How Successful School Leaders Use Transformational and Instructional Strategies to Make a Difference

• In Event: How School Leaders Impact Student Learning and Achievement: Leadership Principles, Models, and Effects Revisited

Abstract

Objectives
The most commonly researched leadership models that have been identified as resulting in success are ‘instructional’ and ‘transformational’. This paper illustrates how successful leaders combine the too often dichotomised practices of transformational and instructional leadership in different ways across different phases of their schools’ development in order to progressively shape and ‘layer’ the improvement culture in making a difference to students’ outcomes.

Perspectives
By ‘layering’, we are referring to the ways in which, within and across different phases of their schools’ improvement journeys, the principals selected, clustered, integrated and placed different emphases upon different combinations of both transformational and instructional strategies which were timely and fit for purpose. We identified these leadership approaches as the ‘layering’ of ‘fit for purpose’ combinations and accumulations of within phase leadership strategies and actions over time through the enactment of principals’ personal and professional values and visions and in response to careful diagnosis and multiple and sometimes conflicting communities of interest.

Methods
Empirical data were drawn from a three-year mixed methods national study which investigated associations between the work of principals in effective and improving primary and secondary schools in England and student outcomes as defined (but not confined) by their national examination and assessment results over three years. The research began with a critical survey of the extant literature, followed by a national survey which explored principals’ and key staff’s perceptions of school improvement strategies and actions that they believed had helped foster better student attainment. This was complemented by multi-perspective in-depth case studies of a sub-sample of twenty schools.

Results
The research provides new empirical evidence of how successful principals directly and indirectly promote improvement over time through combining both transformational and instructional leadership strategies. Its findings show that the school’s ability to improve and sustain effectiveness over the long term is the result of principals’ understanding and diagnosis of their schools’ needs and applications of clearly articulated and organisationally shared and applied educational values, and combinations and accumulations of context-sensitive strategies which are ‘layered’ within and across school development phases, and through which improvements in the school’s work, culture and achievements are progressively embedded.

Conclusions and Implications
These findings provide empirical support to Leithwood and Sun’s (2012) claim that, ‘improvement requires leaders to enact a wide range of practices’ (2012, p. 403). They also go beyond their claim by providing a ‘practice specific’ conceptualisation of what we call ‘successful’ school leadership. The mixed methods research design enabled a finer grained, more nuanced evidence based understanding of the leadership roles of principals in effective and improving schools in achieving and sustaining educational outcomes in schools than is possible through either single lens quantitative analyses and meta-analyses or purely qualitative approaches.

References
Leithwood, K., Sun, J. (2012). The nature and effects of transformational school leadership: A meta-analytic review of unpublished research, Educational Administration Quarterly, 48, 3, 387-423.

Authors

• Christopher W. Day, University of Nottingham

• Qing Gu, University of Nottingham

• Pam M. Sammons, University of Oxford