Conference Agenda

Overview:

Empirical research studies (Leithwood et al., 2006) conclude that the principal is the second most influential variable in student academic success. Over the past twenty years, the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP) has conducted over 150 qualitative case studies of successful principals in 27 different countries, providing contextualized understandings of school and principal success in challenging contexts. These findings have been robust across time, region, and country, a significant finding as the phenomenon of policy transfer has increased high stakes testing globally over the past two decades.

Research Questions:

Notwithstanding Leithwood’s (e.g., 2005; 2006) work over a number of years combining the empirical and conceptual, we were intrigued by five questions which did not yet seem to have been answered:

1. What similarities and differences can be identified in the beliefs and behaviours of successful school principals across national cultures and policy contexts?

1. What part do local, regional, national and international policies play in influencing the work of successful principals?

1. Do different countries have different ways of defining success?

1. How do high-stake assessments and accountability measures influence the practices of successful principals?

1. Do different socio-economic contexts in which schools operate affect the ways in which successful principals work? Are different qualities and skills needed?

1. How do successful principals come to be successful? How do they learn about their work and acquire the skills needed to create and sustain school improvement?”

ISSPP Methodology

Initially, the ISSPP project utilized multi-perspective, qualitative case study methods. The selection of the case sites was done using purposive sampling of schools that controlled for differences in accountability standards and evidence of improved student performance during the tenure of the principal under study. To gain multiple perspectives about what a principal had contributed to a school’s success, the principal, teachers, school staff and parents were interviewed using a semi-structured protocol.

Findings from Two Decades of Research on Successful Leadership

Over the past twenty years, ISSPP has produced robust global findings about school leadership which ensures student success beyond narrow policy prescriptions (Author, 2007; Leithwood, Day, Sammons, Harris, & Hopkins, 2006; Author, 2006). The ISSPP project has developed a nuanced and contextually sensitive conception of success that extends beyond student outcomes on high-stakes tests to student wellness, community perceptions, and equity. Additionally, global research findings have indicated increasingly complex contexts for school leadership, including digitalization, globalization, externalized accountability policies, and increasingly diverse demographics. Closely related, across the international studies, researchers also reported multiple layers of influence on individuals (children) with regards to their education from the home to society and culture (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Such new and perennial tensions and complexities in a rapidly changing society require a multi-level and multi-layered perspective (Author, 2020a) where schools are complex adaptive systems and societal institutions (Author, 2020b; Morrison, 2010).

Given this level of project saturation and findings about increasing complex and multi-layered contexts for schools, the ISSPP has designed the next phase of its work by developing a theoretical framework of complexity theory and ecological systems theory as well as an analytical framework to explain school and leadership success as part of a multi-level phenomenon with relations among individuals and groups from classrooms to nation state and transnational levels amidst the complex contemporary situation. Extended research methods feature a survey instrument as well as updated qualitative interview protocols.

Papers in this symposium present a synthesis of ISSPP findings, examples from the United States and Australia, and future directions for ISSPP.

This paper presents the results of a meta-ethnography of the case studies conducted in nine countries published in journals and books from the ISSPP. ISSPP publications point to the importance of unveiling how and why ISSPPs differ across contexts. Research synthesis has the advantage of describing this over individual studies. Results from such synthesis can help to provide robust claims, optimize findings, identify context-free elements and context-specific elements, unveil context influence patterns, and paint a thorough and cohesive picture of successful principalship at the global level. Such findings can also provide guidance for practitioners and policy makers. This paper reviews the eighty-five articles and twenty-three chapters involving 108 school cases from the U.S., UK, Australia, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Cyprus, and New Zealand. We adopted the meta-ethnography (Doyle, 2003; Savin-Baden & Major, 2007) as the most appropriate method to review this body of ISSPP studies since this approach can help us discover the connections and complex interactions between agents (e.g., principals and their own characteristics) and contexts at multiple levels (school, community, district-wide, nation-wide, etc.), and what have happened in similar or different contexts overtime. In addition to theme identification within and across contexts, we synthesized the interpretations of the original researcher(s) of each study to retain meaning in context, a promising strength of meta-ethnography (Weed, 2005). Student academic achievement in the broad sense lies at the centre of school success, with other factors (e.g., schools’ reputation, learning experiences) emphasized to different extent in different countries. While successful principals do similar things, their most frequently reported practices vary across countries. For example, principals in US focused often on improving instruction and fostering data teams whereas their counterparts in Australia, Cyprus, Israel, New Zealand, and Spain demonstrated strong advocacy for parents who have been marginalized. British, Sweden and Norwegian principals work for inclusive school culture and communicate widely with stakeholders. Successful principal practices also vary with school contexts (e.g., a low-income school, in a multi-ethnicity school). Local and national policies did play a role in influencing the work of successful principals. For example, principals in Spain with educational policies promoting equity and social justice with no laws to alleviate the severe problems of educational inequality were empathetic, approachable, and accessible while principals in Norway showed optimism, creativity, and persistence in response to the new and contradictory policy expectations. More findings are provided in the full paper.

Doyle, L. H. (2003). Synthesis through meta-ethnography: Paradoxes, enhancements, and possibilities. Qualitative Research, 3(3), 321–344. Savin-Baden, M., & Major, C. H. (2007). Using interpretative meta-ethnography to explore the relationship between innovative approaches to learning and their influence on faculty understanding of teaching. Higher Education, 54(6), 833–852. Weed, M. (2005). Meta interpretation: A method for the interpretive synthesis of qualitative research. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 6(1), 1–17.

