The importance of leadership for school improvement has been empirically established (Hallinger & Heck, 1996).  However, understanding leadership and leadership development has been limited by a technocratic view in which skills and competencies are centered and values, dispositions and identities are ignored (Day & Leithwood, 2007; Lumby & English, 2009).  Identity integrates the meanings behind the skills and knowledge of leaders and reflects the rationale for enacting the role as well as influencing the ways the role is enacted by individual leaders (Burke & Stets, 2009). A focus on identities and their development can tap the complexity of school leadership in a tumultuous, high stakes accountability environment. This symposium seeks to enrich the conversation regarding secondary school leaders’ identity construction in these complex environments by presenting papers from three national contexts—Norway, England, and the U.S.  This multi-national perspective will highlight similarities and differences in identity construction and expose conceptual linkages and gaps that can enrich the understanding of the development and negotiation of leadership identities.  The papers in this symposium are based on a common conceptual framework that emphasizes personal, community, institutional and social/historical contexts that influence identity construction (Wenger, 1999; Smulyan 2000).  This framework is elaborated in the summary of a fourth paper, which will be part of the symposium.

            The proposed symposium includes four papers—three empirical and one conceptual.  The three empirical papers will focus on the identities and identity construction of secondary school leaders in the three national contexts—Norway, England, and the U.S.  Each paper will report on an empirical case study that investigated the ways secondary school leaders constructed their identities in the midst of complex reform environments.  The studies involve school leaders at the early stages of their work in these settings. A fourth paper will elaborate the conceptual framework used by these empirical studies.  We believe that including a conceptual piece along with the empirical pieces will not only provide the theoretical grounding for the investigations but also the opportunity to expose conceptual gaps in literature on identity construction.

            A multi-national set of papers which examines empirically and conceptually the nature of school leader identity construction will contribute to a more complete understanding of leadership in complex reform settings in which contradictory demands and pressures confront leaders.  Examining how school leaders in these complex educational environments make sense of their roles and negotiate with others the purpose and practice of their roles can also contribute to creating the types of leadership preparation and continuing professional development necessary to improve school leadership in these contexts.

            The symposium will be structured by the presentation of the conceptual paper followed by the three empirical, national studies.  Following the presentation of papers, a group of colleagues from the International Successful School Principals Project will engage in a substantive conversation regarding the implications of these papers for enriching leadership preparation and continuing professional development. This is intended to stimulate and enrich the conversation with other participants in the session.