Developing Rural School Leaders combines a focus on rural education and school leadership development to illustrate how the teaching and learning conditions in rural schools can be enhanced through ...transformative leadership coaching. By unpacking literature related to rural school leadership development and using case studies to authentically illustrate the complexities involved in rural school leadership development, this book explores how leaders can develop their abilities to increase data-informed instructional decision making, create a culture that supports teaching and learning, and develop other leaders. Ultimately, this important book concludes with an exploration of the opportunities and challenges of developing rural school leaders.
Purpose
– In this paper, the authors present a case study of successful school leadership at County Line Middle School. The purpose of the paper is to identify how particular leadership practices and ...beliefs were adapted to increase student achievement in this rural, high-poverty school in the southeastern USA.
Design/methodology/approach
– After purposefully selecting this school, the authors adapted interview protocols, questionnaires, and analysis frameworks from the International Successful School Principalship Project to develop a multi-perspective case study of principal leadership practices at the school.
Findings
– The findings illustrate the practices which led to students at this school, previously the lowest-performing in the district, achieving significantly higher on state standardized tests, getting along “like a family,” and regularly participating in service learning activities and charity events. A particularly interesting finding was how the principal confronted the school's negative self-image and adapted common leadership practices to implement a school-wide reform that suited its unique context.
Research limitations/implications
– While the findings of the study explicate the specific ways the principal adapted leadership strategies to enhance student learning, this study also highlights the need to understand how principals become familiar with their community's needs, cultures, norms, and values, and exercise leadership in accordance with them.
Practical implications
– The case offers an example of the need for context-responsive leadership in schools. In particular, it illustrates how this principal enacted leadership strategies that successfully negotiated what Woods (2006) referred to as the changing politics of the rural. To realize this success, the principal utilized his understanding of this low income, rural community to guide his leadership practices. Critically, part of this understanding included the ways the community was connected to and isolated from dominant sub-urban and urban societies, and how to build enthusiasm and capacity through appeals to local values.
Originality/value
– While it is widely acknowledged that school leaders need to consider their school and community contexts when making leadership decisions, less research has focussed on understanding how this can be achieved. This case provides rich examples of how this was accomplished in a rural, high-poverty middle school.
It is widely acknowledged that context matters, that it affects leadership practices. A large body of descriptive studies documents common elements in the work of school superintendents. What is less ...well known is how superintendents’ leadership may be expressed very differently given the varying contexts in which they work. The purpose of this cross-national study was to identify the specific variations in context which influence superintendents’ leadership, and to examine how superintendents respond to these variations in context. Structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with 12 superintendents- six from across Sweden and six from Wisconsin, in the United States. The findings illustrate that the work of superintendents is paradoxically similar but different. Superintendents described common primary work priorities, challenges and contextual variations which influenced their practice. Yet, differences in district size, organizational culture, community characteristics, and geographic location significantly influenced their leadership practices. Despite their challenges, all superintendents responded to and shaped the context of their work. The study provides illustrative examples of superintendent leadership in situ, and supports the argument that leadership is both embedded in and influenced by context. The study also furthers the authors’ emerging theory of context-responsive leadership.
The increased need for effective school leadership development, especially in rural and high-needs schools, has led to an increase in research-practice partnerships between districts and ...universities. Yet, there is a need for systematic analysis of the outcomes of such partnerships. The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of a leadership development initiative on 16 school leaders and eight leadership coaches and their leadership and leadership coaching practices. The initiative, the Leadership Learning Community (LLC), was created through a research-practice partnership between a consortium of 12 predominantly rural, high-poverty school districts and two universities to meet the districts' leadership development needs. The results of the study demonstrate the benefits of rural school districts partnering with other districts and universities to provide cross-district leadership development through facilitated professional communities and job-embedded coaching to develop rural school leaders and coaches able to lead continuous school improvement efforts.
Purpose: The purpose of this article is to examine how the leadership coaching capacities of experienced school leaders can be developed to support less-experienced school leaders to lead continuous ...improvement efforts. In this article, we report the findings of a 2-year study of experienced school leaders who developed their leadership coaching knowledge, skills, and dispositions to enhance the capacities of less-experienced school leaders in a research–practice partnership called the Leadership Learning Community. Research Methods: We drew on qualitative research methodology to answer the study’s research question. To collect our data, we utilized participant observations of 12 professional development days and 70 job-embedded coaching sessions over a 2-year period, yearly semistructured interviews with the eight leadership coach participants, and other artifacts related to the Leadership Learning Community. We analyzed our data using multiple rounds of coding to arrive at the themes. Findings: The findings highlight the possibilities of developing leadership coaching capacity through a combination of community-based structured and facilitated learning opportunities and experiential learning. The findings also add to the limited research regarding leadership coaching as a strategy for enhancing school leadership development. Conclusion and Implications: The results of the study provide assistance to national and state administrator organizations, educational service districts, and school district administrators endeavoring to meet the learning needs of school leaders through leadership coaching. Further research should be conducted to understand how the leadership coaching capacities of leadership supervisors and developers can be facilitated.
