This qualitative study explores the early implementation of a university school leadership preparation program and school district collaborative effort to develop school leaders and sustain leadership capacity in nine rural school districts. Emerging findings drawn from survey, focus-group, and participant observation data include (a) the…

This study, a process evaluation, examined the inaugural, year-long leadership development program, Developing Collective Change Agents (DCCA), in a rural district in the southeastern United States. The evaluation described the program's organizational design within the context of a review of related literature for education leadership…

Educator preparation programs for school district leaders are encouraged to review internship topics and activities for relevance in today's changing educational climate and programing. The National Educational Leadership Preparation (NELP) standards are research-based standards that have been approved to assist advanced programs at the master,…

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) administrators at all levels, across different programs and departments, engage in coaching with a set of common goals and principles. The coaching is designed to not only help them grow professionally but also build their capacity to coach those they supervise, including teachers and staff. LAUSD's…

This article examines the leadership of school principals who, based on the narrative case of the Blueberry School, discuss how they as principals would have responded to a similar problematic situation regarding a school change process. The study is grounded in the context of the Norwegian National School Leadership Programme. Theoretically, the…

All principals can learn and implement the actions and behaviors that have the biggest effect on student learning outcomes, namely: (1) to establish a clear schoolwide focus on delivering quality instructional experiences for all students; (2) to initiate, lead, and manage change in school processes, programs, personnel, professional learning, and…

This article introduces new perspectives, principles and recommendations for the successful development of teacher leadership. It draws from literature on teacher leadership, work redesign, and on-the-job leadership development to explore key insights and questions for teacher leadership development, and it presents a conceptual-theoretical model…

This study examined the alignment of the UMT Educational Leadership Program with the Tennessee Administrator Evaluation Rubric, the extent in which its graduates felt prepared to meet each standard of the Tennessee Administrator Evaluation Rubric, and its impact on graduates' preparedness for leadership. Using a mixed-methods design, the…

The heart and soul of any successful organization is outstanding leadership. In education, school divisions are always striving to increase school achievement and as such hold school leaders accountable for this growth. Leaders require explicit leadership skills. This article shares a proposal in which school leaders participate in direct literacy…

K-12 principals are held increasingly accountable for school success, yet their direct impact on students is negligible. Principals must thus work to positively impact teachers in order to indirectly impact student achievement. Transformational leaders are able to utilize intellectual stimulation in order to impact those who work under them. The…

Educational policies and research funding sources in many nations, including the United States, promote the use of evidence-based practice for school development, with evidence most often defined by standardized tests. Scholars and educators have engaged in debates regarding the use of evidence defined by tests and the underlying assumptions about…

Rural school principals often face issues of professional isolation and lack of access to leadership development opportunities, particularly when compared to principals from larger school districts. To address these challenges, the Elgin Children's Foundation launched its Principal Support Program (PSP) in 2017 to support the development of…

Purpose: This study examines a university-based professional learning program, the University School Systems Program (USSP), designed to strengthen district- and school-level leadership for improvement. The program has a record of success in improving student outcomes in participating schools, yet little is known about how the program design may…

In the field of educational leadership, there is some work around the preferred theories of scholars, but little to no research on how the chosen theories are subsequently applied. Better understanding the purpose, role, and depth of how theory is used in educational leadership can help inform the teaching and mentorship of aspiring leaders and…

Early childhood pedagogical leadership has been found to enhance program quality by assisting educators to reach deeper understanding of pedagogical practices. In the early years of school where pedagogical tension resides, research on early childhood pedagogical leadership is scarce. Furthermore, there are few models of early childhood…