. (2004) A New Look at Dispersed Leadership, in edited by John Storey (Ed), Leadership in Organizations: Current Issues and Key Trends, London: Routledge. Robinson, V., Hohepa, M. & Lloyd, C. (2009) School Leadership and Student Outcomes: Identifying What Works and Why. Best Evidence Syntheses Iteration (BES), Ministry of Education, New Zealand Spillane, J., Halverson, R. and Diamond, J. (2001) “Towards a Theory of Leadership Practice: A Distributed Perspective” Northwestern University, Institute for Policy Research Working Article.
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