LEADING A SCHOOL FOR
IMPROVED STUDENT
OUTCOMES
Professor Stephen Dinham
Research Director – Teaching, Learning and
Leadership
ACER
CURRICULUM CORPORATION
Melbourne 11th November 2008
WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT
STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT?
 Schools do make a difference
 The teacher is the major in-school
influence on student achievement
 How teacher expertise develops
 What works in teaching
 Leadership matters
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The Effects of Quality Teaching
(Findings from meta-analytic research)
Percentage of Achievement Variance
> 30%
Teachers
Students
Home
Peers
~5-10%
Schools
Principal
~50%
~5-10%
Hattie (2003, 2005)
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It’s the Teacher …
‘... the most important factor affecting student
learning is the teacher. ... The immediate
and clear implication of this finding is that
seemingly more can be done to improve
education by improving the effectiveness of
teachers than by any other single factor’.
Wright, S.; Horn, S. & Sanders, W. (1997). 'Teacher and
Classroom Context Effects on Student Achievement:
Implications for Teacher Evaluation', Journal of
Personnel Evaluation in Education, 11, pp. 57-67.
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Four Fundamentals of Student Success
(Dinham, 2008)*
QUALITY
TEACHING
FOCUS ON THE
STUDENT
(Learner, Person)
PROFESSIONAL
LEARNING
LEADERSHIP
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Unpacking Leadership (Dinham, 2008)*
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PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: WHAT
SUCCESSFUL EDUCATIONAL LEADERS DO*
 They make students, as learners and people, the
central focus of the school.
 They make teaching and learning the central
purpose of the school.
 They ensure that student welfare policies and
programs are integrated with and underpin
academic achievement.
 They have a vision for where they want their
school to go and for what they want it to be.
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PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: WHAT
SUCCESSFUL EDUCATIONAL LEADERS DO*
 They are effective communicators at all levels.
 They are able to balance the big picture with finer
detail.
 They possess perspective and can prioritise.
 They place a high priority on and invest in the
professional learning of themselves and others.
 They are informed, critical users of educational
research.
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PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: WHAT
SUCCESSFUL EDUCATIONAL LEADERS DO*
 They continually seek to improve the quality of
teaching in their school.
 They seek ways for every student to achieve and
experience success.
 They act as talent spotters and coaches of
talented teachers and release individual and
organisational potential.
 They question and push against constraints.
 They seek benefits from imposed change.
 They are informed risk takers and encourage
others to do the same.
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PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: WHAT
SUCCESSFUL EDUCATIONAL LEADERS DO*
 They have a positive attitude and seek to drive
out negativity.
 They model the values they expect in others such
as integrity, altruism and self-growth.
 They build a climate of trust, mutual respect,
collegiality and group identity.
 They believe in education for the benefit of the
individual and society.
 They work for students, staff, the school and
community, rather than for themself.
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PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: WHAT
SUCCESSFUL EDUCATIONAL LEADERS DO*
 They can read and respond to people and build
relationships.
 They have high professional standards and expect high
levels of professionalism in return.
 They possess courage and demonstrate persistence and
resilience.
 They build productive external alliances with parents, the
community, government agencies, business and the
profession.
 They entrust, empower and encourage others through
distributed leadership and engage in productive team
building.
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PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: WHAT
SUCCESSFUL EDUCATIONAL LEADERS DO*
 They provide timely and constructive feedback,
good and bad.
 They are approachable and good listeners; they
can read and reach people.
 They create an environment where people strive
to do their best and where they are recognised
for their effort and achievement.
 They emphasise and use evidence, planning and
data.
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PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: WHAT
SUCCESSFUL EDUCATIONAL LEADERS DO*
 They are constantly concerned with lifting school
performance; nothing is permitted to get in the
way.
 They see themselves and their school as being
accountable for student achievement.
 Overall, they are authoritative, being highly
responsive and highly demanding of individuals,
teams and groups, and above all, themselves.
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Implications
 If we hope to promote student achievement, we
need to begin by understanding the research
evidence, particularly meta-analytic effect size
research, about what influences student learning.
 The classroom teacher is the major in-school
influence on student achievement. The
differences we see in student achievement are
larger within schools than between schools.