In this paper, we recap the history and evolution of ISSPP research in the USA with research teams that grew from one location (Buffalo, NY) in 2002 to seven teams at present. Drawing on a meta-analysis of leadership studies in the United States and other Western countries, including effective schools research on high-needs U.S. schools, Leithwood and Riehl (2005) identified four core practices necessary but not sufficient for success in any context: 1. Setting directions 2. Developing people 3. Redesigning the organization 4. Managing the instructional program These four core practices were used as a common analytical framework for analyzing interview data within and across the U.S.A. cases. All of the cases were selected with a common sampling strategy whereby we purposely selected schools with improved student outcomes and nominations by school district leaders and organizations. Some research teams focus on public schools while others include religious schools; some schools are situated in districts that have tighter coupling with support within accountability mandates and district systems while others have more loose coupling whereby schools seek out programs and innovations on their own initiative. Data sources include semi-structured qualitative interviews with the district leaders, principal, teachers, parents, and students in order to provide a more elaborated understanding of the phenomena i.e., school success and the principal’s leadership contribution to that success. Successful principals in New York, Massachusetts, Texas, South Carolina, Arizona and Indiana set directions and developed people around a school direction and redesigned the school organizations around collaboration. Like the Buffalo cases, these school leaders provided sustained professional development aimed at improved instructional practices and used data as a source of reflection and planning. At the same time, the additional U.S. cases conducted over the past fifteen years reflect increased leadership attention on the needs of increasingly diverse students from internal demographic shifts as well as global population migrations. While some of the principals grew up in the neighborhood areas or communities in which their schools were situated, that was not the case for all of the principals. The principals were conscious of their own histories and were committed to learning about the history of the school and surrounding community. These cases of successful principals in high-needs Northeast, Southeast, Southwest and Midwest U.S. schools provide qualitative, contextualized understandings of school success and principal contributions to that success at particular points in time over the past 20 years.

Byrne, D., & Callaghan, G. (2013). Complexity theory and the social sciences: The state of the art. Routledge. Leithwood, K., Day, C., Sammons, P., Harris, A., & Hopkins, D. (2006). Successful school leadership: What it is and how it influences pupil learning. Leithwood, K., & Riehl, C. (2005). What do we already know about educational leadership. A new agenda for research in educational leadership, 12.

In two devolved Australian school systems, for over 20 years Australian researchers have been interested in understanding how successful school leaders lead schools that have a broad range of student and school outcomes that are above expectations (Author, 2020a & b). This paper draws upon findings from five Tasmanian and 17 Victorian multiple perspective case studies of successful primary, secondary and special school principals. All cases included interviews with the principal, senior teachers, teachers, students, parents and school council members and document analysis, In addition, eight cases included observation of the school, and one case included a teacher survey. The cases reveal a complicated pattern of leadership activities by the principal and other school leaders that includes setting school directions, building positive cultures, developing supportive organizational structures, enhancing personal, professional, organizational and community capacity, and developing networks, collaborations, partnership and stakeholder engagement. These areas of leadership action interact with school, staff, family and broader contextual factors to develop outstanding teaching and learning that results in a wide array of positive student and school outcomes. Student outcomes include academic, extra-curricular, co-curricular, personal and social areas. School outcomes include reputation, learning environment, resource, community empowerment and teacher quality areas. Successful school leadership is shown to be a complex endeavor, led by the principal but involving many, that can be sustained successfully over many years, and which leads to important and diverse student and school outcomes. The findings are related to both system and complexity views of educational leadership to provide a contemporary view of educational leadership that is especially suited to times of rapid and disruptive change.

Author, 2020a Author, 2020b

A range of research by ISSPP members from more than 20 countries over the last two decades has found that, regardless of national contexts, cultures, policies and individual school contexts and conditions, successful principals work takes place in schools as complex adaptive systems and is predicated upon educational purposes that include but are broader than the functional, founded on principles of social justice and inclusion (Biesta, 2015). The newly developed ISSPP research design reported in the proposed symposium has been developed as a consequence of these findings. It recognises the importance of examining leadership in the context of how principals navigate within and between both individual and system levels (e.g., between teachers, principals and middle leaders, governance, communities’ policy histories, national cultures) over time and at critical points in growing, achieving, and sustaining success. Thinking in this way may require a paradigm shift for many towards an ‘holistic, connectionist and integrationist view of the individual and the environment, rather than a fragmented, reductionist perspective’ (Youngblood, 1997:34). Using this way of thinking acknowledges that successful leaders go beyond, ‘rational-scientific’ methods, employing ‘soft skills to foster trust, and leverage the power of communities. Implicitly, it rejects linear and predictive explanations or singular views of truth about how principals achieve success, asserting that their work is dynamic, emergent, and dependent on the interaction of several variables, not all of which can be observed or predicted, but all of which are connected. This paper presents the future directions for ISSPP, including the use of complexity theory and ecological systems theory in research on successful school leadership, as they lead and manage the complex interactions within and between micro, meso, macro, exon and chrono level systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Drawing on 20 years of extant empirical research findings as well as complexity theory and ecological systems theory, we present an analytical framework that informs data collection and analysis. Further, the paper explains the use of a comparative design, a multi-perspective, multi-level approach in conducting research that enables multiple causalities, multiple perspectives, and multiple effects to be charted. The paper concludes with implications of the ISSPP for the educational leadership field.

Biesta, G. (2015). What is Education For? On Good Education, Teacher Judgement, and Educational Professionalism. European Journal of Education, 50 (1), 75-87. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard university press.