Successful Leadership
Research Findings
Christopher Day, University of Nottingham, UK
christopher.day@nottingham.ac.uk
Headteacher Standards in
UK
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Shape the future
Lead teaching and learning
Develop self and work with others
Manage the organisation
Secure accountability
Strengthen community
(DfES, 2004)
What We Know About
Successful Leadership (1)
CORE LEADERSHIP PRACTICES
Setting Directions
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Identity and articulating a vision
Creating shared meanings
Creating high performance
expectations
Fostering the acceptance of group
goals
Monitoring organisational performance
Communicating
What We Know About
Successful Leadership (2)
Developing People
• Offering intellectual stimulation
• Providing individual support
• Providing an appropriate model
What We Know About
Successful Leadership (3)
Developing the
Organisation
• Strengthening school culture
• Modifying organisation structure
• Building collaborative processes
• Managing the environment
What We Know About
Successful Leadership (4)
Successful Leaders:
(i)
Have significant effects on student
learning
• Establish conditions that support
teachers and help students to succeed
(ii)
Are leaders among leaders
What We Know About
Successful Leadership (5)
Successful leaders respond productively to
challenges and opportunities created by
the accountability oriented policy
contexts in which they work. They:
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Create and sustain a competitive school
Empower others to make significant decisions
Provide instructional guidance
Plan strategically
What We Know About
Successful Leadership (6)
Successful leaders respond productively to
the opportunities and challenges of
educating diverse groups of students.
They:
• Build powerful forms of teaching and learning
• Create strong communities in school
• Expand the proportion of students social
capital valued by the schools
• Nurture the development of families’
educational cultures
(Leithwood & Riehl, 2003)
Sustaining Success in Challenging
Contexts: Leadership in English Schools
Christopher Day, University of Nottingham, UK
christopher.day@nottingham.ac.uk
The Standards Agenda
Social Trends
ISSLP Participants
• Australia - Bill Mulford (Tasmania) and David Gurr &
Lawrie Drysdale (Melbourne)
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Canada (Toronto) - Kenneth Leithwood
Denmark (Copenhagen) - Lejf Moos
England (Nottingham) - Christopher Day
China (Hong Kong) - Kam-Cheung Wong
Norway (Oslo) - Jorunn Moller
Sweden (UMEA) - Olof Johansson
USA (SUNY, Buffalo) - Stephen Jacobson and Lauri
Johnson
ISSLP Objectives
• Identify the values, knowledge, skills and dispositions
which successful school leaders use in implementing
leadership practices across a range of successful schools
in different countries.
• Identity those leadership practices that are uniquely
important in large v. small schools, urban v. suburban v.
rural schools, schools with homogeneous and diverse
student populations and high v. low poverty schools.
• Explore the relationship between successful leadership
values, practices, broader social and school specific
conditions, and student outcomes in different countries.
ISSLP Objectives (ctd)
• Produce the first international database on successful
school leadership based upon the largest empirical
study, thus providing a unique contribution to
knowledge.
• Produce digital case studies, organise national and
international dissemination conferences and produce
and disseminate a book and several academic
conference papers.
ISSLP Project Phases
• Literature review and design of interview
protocol (April 2001 - July 2002)
• Multi-site case studies conducted, analysed,
comparative data produced (September 2002 August 2004)
• Questionnaire survey of principals in each
country (January 2005 - September 2005)
• In-depth observational case studies (October
2005 - July 2006)
• Production of digital case studies (September
2006 - March 2007)
ISSLP Methods
• Interview and questionnaire based study
• Principals complete biographical and career
questionnaires
• Intervies, over 2-3 days (min), on school principal’s
“success” with:
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Principal (3 occasions)
2-3 teachers
2-3 support staff
2-3 parents
2-3 school governors
2 groups of pupils (3-4 in each group)
ISSLP Methods (ctd)
• Interviews based on semi-structured schedules
covering:
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Pupil population and challenges presented
School Ethos
School success and principal’s contribution
Professional relationships with government inspectors, LEA
officers, teachers, governors, parents and pupils
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Non-professional sources of support
Work/Life boundaries
Narratives of histories and critical incidents/phases
Selection of Schools
•Schools of different sizes operating within different phases of
education (i.e. the early years of primary schooling through
to upper-secondary and including special schools)
•Schools located within a range of economic and sociocultural settings (i.e. including rural, suburban and innerurban schools as well as those with mixed catchment areas)
•Schools in which headteachers who were widely
acknowledged as being “effective leaders had spent different
amounts of time (i.e. ranging from relatively new to wellestablished headteachers with many years of experience)
Questions
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What does teacher leadership look like?
How is success defined?
What kinds of people become successful leaders?
How is successful leadership sustained?
Are there generic leadership values, qualities, skills
regardless of country, culture and school?
How critical are care, loyalty and trust? Why?
How do successful leaders learn about their work?
Does size matter? Why?
Does the student/family matter? Why?
Do national culture/policy contexts matter? Why?
Are successful leaders born or can they be made?
What successful leaders
look like
• Beyond transformational leadership
• Values-led, achievement-oriented, people
centred
• Contingency driven: managing tensions and
dilemmas
• Reflection
• Training and Development
Effective Headteachers:
Values led
• Were clear in their vision for the school and
communicated it to all its constituents;
• Focused upon care and achievement simultaneously;
• Created, maintained and constantly monitored
relationships recognising them as key to the cultures of
learning;
• Were reflective in a variety of internal and external
social and organisational contexts, using a variety of
problem-solving approaches;
• Sought, synthesised, and evaluated internal and
external data, applying these to the school within their
values framework;
• persisted with apparently intractable issues in their
drive for higher standards
Effective Headteachers:
Values led (ctd)
• Were prepared to take risks in order to achieve these;
• Were not afraid to ask difficult questions of themselves
and others;
• Were entrepreneurial;
• Were “networkers” inside and outside the school;
• Were not afraid to acknowledge failure but did not give
up and learnt from it;
• Were aware of a range of sources to help solve
problems;
• Managed ongoing tensions and dilemmas through
principled, values-led contingency leadership.
Origins UK
Seven Tensions
• Leadership v. Management
• Maintenance v. Development
• Internal v. External Change
• Autonomy v. Autocracy
• Personal Time v. Professional Tasks
• Personal Values v. Institutional Imperatives
• Leadership in Small v. Large Schools
Three Dilemmas
• Development v. Dismissal
• Power with v. Power over
• Subcontracting v. Mediation
Ten Areas For Success
• Vision and resilience
• Articulating and upholding values and beliefs:
the ethical dimension
• Focussing upon moral purpose
• Fostering an inclusive community
• Creating expectation and achievement
• Building internal capital and capacity
• Leading the learning
• Defining and maintaining identity
• Renewing trust
• Being passionate through commitment
Three Key Themes
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Moral purpose and social justice
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Organisational expectation and
learning
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Identity, trust and passionate
commitment
Moral purpose and social justice
Organisational expectation
and learning
Identity, trust and
passionate commitment