Leading for Student Academic Outcomes: What Counts?

• In Event: Poster Session 4
  In Poster Session: Issues in Education and Leadership

Abstract

The increasing demand on school principals to raise student achievement in the accountability era has brought the attention of researchers back from transformational leadership to instructional leadership. Traditionally, these two leadership types have been considered separately in the literature. While researchers often advocate one type in favour of the other, this study argues that both types are important to schools and attempts to simultaneously examine their influence on academic school outcomes. Based on the empirical data collected from 48 Hong Kong secondary schools, results have shown that the inclination towards instructional leadership was stronger in the top 25% of academically performing schools in comparison to the bottom 25%; however, a similar pattern of transformational leadership is found in both quadrants.

Author

• Paula Kwan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong