Leadership For Student Learning

What It is and How It Works

Ken Leithwood
School leadership is
second only to
classroom instruction
as an influence on
student learning.
THE EVIDENCE . . .

i. Qualitative case studies of exceptional or “turnaround”

schools
 very large effects on both school conditions and student learning
ii. Large scale quantitative studies of leadership effects on
student learning and on student engagement
 5-7% variation across schools : total from all school sources is 12-
20%
iii. Leadership succession studies
For reviews of this evidence, see, for example….

Hallinger & Heck (1996)

Waters, Marzano & McNulty (2003)

Leithwood & Jantzi (2007)

Robinson, Lloyd & Rowe (2008)

Almost all successful (school)
leaders draw on the same
repertoire of basic
leadership practices.
P = f (M, A, S)
P = teacher’s performance
M = teacher’s motivation
A = teacher’s abilities,
professional knowledge
and skills
S = work settings and features
of their school and classroom
 LEADERSHIP TASKS, FUNTIONS
OR PRACTICES

Setting Directions Developing Redesigning the Improving the

(Motivation) People Organization Instructional Program
(Ability) (Setting) (attending to the
“technical core”)
Group Vision
Goals

Setting
Directions

Communication
Expectations
 Intellectual Modeling
Stimulation

Developing
People

Individualized
Support
 Families
and Culture
Communities

Redesigning
the
Organization

Connections
Structures
Resource
Allocation Staffing

Improving
the
Instructional
Program

Monitoring
Buffering
For more on this, see…

Leithwood, K. & Riehl, C. (2005). What we already know about

successful school leadership.

In W. A. Firestone & C. Riehl (Eds.), A new agenda: directions

for research on educational leadership. New York, NY:
Teachers College Press.

.
It is the enactment of the same
basic leadership practices –
not the practices themselves –
that is responsive to the
context.
TURNAROUND SCHOOLS AS AN
ILLUSTRATION
 For example, “culture building”, part of
Organizational Redesign

 Stage 1: teacher isolation; no expectations for collaboration

among teachers
 Stage 2: model and clarify expectations for collaborative work
by teachers
 Stage 3: refresh, extend expectations; refine nature of
collaborative work to increase effects on quality of instruction
and
from focused to distributed sources of leadership
For more on this, see….

Leithwood, K., Harris, A., & Strauss, T.

(2010). Leading School Turnaround. San
Francisco: Jossey Bass
School leaders improve pupil
learning indirectly through
their influence on “four
paths”
Four Paths of Leadership Influence on Student Learning

Rational
LSA Path (Academic press,
Initiativ Disciplinary climate, TLCPs)

es School-wide
Emotions Experience
Path (Efficacy,
Trust)

Leadership
Practices Student
Organizational
Learning
Path (Time, PLC)

Family Classroom
Path Experience
(Expectations,
Reading
For more on this, see

Leithwood, K., et al (2010). School leaders’ influence on student

learning: The four paths, In T. Bush, L, Bell and D. Middlewood
(Eds.),The principles of educational leadership and management.
London: Sage publishers

[Leithwood, K., Patten, S., Jantzi, D. (in press). Testing a

conception of how school leaders influence student learning,
Educational Administration Quarterly]
For more about how leadership influences the
emotional path, see….

Leithwood, K., Beatty, B. (2008). Leading

with teacher emotions in mind. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Corwin Press
School leadership has a
greater influence on schools,
classrooms and students
when it is distributed
RATING OF LEADERSHIP SOURCES BY QUINTILES
BASED ON STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT
Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5

5.5

5
Ratings (Scale: 1 to 6)

4.5

3.5

3
Tea Role

Ind Par
Ind Tea

Par Adv
District

Other S A

Sch Team

Student
Principal

Leadership Sources
RATING OF LEADERSHIP SOURCES BY QUINTILES
BASED ON STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

 Schools in the highest quintile attributed relatively high levels

of influence to all sources of leadership
 Schools in the lowest quintile attributed relatively low levels of
influence to all sources of leadership
 Highest quintile schools, as compared to the lowest, differed
most in ratings of teams, parents and students
 Principals were rated as having highest influence in schools in
ALL quintiles
But only some patterns of
leadership distribution make
a positive contribution
Patterns of Distributed Leadership

Planful Spontaneous
Alignment Alignment

Planful Anarchic
Misalignment Misalignment
 Planful Alignment
and
Academic Optimism
Optimism
M e a n O p tim is m -P e s s im is m S c o re

5.00 Pessimism

4.00

3.00

2.00

1.00

0.00
1 - Disagree 2 3 4 5 6 - Agree
Strongly Strongly

We collectively plan who will provide leadership for each of our initiatives and how they will provide it
7
A small handful of personal traits explains a high
proportion of the variation inleadership
effectiveness.
For more on leadership distribution, see

Leithwood, K., Mascall, B., Strauss, T. (Eds.)

(2009). Distributed leadership according to
the evidence. New York, NY: Routledge.