What Leadership Practices Are Associated with International Baccalaureate (IB) Student Achievement? An Exploratory Study of IB Schools in Southeast Asia

Abstract

This article explores what leadership practices are 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 from 29 schools in Southeast Asia, the article reports certain leadership practices (i.e., strategic resourcing, monitoring classroom teaching and curriculum, encouraging teacher learning and development) exercised in the sampled IB schools that are significantly associated with student academic outcomes. This article contributes to empirical literature on school leadership effects on student learning in international school settings, which is an underresearched inquiry in the field.

Notes

1 The IB programs consist of the PYP (for children aged 3-12), the MYP (for students aged 11-16), and the DP (for students aged 16-19), which correspond to K-12 curriculum in non-IB schools.

2 For conceptual details about teacher professional community used in this study, see Lee, Louis, et al. (2012) and Louis and Lee (2016). For the validation procedure of teacher professional community in this study, see Walker, Bryant, et al. (2014) for details.

3 See Walker et al. (2016) for more details about how we selected these four particular domains and their psychometric properties.

4 Initially, we invited 77 IB schools to join the pilot study based on the following selection criteria: (a) located in South Asia or East Asian countries and (b) having either first-year DP students or both first- and final-year DP students sitting IB DP examinations in May or November 2013. As such, 1,530 students from 19 schools agreed to participate in the study (58 schools declined to participate or did not respond to the invitation). Students who agreed to participate in the online survey but did not provide any single response to the LP survey were excluded.

5 It is interesting to see the low engagement of teachers in deprivatized practice in IB schools. Notably, Lin et al. (forthcoming) study in this special issue also found the same pattern in two IB schools in East Asia. This suggests that teachers in IB schools appear to also be less engaged in deprivatized practice, which is similar to many teachers in local schools in East Asia.

6 The t-test results are not presented because no significant differences were found.

7 Note that we did another separate analysis by using an alternative variable—that is, cumulated years of IB experience. We did not present the results when we used this continuous variable instead of using the binary variable (continuum vs. noncontinuum) because results based on the continuous variable were almost the same as those using the binary variable. Another reason why we favored the binary variable was that although the continuous variable indicates exact years of IB learning experiences, there were some student cases with more years of IB learning experiences that do not fall within the continuum student category, defined in the previous section.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Moosung Lee

Moosung Lee holds one of the University of Canberra’s prestigious Centenary Professor appointments, ten of which have been made across the University’s five strategic areas of research. His scholarly interests are in teacher professional learning community, principals’ time use, International Baccalaureate schools, cross-national comparative studies in education, multicultural education, and lifelong learning.

Allan Walker

Allan Walker is Joseph Lau Chair Professor of International Educational Leadership, Dean, Faculty of Education and Human Development and Director of Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change at The Education University of Hong Kong.

Darren Bryant

Darren A. Bryant is Head of the Department of Education Policy and Leadership at the Education University of Hong Kong. His research interests include leader development, the work of middle leaders, and leadership in IB and intercultural schools.