Educational Management Administration & Leadership

The paper reports on a small-scale, exploratory study investigating the professional aspirations of a cohort of student teachers at a UK university. Questionnaires and interviews sought insights into the students’ perceptions of leadership, future aspirations and self-perceptions as potential leaders. Whilst there was commonality in male and female students’ interest in subject leadership and teaching- and learning-oriented roles such as Advanced Skills Teacher, gendered trends emerged in patterns of aspiration towards certain other posts. Women were more likely than men to aspire to the post of Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator, and men were more likely than women to aspire to the most senior posts, especially headship. Whilst men and women showed awareness of the negative and more challenging aspects of senior school leadership, there were indications that male students were more likely than their female colleagues to perceive the affordances offered by headship and to envisage themselves as potential headteachers. There were indications of difference also in the ways in which men and women constructed teaching and leadership, and a stronger tendency for men to transfer agentic self-perceptions as teachers to a view of their future selves as leaders.

The concept of inquiry is central to contemporary discussions of teacher and leader professional learning and problem solving in interpersonal contexts. However, while few would debate its value, there has been little discussion of the significant challenges inherent in engaging in genuine inquiry. In this article, we distinguish between genuine and pseudo-inquiry, and define the former as motivated by an open-minded stance and desire to learn. We argue in our literature review, that while both forms of inquiry may share the same linguistic features, deeper analysis of underlying thoughts and motives is required to distinguish the two types of inquiry. We then report a descriptive study of how 13 school leaders (in a simulated setting) inquired into their concerns about a teacher’s behaviour. The analysis of their conversation transcripts showed that they engaged in limited genuine inquiry. Leaders’ capacity for genuine inquiry was constrained by their judgmental thinking, tendency to avoid negative emotion and desire to maximize staying in control of the conversation. Implications for further research on inquiry and for leadership development are discussed.

Leaders of international schools find themselves operating within a loosely defined, yet rapidly growing, specialty niche of education. The leadership context for these schools is often filled with ambiguity and complex tensions between opposing forces. This article proposes a two-stage framework for critically analyzing the dualities of international schools. The first stage, ‘making sense of dualities’, adapts Simkins’ framework for sense-making in educational leadership. The second stage, ‘leading dualities’, utilizes Bolman and Deal’s four frames of leadership. Two categories of dualities are proposed for initial consideration: spatial dualities (opening gateways across eras) and temporal dualities (bridging boundaries across cultures). Specific examples of spatial dualities are analyzed within the context of an international school in Turkey. The Roman god Janus, whose two faces see opposite perspectives, is utilized as a metaphor for the simultaneous composite nature of dualities. The article concludes that it is the challenge of leaders to make sense of opposite perspectives within their school and leading their school community to do the same.

In recent years educational organizations have begun to be administered by more sharing, participation and democratic principles. The school-based management approach accelerated during the decentralization period in education is also seen as a cause for spread of leadership throughout the school. This trend is reflected in the educational leadership literature, which began to describe as distributed leadership (DL), the process/approach of spreading leadership organization-wide. However, the extent to which leadership in educational organizations is distributed cannot be easily delineated, particularly in countries such as Turkey where the system was established and managed centrally. Yet, DL attracts researchers’ attention in terms of the organizational behaviours. It ascribes to teachers, such as their commitment and associated psychological contracts (PCs). In this study of Turkish schools that are centrally organized, we consider the relationship between DL and teachers’ perceptions of their PC levels. As the research variables are multilevel, the data collected from 466 teachers working in 34 different schools were analysed by hierarchical linear modelling. The analyses indicated that the distribution of leadership among school managers was a significant predictor of the PCs of the teachers. However, the observed variance in the PC was determined to be explained by the service periods of teachers.

In this study, the conceptual use of the strategy map approach and the strategy map which it produces have been adapted from the business sector and introduced as tools for achieving more effective strategic planning and management in higher education institutions (HEIs). This study discusses the development of strategy maps as transformational management tools in universities. It analyses 15 universities’ strategy maps to establish a comparative perspective in terms of content, expression and form. Based on this analysis, the study synthesises a model for the effective employment of the strategy map approach and strategy maps in universities. The study then uses Tsinghua University as the subject of a case study to illustrate how a university’s strategic plan could be converted into a strategy map. This study gives suggestions for implications of the strategy map approach in transforming the internal governance model in universities and achieving effective and responsive university strategic planning and management.

This study seeks to confirm if internal audit, a corporate control process, is functioning effectively in Australian public universities. The study draws on agency theory, published literature and best-practice guidelines to develop an internal audit evaluation framework. A survey instrument is thereafter developed from the framework and used as a basis to examine if internal audit is structured to enhance governance in the Australian public university sector. The results show that a majority of university internal audit functions are operating under flexible structural and functional arrangements to achieve internal audit’s theoretical role of enhancing governance. A minority of functions did not comply with best-practice guidelines for achieving internal auditing’s theoretical role. The flexible arrangements further do not guarantee internal audit functions currently complying with best-practice guidelines will continue to do so. Contributing factors to non-compliance and flexible operating arrangements include the non-availability of mandatory requirements for compliance by the profession or government legislation. The study provides avenues for further research to confirm the findings with other stakeholders.

The purpose of this study was to reflect the leadership strategies that may arise using a constructivist approach based on organizational learning. This approach involved the use of simulations that focused on ethical tensions in school principals’ daily experiences, and the development of codes of ethical conduct to reduce these tensions. The study included 50 teachers who served in school leadership roles in addition to their regular teaching jobs. The teachers participated in 50 simulation sessions. The data were analyzed with ATLAS.ti 5.0. Five dimensions of tensions between leadership strategies were found to be related to the central concept of “Leadership strategies derived from simulations:” Engaging versus Monitoring; Envisioning versus Implementing; Implementing versus Engaging; Monitoring versus Envisioning, and Articulating versus Envisioning—demonstrating the complexity of dialogue during the simulations, which include a multifaceted model of tension between values, and codes of ethical conduct. The study findings may encourage school principals and education leaders to use simulations to help unravel ongoing ethical dilemmas in school for the development of leadership strategies based on organizational and constructivist learning theories. These learning conditions may provide fertile ground for practicing difficult ethical decision-making and thus enhance the professional development of education leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to document the perceptions of school leaders regarding the technological use, skills, and attitudes of high school teachers. Using a qualitative research approach, 11 educational leaders from Prince Edward Island (Canada) were individually interviewed. Participants represented the Department of Education, principals, vice-principals, and department heads. Analyzed through the concept of e-leadership, the findings indicated that participants used a growing array of technological tools and activities including Smartboards, flipped classrooms, Prezi, educational apps, YouTube, and teacher blogs. Participants identified lack of time as a possible reason why some teachers were not incorporating technology into student learning. Findings highlight the need for provincial and school district authorities to promote policies aimed at promoting e-leadership among teachers. We insert an appendix to provide descriptions of the technological terms included within the paper.

To gain insight into how to promote teachers’ use of digital learning materials (DLMs) in their pedagogical practices we adopted the Integrated Model of Behaviour Prediction to investigate the relationships between organizational and teacher-related variables. A representative sample of 772 teachers from primary, secondary or vocational education took part in a survey study. Conjectured combinations of direct and indirect relationships between the variables were tested for the best model fit with structural equation modelling. The results suggest that a model with mediating relations from leadership through information and communication technology (ICT) policy and professional development activities to the variables self-efficacy, attitude and social norm, combined with direct relations from leadership to the latter, has the best fit for predicting teachers’ intention to use DLMs.