Leadership for learning as an organization-wide practice: evidence on its multilevel structure and implications for educational leadership practice and research

ABSTRACT

Leadership for learning has emerged as a framework that subsumes the core characteristics of instructional leadership, transformational leadership, and distributed leadership. It acknowledges that leadership responsibilities are shared across stakeholders, inviting wider sources of leadership. If leadership for learning conceptualizes leadership as an organization-wide practice beyond that of an individual (e.g. the school principal), its measurement must accordingly invite perceptions and experiences of diverse stakeholders at multiple levels. Focusing solely on principals’ or teachers’ leadership perceptions is problematic since it fails to capture the unique lived realities teachers or principals experience concerning leadership enactment. It also limits the capacity to examine whether and how these multiple perspectives exert same or divergent impacts on staff development, school culture, and student learning. Thus, this study employed leadership for learning as its theoretical framework and rigorous multilevel factor analysis techniques to examine the extent to which individual teachers, teachers collectively, and principals show distinct perceptions of leadership practices. Four-fold cross-validation multilevel factor analysis revealed conceptual distinctions in how the three entities experience leadership practices distributed across the school. We also present implications for educational leadership research, practices, and policy.

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Notes on contributors

Joonkil Ahn

Joonkil Ahn is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of North Dakota, USA. His scholarship examines how leadership as an organizational quality enhances staff development and student learning outcomes. Framing teachers as proactive reform agents, not as targets of it, his research also investigates how teacher collaboration and their individual and collective efficacy operate with and mediate the relationships between leadership enactments and student outcomes. Primarily using quantitative methods, his research actively engages in innovative approaches such as multilevel structural equation modeling and longitudinal analyses.

Alex J Bowers

Alex J. Bowers is a Professor of Education Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City, USA. His research interests include organizational level data analytics and data science, organizational behavior, school and district leadership, data-driven decision making, high school dropouts and completion, educational assessment and accountability, education technology and school facilities financing.

Anjalé D Welton

Anjalé D. Welton is Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (ELPA) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Her research broadly examines how educational leaders both dialogue about and address race and racism in their school communities. Her research specific to racial equity and justice also considers the role of student and community voice, leadership, and activism in education reform and transformation. Welton previously had the privilege of collaborating with high school students engaging in social-justice education and youth participatory action research (YPAR).