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the ways principals in three high-needs middle schools enacted core leadership practices in concert with their immediate contexts to institutionalize ...comprehensive school reforms and support student learning. Research Methods: The schools were selected from a geographically stratified sample of public middle schools in a state in the southeastern United States. Multiple linear regression was used to identify schools performing better than expected considering their levels of poverty and other school-related factors. The final three schools, one from each geographic region, showed steady increases in academic achievement and school climate following the arrival of their principals. Data were primarily collected from interviews with principals, teaching and nonteaching staff, and parents using protocols adapted from the International Successful School Principalship Project. Findings: The findings explicate the large degree to which the leadership practices and beliefs that influenced student achievement in these schools were adapted to and commensurate with each school’s immediate context. Furthermore, they illustrate how principals used these practices to institutionalize school-wide reform efforts as vehicles for leading change within their schools. Implications: The findings substantiate research on successful school leadership in high-needs middle schools. They also extend this research by examining the way core transformational and instructional leadership practices can be adapted to suit various school contexts and institutionalize school-wide reform efforts to enhance student learning. Further research is required to understand how principals decide to adapt their leadership practices, and how aspiring leaders can best learn to do so.
PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine how a school leadership team in a rural, high-poverty elementary school learned to lead continuous school improvement in a research–practice ...partnership.Design/methodology/approachThis case study draws on qualitative research methods, improvement science and Deming's notion of a system of profound knowledge to identify how members of the school leadership team understood and approached their school improvement work differently as a result of engaging in continuous improvement processes in a research–practice partnership.FindingsThe findings illustrate how engaging in continuous improvement processes in the research–practice partnership enhanced the leadership team members' capacities to prioritize and solve problems, incorporate multiple and diverse perspectives in problem-solving efforts and establish a culture of increased risk-taking and ownership of teaching and learning outcomes. In sum, the members of the leadership team became the drivers of their own change processes.Originality/valueThe findings provide insight into how leaders in rural, high-poverty schools can build capacity within their schools to meet the demand for increased student achievement by leading collaborative, continuous improvement processes grounded in improvement science in research–practice partnerships.
This study proposes that dynamically changing organizations can achieve stable productive capacity (or environmentally stable states) by adaptively processing internal and external volatility. It ...tests this proposal with agent network measures rather than with more traditional variables. We examine three such network dynamics that, according to the collective perspectives of complexity theory, influence a network's capacity to perform: informal leadership, interaction among agents, and clique engagement. Data were collected at an elementary school in the southeastern United States; the methodologies include qualitative interviews, network analysis, and response surface methods. Results revealed that informal leadership and engagement in cliques positively affect the productive capacity of organizations, and that cliques can absorb large amounts of information flow (volatility) thus promoting stable productivity levels. That is, collective, information-processing adaptability fosters stable productivity plateaus that absorb unpredictable demands. Suggestions for practitioners are provided.
PurposeThe purpose of this paper was to determine what experienced school leaders learned through participating in a three-year leadership initiative, called the Leadership Learning Community (LLC), ...that helped them coach less experienced leaders to lead school improvement efforts.Design/methodology/approachData were collected and analyzed using a qualitative design throughout the three-year initiative.FindingsThe findings indicate the LLC leadership coaches learned to accept and navigate the leaders' developmental and contextual needs, practiced and honed their coaching skills and recognized their own developmental needs.Originality/valueThese findings address the paucity of research on leadership coach learning and development.
In this article, I provide findings from a multisite case study of three urban high schools. In each of the schools, principals endeavoured to foster the capabilities of their department chairs to ...enhance school-wide instructional capacity and increase student achievement. Data were gathered from interviews, participant observations and document analyses during a two-year Leadership for Learning grant funded by the Wallace Foundation. The findings highlight the critical role the principals played in cultivating a shared understanding of the need for change; engaging department chairs in authentic instructional leadership initiatives; and providing the ongoing support, resources and commitment necessary for the chairs to enhance their instructional leadership capacities. I conclude the article with implications for research and practice.
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