Purposes:
This study aimed to improve our understanding of the nature, causes and consequence of school leader efficacy, including indirect influences on student learning. We asked about district ...contributions to school leader efficacy, whether leader self- and collective efficacy responded to the same or different district conditions and the effects of leader efficacy on conditions in the school and the learning of students.
Methods:
Evidence for the study was provided by 96 principal and 2,764 teacher respondents to two separate surveys, along with student achievement data in language and math averaged over 3 years. Path analytic techniques were used to address the objectives for the study.
Findings:
In this study, school leaders' collective efficacy was an important link between district conditions and both the conditions found in schools and their effects on student achievement. School leaders'sense of collective efficacy also had a strong, positive, relationship with leadership practices found to be effective in earlier studies.
Implications:
These results suggest that district leaders are most likely to build the confidence and sense of collective efficacy among principals by emphasizing the priority they attach to achievement and instruction, providing targeted and phased focus for school improvement efforts and by building cooperative working relationships with schools.
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 variables with more or less powerful effects on student learning. Leaders increase student learning by improving the condition or status of selected variables on the Paths. Research Methods: Evidence includes teacher responses to an online survey (1,445 responses) measuring distributed leadership practices in their schools (N = 199) and variables mediating leaders’ effects on students. Grade 3 and 6 math and literacy achievement data were provided by the province’s annual testing program. The 2006 Canadian Census data provided a composite measure of school socioeconomic status. Path modeling techniques were used to test six hypotheses. Results: The Four Paths model as a whole explains 43% of the variation in student achievement. Variables on the Rational, Emotions, and Family Paths explain similarly significant amounts of that variation. Variables on the Organizational Path were unrelated to student achievement. Leadership had its greatest influence on the Organizational Path and least influence on the Family Path. Implications: School leaders and leadership researchers should be guided much more directly by existing evidence about school, classroom, and family variables with powerful effects on student learning as they make their school improvement and research design decisions.
This review examined 57 post-1990 empirical studies of school size effects on a variety of student and organizational outcomes. The weight of evidence provided by this research clearly favors smaller ...schools. Students who traditionally struggle at school and students from disadvantaged social and economic backgrounds are the major benefactors of smaller schools. Elementary schools with large proportions of such students should be limited in size to not more than about 300 students; those serving economically and socially heterogeneous or relatively advantaged students should be limited in size to about 500 students. Secondary schools serving exclusively or largely diverse and/or disadvantaged students should be limited in size to about 600 students or fewer, while those secondary schools serving economically and socially heterogeneous or relatively advantaged students should be limited in size to about 1,000 students.
Purpose:
This study aimed to estimate the impact of collective, or shared, leadership on key teacher variables and on student achievement. As well, it inquired about the relative contribution of ...different sources of such leadership and whether differences among patterns of collective leadership were related to differences in student achievement.
Methods:
Evidence included 2,570 teacher responses from 90 elementary and secondary schools in which four or more teachers completed usable surveys. Student achievement data in language and math averaged over 3 years were acquired through school Web sites. Data were analyzed using path-analytic techniques.
Findings:
Collective leadership explained a significant proportion of variation in student achievement across schools. Higher-achieving schools awarded leadership influence to all school members and other stakeholders to a greater degree than that of lower-achieving schools. These differences were most significant in relation to the leadership exercised by school teams, parents, and students. Principals were awarded the highest levels of influence in schools at all levels of achievement.
Implications:
Influence seems to be an infinite resource in schools. The more those in formal leadership roles give it away, the more they acquire.
This book addresses how to scale-up and sustain effective forms of leadership development over long enough periods of time to realize the positive effects on large numbers of students of improved ...school leadership.
School leaders' influence on student achievement is largely indirect. Using systematic review techniques, this paper assesses the impact that leaders have on their students when they focus their ...improvement efforts on those teacher emotions or dispositions known to have direct effects on teaching and learning in the classroom. Building on an earlier conceptions of how leadership influences student learning and based on a review of research over the last 25 years, this study identifies four distinct teacher emotions which have significant effects on student learning--collective teacher efficacy, teacher commitment, teacher trust in others, and Organizational Citizenship Behavior. This review also describes leadership practices likely to foster productive teacher emotions, most such practices reflecting a transformational approach to leadership.
Parent involvement in their children's learning is widely acknowledged as having a positive effect on student academic success. Of particular relevance is the finding that the influence of parent ...engagement can mitigate differences in socioeconomic status (SES) and family background. Family background is a multi-dimensional concept that includes the family's "educational culture" (including for example, parenting style, parental expectations for children's work at school, direct instructional support for school learning, active parent interest in the school's curriculum, and the monitoring of children's engagement with their school work). It is these features of a child's home environment that directly influence much of the social and intellectual capital students need to be successful at school. This paper summarizes a quasi-experimental field study which explored the relative effects of alternative types of school interventions on parent engagement. All of these interventions aimed to further engage parents in the education of their children as a means of both improving student achievement and closing gaps in achievement for students living primarily in challenging social and economic circumstances. Initiatives by school staffs aimed at helping those families struggling to build productive educational cultures in their homes would appear to be a very promising strategy for closing achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students. The study provides eight lessons other districts might take heed of as they embark on their own parent engagement interventions.
PDF
