Ashley Yoon Mooi Ng , 2023. Leadership for Learning in Schools in the Twenty-First Century
Leadership for learning refers to the various strategies that school leaders use to achieve school outcomes, specifically on student learning (Leithwood 2016). Besides instructional leadership, this chapter of this article by Ng (2023) provides an overview of other main leadership theories, such as transformational leadership, distributed leadership, and teacher leadership and it traces the transformation of instructional leadership to its reincarnated form of ‘leadership for learning’. Research on principals’ instructional leadership and leadership for learning is predominantly from the West. As a result, policy makers and practitioners from other region, particularly the East, continue to rely on research findings from Western leadership literature (Walker and Hallinger 2015) to conceptualize new leadership roles and policies. As successful leadership practices are shaped by organizational and socio-cultural context, this chapter emphasizes a need to take into account the regional setting that affects leading learning in the schools of different contexts and environment.
The emphasis of principals being responsible for student achievement originated with the study by Edmonds (1979), which led to the influential Effective School Movement in the 1980s (Townsend 2019). Principals in their role of instructional leaders were considered experts in instruction and curriculum (Lai and Cheung 2013) and as a result, principals were described as strong and directive with a focus on achieving goals, and work with teachers to improve teaching and learning (Mestry 2017)
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