Session Information
26 SES 06 A, Successful Leadership Research: New Directions for the International Successful School Principalship Project
Symposium
Contribution
This paper presents the results of a meta-ethnography of the case studies conducted in nine countries published in journals and books from the ISSPP. ISSPP publications point to the importance of unveiling how and why ISSPPs differ across contexts. Research synthesis has the advantage of describing this over individual studies. Results from such synthesis can help to provide robust claims, optimize findings, identify context-free elements and context-specific elements, unveil context influence patterns, and paint a thorough and cohesive picture of successful principalship at the global level. Such findings can also provide guidance for practitioners and policy makers. This paper reviews the eighty-five articles and twenty-three chapters involving 108 school cases from the U.S., UK, Australia, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Cyprus, and New Zealand. We adopted the meta-ethnography (Doyle, 2003; Savin-Baden & Major, 2007) as the most appropriate method to review this body of ISSPP studies since this approach can help us discover the connections and complex interactions between agents (e.g., principals and their own characteristics) and contexts at multiple levels (school, community, district-wide, nation-wide, etc.), and what have happened in similar or different contexts overtime. In addition to theme identification within and across contexts, we synthesized the interpretations of the original researcher(s) of each study to retain meaning in context, a promising strength of meta-ethnography (Weed, 2005). Student academic achievement in the broad sense lies at the centre of school success, with other factors (e.g., schools’ reputation, learning experiences) emphasized to different extent in different countries. While successful principals do similar things, their most frequently reported practices vary across countries. For example, principals in US focused often on improving instruction and fostering data teams whereas their counterparts in Australia, Cyprus, Israel, New Zealand, and Spain demonstrated strong advocacy for parents who have been marginalized. British, Sweden and Norwegian principals work for inclusive school culture and communicate widely with stakeholders. Successful principal practices also vary with school contexts (e.g., a low-income school, in a multi-ethnicity school). Local and national policies did play a role in influencing the work of successful principals. For example, principals in Spain with educational policies promoting equity and social justice with no laws to alleviate the severe problems of educational inequality were empathetic, approachable, and accessible while principals in Norway showed optimism, creativity, and persistence in response to the new and contradictory policy expectations. More findings are provided in the full paper.
References
Doyle, L. H. (2003). Synthesis through meta-ethnography: Paradoxes, enhancements, and possibilities. Qualitative Research, 3(3), 321–344. Savin-Baden, M., & Major, C. H. (2007). Using interpretative meta-ethnography to explore the relationship between innovative approaches to learning and their influence on faculty understanding of teaching. Higher Education, 54(6), 833–852. Weed, M. (2005). Meta interpretation: A method for the interpretive synthesis of qualitative research. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 6(1), 1–17.
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