Large, sustained, multi-nation and collaborative research networks are becoming more popular because of their power to produce findings that generalize across contexts as well as providing contextually nuanced views of a phenomenon. In educational leadership there have been four major projects since the beginning of this century: The International Successful School Principalship Project; the International Study of the Preparation of Principals; Leadership for Learning; and, the International School Leadership Development. These projects cover from seven to more than 20 countries and have run for five or more years. The discussion of these projects provides insight into principal effectiveness research and some guidance to those who seek to collaborate with colleagues nationally and internationally. International projects like these bring the interplay of leadership and context into focus, and show that context is important in terms of educational success and how leadership is enacted. These international comparative projects are important works, as they endeavor to counter the blancmange view of education that comes through the pervasiveness of things like international testing programs and the reliance on meta-analyses.This session reports on a finsihed and soon to be published paper.

There are four projects considered in this paper. Two projects, the ISSPP and the ISLDN, were foundational and grounded studies, exploring topics that were believed to be poorly understood. One project, the LfL, had a political orientation in that it sought to produce findings that would lead to policy change. The other project, the ISPP, wanted to capture current practice in principal preparation from around the world, and use this knowledge to provide practice and policy guidance. In the paper, for each project we provide a description of the history and intent, and concise descriptions of the methodologies used and core findings. The core research details are described sufficiently for readers to gauge whether the projects can be trusted and whether they are worthwhile attending to. We also provide examples of major publications so that readers can begin to access the wealth of knowledge created by these projects. The publication lists are by no means comprehensive, but they are more than sufficient to act as key portals for further exploration. The list of projects is not meant to be exhaustive, and other projects could have been included, such as the Asia Leadership Roundtable (which has run nine annual meetings and is organized by the Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change, www.eduhk.hk/apclc) or the seven-nation study led by Harris and Jones (see the special issue in the Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 35(3), 2015). We believe the four projects we have chosen are worth attending to. They have all involved many countries from across the world in substantial and important research involving several years of collaboration.

International projects like these bring the interplay of leadership and context into focus. Despite the complexity in considering leadership and context, a standout feature of the projects is that across different contexts, there are general findings that emerge, either confirming contemporary understandings (such as confirming the four element leadership framework that includes practices associated with building vision and setting direction, understanding and developing people, redesigning the organisation, and managing the teaching and learning program), or proposing new views through the construction of leadership models (such as the successful school leadership and leadership for learning models), and recommendations emerge that can transcend contexts (such as the need for high quality, but contextually relevant leadership preparation programs). These international comparative projects are important sources of knowledge about school leadership because of the range of contexts they explore (both across and within countries), yet somewhat difficult to get to know because of the length of the projects, the qualitative nature of much of the research and the range of publications produced. At a time when the educational world is rapidly shrinking with the rise of somewhat simplistic international country comparisons through testing and survey-based research like PISA and TIMMS, and the dominance of summaries of quantitative research through meta-analyses, it is important to have these large, mainly qualitative, international projects to identify commonalities and differences in the leadership of schools across and within countries, and to do so with considerable detail that provided in other forms of research. Through the provision of detailed local description and comparative cross-country analysis, these projects endeavor to counter the blancmange view of education that comes through the pervasiveness of international testing programs and the reliance on meta-analyses.

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