Within the literature on school leadership numerous concepts of leadership which are associated with “successful school leadership” have been introduced during the last decades. Meta-analyses, synthesizing the evidence about the impact of school leadership point to the impact of specific forms of leadership such as transformational leadership (Leithwood & Riehl, 2003; Robinson 2007; Marzano et al, 2005). Other studies have focused on the shared responsibilities and leadership roles across schools giving rise to a distributed perspective of leadership (Spillane, Halversen and Diamond, 2001; Spillane, 2006). More recently, concepts such as integrated, total and system leadership have been introduced, which have attempted to extend leadership thinking to new concepts and areas (Fullan, 2004; Leithwood, Harris and Hopkins, 2008).The session as a whole aims to raise a discussion about developing theories and conducting research within the field of educational leadership which goes beyond traditional research paradigms and traditions. Using an international forum such as ECER provides a very good opportunity to bring in different perspectives to develop the field further.

Through the four proposed paper presentations, this symposium has four specific aims.

Firstly, it maps different theoretical concepts such as transactional leadership, transformational leadership, distributed leadership, system leadership, integrative leadership and total leadership. The concepts’ origins, their aims and foci, expected outcomes and effects, processes and tools to achieve the outcomes, as well as the involvment of important actors and relationships are investigated. Most important, however, is what kind of ideas or theories of change underlie the different concepts.

Secondly, based on this conceptual analysis, the symposium investigates how the leadership concepts are used as analytical perspectives to guide empirical research and how they are related to the research questions, the research design, the use of research methods and analytical techniques, not least with respect to research findings and conclusions presented.

Thirdly, the use of these leaderhip concepts are often presented in terms of normative assumptions of successful leadership. This leads to the question about how successful school leadership - the success of school leaders - is measured. The aim of the third paper is to investigate how the performance of school leaders is operationalised in scientific studies and what measurements are used to assess the performance of school principals in the field of research?

Fourth, the last paper of the symposium elaborates on the lessons for research and practice that can be taken from the mapping exercise, the extent to which different concepts enjoy empirical support and not at least the operationalisation of successful leadership in different studies. Methodological advances are discussed and a framework for an integrative model of research is presented which takes the complex nature of school leadership processes as well as their contingency and contextuality into account. Conceptual awareness, coherence and critically engaging in discussing results and limitations are put up as important criteria.