Calculating the power of alternative choices by school leaders for improving student achievement

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses a wicked problem faced by leaders wanting to be evidence informed in their choices of school improvement priorities and the most productive leadership practices to enact in pursuing those priorities. While local contexts will always be central to these choices, results of research ought to provide useful points of departure. But determining what relevant evidence recommends, local context aside, is far more difficult that the admonition to be ‘evidence informed’ seems to imply and the research community has offered few systematic solutions to the problem. This paper offers one possible solution, the calculation of ‘Power Indices’ using, for the purposes of illustration, evidence about the effects of a selected set of potential school improvement priorities (teachers’ emotions) on student learning, in combination with evidence about the effects on teacher emotions of a selected set of transformational leadership practices. Results argue for the value of a unique line of future research enabling school leaders to make choices about both school improvement priorities and how they might best pursue those priorities that systematically reflect the results of relevant evidence.

KEYWORDS:

• Developing people
• school leadership
• indirect influence
• student learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. While we use the phrase transformational leadership effects repeatedly throughout our descriptions of results, almost all studies in the review reported only correlational data of one sort or another, which permit only weak causal claims.

2. These six journals are: Educational Administration Quarterly, Journal of School Leadership, Journal of Educational Administration, Leadership & Policy in Schools, International Journal of Leadership in Education, International Studies in Educational Administration.