Collaborative Leadership and School Improvement: Their Effects on Student Learning

• In Event: The Relationship Between Distributed Leadership and Student Learning

Abstract

Objectives
Over the past several decades, school research has developed a theoretically informed empirical knowledge suggesting school leadership affects student learning through strategic actions that focus on changing a constellation of sociocultural, structural, and academic processes (e.g., Bossert et al., 1982; Hallinger et al., 1996; Leithwood et al., 2010; Robinson et al., 2008; Smither et al., 2005). In reviewing previous research, however, scholars have highlighted two specific problems: Most research was cross-sectional rather than longitudinal, and most studies framed leadership as the causal agent for organizational change. In this paper, I investigate leadership as facilitating strategic improvement in building the school’s capacity for change through monitoring changes in teachers’ perceptions of key educational processes affecting student learning, and I identify subsets of schools with similar growth trajectories.

Theoretical Framework
The paper focuses on the relationships among three constructs central to our understanding of leadership and learning: collaborative leadership, capacity for school improvement, and growth in student learning. Following our earlier work, I conceptualize these constructs as embedded within an organizational system that is changing over time and connect changes in these constructs to students’ academic growth. The basic questions are the following: How are changes in collaborative leadership, school capacity for improvement, and student learning related over time? Second, are there subgroups (i.e., latent classes) of schools in the data set related to differences in these organizational factors?

Methods and Sources of Data
Multilevel latent curve analysis (LCA) and latent growth mixture modeling (LGMM) were utilized to examine the proposed changes in organizational processes and students’ growth in reading and math and to identify a set of emergent categories of schools with similar growth trajectories.
Data were used from a cohort of 13,340 students in 190 elementary schools who were followed over a three-year period. School leadership (alpha =.85) was measured by eight items consistent with four preliminary assumptions about leadership directed at improvement (shared vision and collaborative work, distributed among role groups in the school, focused on building conditions for professional learning and change, and directed toward improvement of conditions supporting learning.

Results
Several results were consistent with the proposed model. First, controlling for context covariates, initial status collaborative leadership and change in leadership were significantly and positively related, as were initial status and change in school capacity building. Second, as proposed, change in collaborative leadership was significantly and positively related to change in capacity building. Third, changes in capacity building were positively and significantly related to growth in reading and math Fourth, change in collaborative leadership was indirectly and positively related to growth in reading and math outcomes (through change in capacity building). Finally, I identified three latent growth trajectory classes within the school sample.

Significance
In terms of increasing learning outcomes, results suggested mattered less where schools started than what they did to change key leadership and capacity building processes over time.

Author

• Ronald H. Heck, University of Hawaii - Manoa