When it comes to organizational performance, leaders matter. Without significant attention to the preparation and development of school leaders, government initiatives aimed at building world class education systems are unlikely to succeed. Across the Anglophone world leadership preparation and development has become a key leverage point in…

William Taylor's 1969 chapter provides a springboard to reflect on how what he termed administrator training has developed since the 1960s. Responding also to Baron's insistence in the same volume that education be viewed as political, the article adopts a critical perspective, focusing on leader preparation programmes and exploring how they…

Currently educational research literature demonstrates wide discussion and endorsement of "distributed" leadership while concurrently traditional, hegemonic forms prevail in practice. This article investigates understandings about educational leadership held by Australian school principals. The article describes the contradictory…

A descriptive study was conducted using a researcher-created survey of students (N=10) enrolled in online M.Ed. courses in Educational Leadership during the fall of 2012. The purpose or this study was to determine student perceptions of learning in an online setting versus a traditional setting. Key findings of the study indicate that because of…

The Middle-Grades Leadership Development (MLD) Project was designed to develop principal leaders and leadership teams who create high-performing middle-grades schools. Designed by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, the four-year project was funded from 2013 to 2017 by a U.S. Department of Education Investing in Innovation (i3)…

Dr. Robert J. Birkenholz is a Professor of Agricultural and Extension Education in the Department of Agricultural Communication, Education, and Leadership (ACEL) at The Ohio State University. In 2002, he was appointed Chair of the department and served in that administrative role for two terms. In 2009, Dr. Birkenholz returned to a full-time…

This practice paper describes how leadership education faculty and students at Virginia Tech have facilitated change through the use of appreciative inquiry (Ai) at the departmental level, program level, and project level. Appreciative inquiry has been found to be a useful tool for leadership educators, as its foundation in social constructionist…

This commentary details the process aimed at developing the Inaugural National Leadership Education Research Agenda. The goal of the project is to create a guiding document to assist in further defining Leadership Education as a discipline and provide directional research priorities for that discipline. The commentary provides a foundational…

The tapestry of leadership development has a long history in American higher education. As a faculty member for the last 26 years of my career teaching the history of student affairs and higher education and studying college student leadership, I enjoyed examining perspectives on the evolution of leadership development and how it grew from being…

Complexity and rapid change prompt the need for institutions of higher education to reexamine curricula and programs to ensure they are preparing graduates for 21st century career opportunities. At Ohio State University, conversion from quarters to semesters provided the impetus to revisit the undergraduate curriculum and create a new Community…

The purpose of this study was to assess the perceptions of principals who serve as mentors for an internship program for aspiring principals at East Tennessee State University. Each mentor was interviewed to gather information about the internship program, the benefits of mentoring in the program, and what the mentors may have learned about their…

This study examined the effects of a newly developed on-site consultancy programme to improve global quality of the child care environment in non-parental child care centres for 0- to 4-year-old children as measured with the ITERS-R/ECERS-R. Using a randomised controlled trial with a pretest, posttest, and follow-up test, we compared 35…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of informal mentoring on the leadership development of women in leadership positions in Vietnamese universities. Methodology: This study was qualitative in nature; therefore, ethnographic design methodology was utilized to collect data. The data collection was performed in three stages:…

The purpose of this researcher was to examine the in-service experiences of seven headteachers in Luwinga ward in Mzuzu, Malawi, and the challenges they encountered in their first year on the job. A modified version of the questionnaire and interview guide developed by the members of the International Study of the Preparation of Principals at the…

Across the United States, there are schools whose students are significantly outperforming and out-improving those from nearby schools. In almost any geographic location in America, within a 30-minute drive there exist schools where classrooms are alive with stimulating learning, day in and day out. Not too far away from these schools are schools…