Session Information
26 SES 06 A, Successful Leadership Research: New Directions for the International Successful School Principalship Project
Symposium
Contribution
A range of research by ISSPP members from more than 20 countries over the last two decades has found that, regardless of national contexts, cultures, policies and individual school contexts and conditions, successful principals work takes place in schools as complex adaptive systems and is predicated upon educational purposes that include but are broader than the functional, founded on principles of social justice and inclusion (Biesta, 2015). The newly developed ISSPP research design reported in the proposed symposium has been developed as a consequence of these findings. It recognises the importance of examining leadership in the context of how principals navigate within and between both individual and system levels (e.g., between teachers, principals and middle leaders, governance, communities’ policy histories, national cultures) over time and at critical points in growing, achieving, and sustaining success. Thinking in this way may require a paradigm shift for many towards an ‘holistic, connectionist and integrationist view of the individual and the environment, rather than a fragmented, reductionist perspective’ (Youngblood, 1997:34). Using this way of thinking acknowledges that successful leaders go beyond, ‘rational-scientific’ methods, employing ‘soft skills to foster trust, and leverage the power of communities. Implicitly, it rejects linear and predictive explanations or singular views of truth about how principals achieve success, asserting that their work is dynamic, emergent, and dependent on the interaction of several variables, not all of which can be observed or predicted, but all of which are connected. This paper presents the future directions for ISSPP, including the use of complexity theory and ecological systems theory in research on successful school leadership, as they lead and manage the complex interactions within and between micro, meso, macro, exon and chrono level systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Drawing on 20 years of extant empirical research findings as well as complexity theory and ecological systems theory, we present an analytical framework that informs data collection and analysis. Further, the paper explains the use of a comparative design, a multi-perspective, multi-level approach in conducting research that enables multiple causalities, multiple perspectives, and multiple effects to be charted. The paper concludes with implications of the ISSPP for the educational leadership field.
References
Biesta, G. (2015). What is Education For? On Good Education, Teacher Judgement, and Educational Professionalism. European Journal of Education, 50 (1), 75-87. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard university press.
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