Session Information
26 SES 10 B, Successful Principals and Inservice Training
Paper Session
Contribution
The goal of schools and school systems to develop educated citizens for the 21st century may be widely shared, but the means to achieve this target are many. One way to measure school quality is how well students perform on high stakes exams (Meyer & Benavot, 2013). Others advocate innovation and the development of a meaningful learning environment (OECD, 2013). How have these two poles of achievement and meaningful learning been characterized in the educational discourses about what makes an effective school? And what role do school leaders play in this process?
Over the last 35 years, with local and global trends, technology changes, economic crises and employment challenges, it is reasonable to assume that the educational field has changed, and that these changes might be manifested in the discourses about effective and successful schools. The educational research community has an important part in defining this discourse as evidenced in published educational journal articles and research reports.
Our interest in exploring these discourses arises from our participation in the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP), a 12-year international project which started in 2001 with teams of researchers from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, England, Canada, the United States, Australia and Hong Kong developing case studies that examined the practices of successful school leaders in their respective countries (Day & Leithwood, 2007). Twenty countries are now represented in the project. The first phase of the ISSPP produced over 100 case studies, and while a common research protocol was used across the countries, definitions of success have varied across contexts. Some research teams focused on increased student achievement outcomes as the major criterion for the selection of successful schools and principals, while other researchers have argued for moving beyond student academic outcomes to embrace non-cognitive social outcomes such as student empowerment (Mulford et. al, 2007) and student happiness (Winton, 2013); a focus on democratic schooling (Moos, Kreisler, & Koford, 2008); or the principal's attention to the sociocultural affect (Ylimaki, Bennett, Fan, & Villasenor, 2012). We were interested to see how these contrasting notions of effective and successful schools and school leadership might have been represented in the educational research literature over time.
In this exploratory study we inquired into the discourses surrounding effective and successful schools and school leadership in the educational research literature over a 35-year period. Specifically, we asked:
How have effective schools, successful schools, and school leadership been discussed in US and international educational journals from 1979 to 2013? How have the discourses in this literature varied across national contexts and over time?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Blei, D. M. (2012). Probabilistic topic models. Communications of the ACM, 55(4), 77–84. Day, C., & Leithwood, K. (2007). (Eds.). Successful principal leadership in times of change: An international perspective. Dortrecht: Springer. Goldstone, A. & Underwood, T. (Winter, 2012). What can topic models of PMLA teach us about the history of literary scholarship? Journal of Digital Humanities, 2(1). Retrieved from http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-1/what-can-topic-models-of-pmla-teach-us-by-ted-underwood-and-andrew-goldstone/ Leithwood, K. A. (1992). The move toward transformational leadership. Educational Leadership, 49(5), 8-12. McCallum, A.K. (2002). MALLET: A machine learning for language toolkit (Version 2.0.7) [Software]. Retrieved from http://mallet.cs.umass.edu. Meyer, H.D., & Benavot, A. (2013). PISA, power, and policy: The emergence of global educational governance. Oxford: Symposium Books. Moos, L., Krejsler, J., & Kofod, K. (2008). Successful principals: Telling or selling? On the importance of context for school leadership. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 11(4), 341-352. Mulford, B., Kendall, D., Edmunds, B., Kendall, L., Ewing, J., & Silins, H. (2007). Successful school leadership: What is it and who decides? Australian Journal of Education, 51(3), 228–246. OECD (2013). Innovative learning environments, Educational research and innovation, OECD publishing. Spillane, J. P., Halverson, R., & Diamond, J. B. (2001). Investigating school leadership practice: A distributed perspective. Educational Researcher, 30(3), 23–28. Teh, Y. W., Jordan, M. I., Beal, M. J., & Blei, D. M. (2006). Hierarchical Dirichlet processes. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 101(476), 1566–1581. Winton, S. (2013). How schools define success: The influence of local contexts on the meaning of success in three schools in Ontario, Canada. Canadian and International Education/ Education canadienne et internationale 42(1). Retrieved from http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cie-eci/vol42/iss1/5 Ylimaki, R., Bennett, J.V., Fan, J., & Villasenor, E. (2012). Notions of “success” in southern Arizona schools: Principal leadership in changing demographic and border contexts. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 11(2), 168 -193.
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