This article examines and critiques the leadership capacity of department leaders in a high school and attempts to gain a deeper understanding of how department leaders perceive their role as teacher leaders, making a distinction between what an individual department leader does in his or her position and teacher leadership as a form of continuous…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the meaning of teacher leadership from teachers' perspectives. The authors examine teachers' practice of and talk about legitimate sources of power and influence in the context of an urban high school reform. Design: This is an interpretive study of teacher leadership situated in one small high…

In the North Middlesex Regional School District, located in north central Massachusetts near the New Hampshire border, teachers knew that the district had urgent challenges. Isolated programs provided rigor to only some students, student achievement scores showed room for improvement, and a recent accreditation review had raised questions about…

Most work on professional learning opportunities in education focuses on classroom teachers and school principals. In this paper the authors take a broader look at school leaders' opportunities to learn from a distributed perspective. Using one mid-sized urban school district as their case, they examine the opportunities to learn (OTL) of school…

The purpose of this study was to identify and to explore programs related to school leadership in two California charter schools. Four research questions guided this study: (a) What policies, programs, and processes are used to improve teacher and administrative leadership (school leadership) in charter schools? (b) How are resources used to…

This article examines the use of interim assessments in elementary schools in the School District of Philadelphia. The article reports on the qualitative component of a multimethod study about the use of interim assessments in Philadelphia. The study used an organizational learning framework to explore how schools can best develop the capacity to…

In this paper, the author explores the rural school context and its teacher leaders as a third transformational leadership prototype adding to Leithwood and Jantzi's (1999) two transformational leadership prototypes of females and new teachers in the elementary school. The author helps illuminate new understanding of rural schools and their highly…

Schools are required to meet a range of students' learning needs and effective school leadership is needed for the implementation of pedagogical practices responsive to the challenges of increasing student diversity and academic accountability. Literature on differentiated instruction and its constituent elements suggests differentiation results…

This research paper is about the role of the principal in enabling teacher leadership for pedagogical innovations and school improvement studied in two Innovative Designs for Enhancing Achievements in Schools (IDEAS) schools in Singapore and Australia over a 3-year period from 2005 to 2007. The research reported is based on the developing…

Since the early 1980s, policy makers and educational leaders have pinned high hopes on mentoring as a vehicle for reforming teaching and teacher education (Feiman-Nemser, 1996). A review of literature written throughout the evolution of mentoring illustrated that researchers focused most of their attention on a relatively narrow aspect of…

Educational reform is not easy. As school leaders search for a format that leads to improvement on many fronts concurrently, data teams is one such promising practice. The data team design not only involves sensemaking of data as evidence of effective teaching and learning, but also builds a professional learning community, distributes leadership,…

This paper reports one major finding from a large two-year, mixed-methods study that investigated the process of beginning teachers' learning to teach with information and communication technology (ICT). Among the ten participants involved in the qualitative portion of the study, three stood out from the rest in their effort to use ICT in…

Since 2004, AISD has conducted an annual survey to monitor campus staff's perceptions of their school environment. The survey measures elements of teaching and learning conditions most critical to school success.

Although most schools are formally structured to support a hierarchical model of leadership, the culture within the education profession supports a rich egalitarian ethic. This article discusses the relational model of school leadership, which offers an alternative to the hierarchical model. The relational model views leadership as residing not in…

"The Learning Principal" is an eight-page newsletter published eight times a year. It focuses on the important and unique work of school principals. This issue includes: (1) Landmark Study Examines U.S. Professional Learning: Findings Point the Way to Improving Student Achievement (Stephanie Hirsh); (2) School Leadership: Q&A:…