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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium is about how school leaders effectively raise standards of learning and achievement. It draws upon extensive syntheses of empirical studies and primary research carried by scholars from Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA in discussing how school principals, build and sustain optimal conditions, structures and cultures for learning and teaching and through this, impact positively on the achievement of students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and indigenous communities. The symposium reveals the conceptual and methodological strengths of using integrated leadership approaches and cross-disciplinary perspectives to explain the effects of the complex range, combinations and accumulations of context sensitive strategies and actions that effective principals employ over time in striving to improve their schools.

Sub Unit

• Division A - Administration / Division A - Section 1: Leadership

Chair

• Qing Gu, University of Nottingham

Papers

• Positive Leadership and Organizational Impacts: A Cross-Disciplinary Synthesis - Karen Seashore Louis, University of Minnesota; Joseph F. Murphy, Vanderbilt University

• How an Integrated Model of School Leadership Influences Student Achievement: A Replication Study - kenneth A. leithwood, OISE/University of Toronto; Jingping Sun, The University of Alabama; Randall E. Schumacker, The University of Alabama

• How Successful School Leaders Use Transformational and Instructional Strategies to Make a Difference - Christopher W. Day, University of Nottingham; Qing Gu, University of Nottingham; Pam M. Sammons, University of Oxford

• Blending Leadership for Learning in Aboriginal and Indigenous Communities - Greer Johnson, Griffith University; Colin Neil Dempster, Griffith University; Bev Fluckiger

Discussant

• Viviane M. Robinson, University of Auckland