School Leadership in International Schools: Perspectives and Practices

The International School Consultancy as of October 2017 estimates that there are now 9,200 international schools, 5 million students, and 463,000 staff scattered around the globe. This estimate represents a fourfold increase in international schools between 2000 and 2017 worldwide (see the ISC website). This dramatic increase has been driven mainly by the rise of International Baccalaureate (IB) schools in Asia Pacific and the Middle East (Lee & Wright, 2015). Despite the rapid growth of school numbers in the global K–12 sector, research literature on leadership in international schools is thin on the ground.

In this issue of the Peabody Journal of Education, we aim to illuminate some of the key features of leadership practice as enacted in international schools located in a number of different regions. Our aim is to offer a platform for researchers to further navigate ways to theorize and investigate empirically leadership practices in international schools. Through doing this investigation we hope that this issue can help to develop a broader, longer-term agenda for research on leadership and school improvement in international school settings.

The issue consists of two major parts. Papers in Part 1 explore a number of different perspectives on leadership in international schools while Part 2 examines leadership practices in these schools. The articles in Part 1 present an array of perspectives (or conceptual frameworks) to better understand leadership in international schools. In the first article, Walker and Lee offer a “disconnection framework” to discuss how international school leaders address challenges around implementing innovative international education curricula such as International Baccalaureate (IB) programs. They argue that leaders in a number of IB case schools in Southeast and East Asia adopt a range of leadership strategies to address five disconnection points between intent and inaction—namely instrumental, intellectual, cultural, professional, and communicative disconnections. While dissecting leadership challenges through the disconnection lens, they suggest that leaders’ actions to address disconnections can best be conceptualized through two faces of distributed leadership: distributed instructional leadership and teacher leadership.

In the second article, Tarc shows that international mindedness (IM) is the most distinguishable goal in the formal curriculum of many international schools, but at the same time IM is perhaps the most difficult goal for school leaders to achieve. Tarc suggests that much less research on IM in hidden curriculum contexts has been conducted. The article suggests ways leaders might more robustly understand and authentically engage in IM in international schools. He concludes that his call to leaders to more authentically enact IM can be further informed by emerging literature on ethical leadership.

In the third article in Part I, Caffyn offers a different perspective on leadership in international schools using the folkloric and literary metaphor of a vampire. Drawing on the inside-school view, he illustrates how individuals (particularly school leaders) and organizational contexts can drain energy and positivity from the school organization. His metaphorical application of vampirism to an international school proves a useful lens to flesh out organizational dynamics such as micropolitics, group conflict, rivalry and division, negative leadership effect as trauma, boundaries, and organizational vulnerability to name a few.

In the final article in Part 1, Hill suggests that revisiting the work of Thomas Greenfield is useful to better understand international schools, where constructions of social reality (i.e., meanings, experiences, interactions, sense-makings) can be more complicated because of the high degree of cultural diversity. In his view, therefore, Greenfield’s subjectivist approach is a useful lens to decode the social reality that constitutes and is constituted by individuals’ experiences in international schools. Hill believes that leaders in international schools should be equipped with communicative and cultural competencies to enable them to address organizational challenges through cohesive inter-subjectivist interpretations of social reality embedded in their organizations.

Articles in Part 2 present empirical investigations of leadership practices in international schools. Lin, Lee, and Riordan discuss the role of teacher leadership in shaping professional learning community (PLC). They demonstrate such linkages using social network data collected from teachers. Drawing on the network properties of teachers’ professional interactions, they capture four different types of teacher leadership: (a) distributed, (b) oligarchic, (c) non-centric, and (d) weak teacher leadership. They link each type of teacher leadership to different levels of teacher engagement in PLC activities. Based on teacher interview data, the authors suggest that senior leaders (e.g., principals) (a) set up appropriate policies and mechanisms such as co-teaching and timetabling for teacher collaboration and (b) involve teacher leaders in decision-making to foster distributed teacher leadership.

Bunnell’s article displays a dark side of leadership practice and its linkage to teachers’ unstable working environments in international schools. Using datamined work from anonymized teachers’ comments on the social media website internationalschoolreview.com (ISR.com), he unveils unethical and immoral school leader behaviors. When entangled with leadership practices, such behaviors are seen as destructive and unhelpful by teachers. The author suggests that the isolated and fragile organizational context of international schools allows school leaders to exercise such negative practices. He further suggests that the flip side of this situation is that many of the teachers work in a precarious state of anxiety with seemingly fewer options to release the “pressure valve” if unhappy with unethical and immoral leadership behavior.

Lee, Walker, and Bryant report the leadership practices associated with International Baccalaureate (IB) student achievement. Using a combined data set of Diploma Program (DP) exam scores and teachers’ survey responses about school leadership in Southeast Asia, they identify a pattern of the association between selected leadership practices and academic achievement, which confirms findings from research conducted in non-IB schools in different school systems; Strategic Resourcing and Encouraging Teacher Learning & Development are positively associated with IB exam scores whereas Monitoring Classroom Teaching & Curriculum is negatively associated with IB exam scores. They conclude that there are certain common features of leadership effects on student learning outcomes regardless of the status of international or local schools. As a school organization, IB schools share certain similarities with non-IB schools in terms of leadership practices and their effects on student achievement. Given that there is no existing empirical research on school leadership effects on student achievement in international school settings, the study contributes to the underresearched area.

In sum, this issue explores the complexity of leadership challenges, practices, and effects in international schools conceptually and empirically. We hope the papers collected here can act as a platform for further research into school leadership issues in international schools around the world and broaden the scope of research beyond local schools. We would like to thank the external reviewers for sharing their insights and critical feedback on the articles included in the issue. We also appreciate the editorial support provided by the Peabody Journal of Education to pursue this important area of research.