Few studies have shared insights on how principals invite student voice to enact equitable leadership practice. The purpose of this study was to explore the ways in which principals demonstrated their commitment to equity via advocating for student voice using in-depth interview data from six school principals in the United States. We present…

Student voice literature has been well mapped with a range of participatory frameworks and typologies over the last three decades. These acknowledge neoliberal uses of voice that reflect a pervasive marketised approach to education, where young people are consumers, teachers surveilled, and leaders are wedged between government and community…

Schooling territories are bounded spaces where policies, bodies, practices, and discourses meet and collide. It is well documented in assessment literature that students who are active decision-makers understand their learning processes and have the necessary wherewithal to access support across schooling spaces. These spaces are co-produced…

This case study explored how a principal in a suburban elementary school in the northeastern United States empowered students and used student voice to develop his own leadership. The researchers collected and analyzed data in the form of observations, principal interviews, and student focus groups. Results and discussion describe and explain how…

In Ireland there is progressive legislation on children's participation in the education system. The Education Act 1998 advocates that school boards should involve students in the school and establish student councils in second-level schools. Since the publication of this legislation progress on realising students' participation in schools has…

In this piece Peter Kent, headteacher of Lawrence Sheriff School in Rugby in the UK, reflects upon the role of the student voice in selecting and recruiting new teaching staff. Contextualised by some recent unsympathetic reporting in the UK media, Peter explains why for their school community, using the student voice to inform teacher recruitment…

While by and large urban public schools continue to not serve the needs of all of the students in their communities, there are some school principals who are creating educational equity for all of their students and deserve to be called social justice leaders. This study aimed to expand the field of school leadership studies and focus on social…

This article explores how leadership can help to enable student voice to occur in schools. We find that the relationship between teachers and the school leader is a critical context for enabling voice. Specifically, we find that the following concepts were important for efforts to enable and foster student voice: (1) clear vision of school that is…

The goal of this study was to examine whether the leadership style of principals affects teacher and student performance. The study includes an elementary, middle, and high school principal along with two teachers from each school who worked at schools that were in good standing from 2007-2011. Each school made adequate yearly progress (AYP) each…

The issues of teacher empowerment and decentralized management have been a part of the educational reform agenda for decades. Recent legislation has required that leadership teams have teacher, support staff, and parent representation, and possibly student representation. Principals receive specific instructions from their Boards of Education as…

Analyzes teachers' and students' perceptions of how participants became empowered in shared governance schools belonging to the Georgia-based League of Professional Schools. Includes descriptions of principals' related leadership practices. Participants reported increased communication quality and frequency both horizontally and vertically.…

Teachers and students must become empowered to be active participants in educational improvement and school decision making. They need opportunities to develop professionally. Empowered schools and their principals are very different from schools with little empowerment. Their principals understand how to foster empowering environments. Empowered…