Even though the concept has been introduced more than 2 decades ago, available evidence conventionally operationalises shared instructional leadership as a composite, which has missed the opportunity to reveal to what extent principal and teacher instructional leadership helps improve instructional outcomes. Using the complex survey data collected…

This qualitative research investigated the applicability of teacher leadership, a notion mostly grounded in the Western literatures, to the educational settings in China. The current research focused on the Chinese lead teachers, backbone teachers (BTs), their experiences, and perspectives of teacher leadership. As a program designed to increase…

School-university partnerships bring meaningful learning opportunities for teachers, and empowering teachers with leadership roles has become an important approach for teacher learning. This study shows how teacher leaders exercised brokerage practice to support teacher learning in one small-scale school-university partnership in China based on…

This paper seeks a deeper understanding of how principals strive for instructional leadership with organisational management strategies in China today. Drawing from 116 interviews of district supervisors and school principals from two regions, we first conduct qualitative analysis to map the dimensions and sub-dimensions of Chinese principal…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to construct a scale that is contextually suitable for measuring early childhood leadership in China. Design/methodology/approach: Following a standard scale development procedure, both qualitative and quantitative research approaches were addressed. Qualitative data was collected from 21 semistructured…

While such connection between an instructional leader and a vigorous teacher-leader team seems natural in the school with instructional effectiveness, the research evidence is surprisingly limited. To fill the gap, these factors are linked such that principals' effort on instruction will lead them to change the school's leadership structure by…

This paper considers the effectiveness of leadership development (LD) processes in relation to school leaders' needs within an eastern Chinese District Education Bureau (DEB). The analysis is based on Chinese and English sources relating to LD, documentary analysis of DEB initiatives and interviews with ten school leaders from two schools. The…

This paper draws from a larger exploratory qualitative study that investigated the perceptions of principals and teacher leaders regarding their interactions in Chinese urban primary schools during contemporary curriculum reform. Insights from micropolitics, notably two core constructs of cooperation and conflict, were utilised to examine the…

This paper examines how one particular class of educational leader--international school Heads--relate to managerialism. Representing a novel site of new theorisation, the independence enjoyed by these leaders allows a 'purer' view of managerialism as experienced 'in here' (inside the subject), not just as a reaction to what is 'out there' (i.e.…

This study examined and compared school autonomy in China and the United States. Based on the international PISA 2012 school data, the authors examined three aspects of school autonomy. We found that in comparison with the United States, (1) principals from China were less likely to have responsibility over eleven school decisions (hiring…