Educational Leadership - October 2009

evaluating teacher practice, promoting teacher professional development, and supporting collaborative work cultures.

; Setting specific learning objectives and implementing thoughtful assessments to help students develop their full potential.

Aligning instruction with standards, setting school goals for student performance, measuring progress against those goals, and making adjustments in the school program to improve individual and overall performance are the dynamic aspects of managing curriculum and instruction. School leaders’ purposeful use of data is essential to ensure a focus on the progress of every student.

; Strategically using resources and aligning them with instructional purposes

to focus all operational activities within the school on improving teaching and learning.

; Cultivating leadership in partnership with other schools, communities, social agencies, and universities to foster greater cohesion among parties concerning the achievement and well-being of every student.

These leadership responsibilities hinge on the capacities of school principals to play a dynamic role and become far more than administrators of rules and regulations. The data in the survey show that school leadership in many countries has changed in recent years. It has moved from a largely bureaucratic administration of schools, focused on managing accountability and administrative procedures, to a model of leadership for learning with the school principal as an instructional leader who seeks to support and improve teachers’ instruction and set the school’s goals and curriculum development.

The findings also challenge two common assumptions. First, instructional leadership is not necessarily an alternative to administrative leadership; many principals display elements of

Teachers who paid
for their own
professional
development tended
to do more of it.

both styles. Second, simply devolving responsibilities to schools does not necessarily trigger a change in leadership style. These findings point to the need for active interventions to develop individual principals’ skills and practices.

More important, the results underline the role that instructional leadership can play: More than one-half of the countries surveyed indicated that teacher appraisals were far more likely to recognize participation in professional development activities in schools with strong instructional leadership. In most countries, school principals in such schools are also more likely to use professional development to address teachers’ weaknesses. Finally, in a number of countries in which school leaders adopt a stronger instructional leadership role, there is more collaboration among teachers,

better student-teacher relations, greater recognition given to teachers for innovative teaching practices, and more emphasis on developmental outcomes of teacher appraisals.

The Best Supports

The Teaching and Learning International Survey reveals close associations among factors such as a positive school climate, teaching beliefs, cooperation among teachers, teacher job satisfaction, professional development, and effective instruction. At the same time, much of the variation in these relationships lies in differences among individual teachers rather than among schools or countries. This underlines the need for individualized and targeted interventions for teachers rather than the uniform interventions that have traditionally dominated education policy.

Education systems can best support teachers by shifting public and governmental concern away from mere control over the resources and content of education toward a focus on outcomes, by moving from hit-and-miss policies to targeted interventions, and by moving from a bureaucratic approach to education to effective school leadership that supports teachers through targeted professional development, appraisal, and feedback.

1The following 23 countries participated in the survey: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, and Turkey.