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Implications
 Many of the changes we see in schooling
consist of ‘fiddling around the edges’ - changes
to the conditions of teaching, which have small
measured effect sizes - rather than changes to the
quality of teaching, which has a large effect size.
 We now have a fairly accurate picture of what
quality or effective teaching looks like. The
challenge is to ‘spread’ and ‘upscale’ such
teaching.
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Implications
 Teacher quality can be improved under the
influence of leadership and through professional
learning.
 The challenge for educational leaders is to
penetrate the classroom door and to help
teachers change their knowledge, thinking and
practice.
 The most effective schools have a central focus on
students as learners and people. Student welfare
and student achievement are not dichotomous but
are mutually reinforcing. The best teachers and
schools emphasise each.
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Implications
 Likewise, the teaching of highly effective teachers
is both teacher-directed and student-centred –
again, the two are not dichotomous.
 Student welfare is not an end in itself but a
means to enhance the learning and development
of every student. The best way to boost student
self-esteem is through achievement. Every
student can be successful.
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Implications
 Socio-economic status does have a large effect on
student learning, but only as far as it determines
advantage/disadvantage. SES does not indicate
innate learning capacity. Effective teachers and
successful schools overcome or reduce such
disadvantage.
 Effective educational leaders help create a climate
where teachers can teach and students can learn.
 Successful school leaders (and teachers) are both
highly responsive and highly demanding of others,
i.e., they are authoritative, rather than permissive,
authoritarian or uninvolved.
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Implications
 Successful school leaders set high professional
standards for themselves and others and model
and invest in professional learning. They are risk
takers and empower others to do the same.
 While we largely know what effective educational
leadership looks like, the challenge is to attract
new leaders and develop their leadership
capacity, along with that of our current leaders.
 There are no quick fixes or recipes for success,
but there are useful frameworks for reflection,
planning, action and evaluation.
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Implications
 Context is important. School history and context must be
taken into account, but context can also act as a ‘swamp’,
in that failure to improve can be rationalised and schools
can be too internally focussed.
 ‘Turning around’ and ‘lifting up’ a school isn’t easy, but
it can be done. The research shows us how. It can’t,
however be accomplished alone and educational leaders
need to build teams and increase capacity through
distributed leadership and professional learning to
accomplish this task.
 Teachers and educational leaders are not born. Every
teacher and school leader is capable of improving his or
her knowledge and practice.
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Implications
 Principals are not the only leaders, but they are the key
leaders.
 I have yet to see a successfully ‘turned around’ or
‘lifted up’ school where there wasn’t a change in
leadership at or near the ‘top’.
 It is possible to have quality teaching in some classes
without effective leadership, but it is impossible to have a
successful school without effective leadership.
 While the measured effects of school leadership on
student achievement are small compared with those
for the classroom teacher, they are nevertheless
significant.
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Leadership
“While leadership explains only three to five
per cent of the variation in student learning
across schools, this is actually about one
quarter of the total variation (10-20 per cent)
explained by all school-level variables.”
(Leithwood, et al , 2004).
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FINALLY
 At the school level, the challenge for educational leaders is
to initiate change that penetrates the classroom door.
Once again, research tells us what effective educational
leadership look like, but attracting, preparing and
supporting suitable leaders and spreading and increasing
leadership expertise across more educators and schools is
difficult.
 Research also tells us that quick fixes are a mirage and
that intensive, strategic, collaborative work under the
influence of leadership are needed turn around and lift up a
school. The good news is that it can be done. The bad
news is that it isn’t easy.
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Finally
 We need to learn from the experiences of
successful teachers, successful educational
leaders and successful schools but it is a mistake
to reduce this understanding to a series of points
or a recipe for an ‘instant pudding’.
 Achieving quality teaching, school
improvement and student success is more an
ongoing journey than arriving at a destination,
with the most successful teachers and schools
always striving to move forward. This attitude
helps explain their success.
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*(2008) ACER Press
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Contact Details
Professor Stephen Dinham
Research Director – Teaching, Learning and Leadership
ACER
Private Bag 55
Camberwell Vic 3124
Email: dinham@acer.edu.au
Phone: 03 9277 5463
Website: www.acer.edu.au/staffbio/dinham_stephen.html
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