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Article Excerpt
There is a vast body of research confirming the important influence of the classroom teacher on student achievement. A key issue, then, is how the quality of teaching and learning within individual classrooms can be influenced and improved. This paper argues that educational leadership is a key influence on the quality of teaching and learning and thus student achievement_ Educational leadership is heavily dependent upon relationships, and this paper explores two fundamental dimensions to relationships--responsiveness and demandingness--and their effects on teaching and educational leadership.
Leadership, teaching and student outcomes
Leadership is seen as central and essential in delivering the change, improvement and performance society increasingly expects of all organisations, including schools.
Because of this perceived importance, leadership has been the subject of both widespread in-depth study and popular writing (see Northouse, 2007, pp. 1-13). What has become clear is that leadership, including educational leadership, is a far more contentious, complex and dynamic phenomenon than previously thought.
The study of leadership has been through many phases and fashions, with various idealistic, empirical, theoretical and even ideological stances: trait versus process leadership; assigned versus emergent leadership; bureaucratic versus charismatic leadership; administration/management versus leadership; transactional versus transformational leadership; universal versus contextual/contingent leadership; 'born' versus 'made' leadership; command versus relationships; line management versus distributed leadership, and so forth.
Part of the confusion has been caused by the conflation of leaders (their attributes, knowledge and skills, i.e., entities) with leadership (the influence exercised by and the functions performed by leaders, i.e., processes).
Opinion on the effect that schools, teachers and educational leaders can have on student outcomes has also fluctuated. Until the early 1960s, it was widely believed that schools made little difference to student achievement, which was believed to be largely predetermined by heredity, family background and socioeconomic context (Reynolds, Teddlie, Creemers, Scheerens, & Townsend, 2000, pp. 3-4). In other words, every student had his or her personal glass ceiling on educational attainment.
Later, the various phases of school effectiveness research from the mid-1960s to the present revealed the inputs, variables and processes resulting in some schools being seemingly more effective and successful than others. One of the phenomena so identified was leadership, initially of the principal but more recently perceived as the influence exercised by other formal and informal leaders within and outside the school.
As a result of many studies in a variety of contexts it is now commonly agreed that it is the individual teacher who has most influence on student achievement, with the exception of that which each student 'brings to the table' (Hattie, 2003, p. 1; see also Hattie, 2002; Mulford, 2006; Rowe, 2003). Hattie and his colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of more than 500,000 studies and found that the student accounts for about 50% of the variance in educational achievement. Homes can account for 5 to 10%, schools 5 to 10%, and peers 5 to 10%. Teachers, however account for about 30% of the variance in student achievement (Hattie, 2003, pp. 1-2). As a result, there has been a major focus on pedagogy, quality teaching and teacher performance from the late 1980s to the present.
Underestimating educational leadership
Research findings on the influence of school-based influences on student achievement such as those referred to above have led some to conclude that leadership has very little influence on teaching, and little effect on student achievement (e.g., see Opdenakker & Van Damme, 2007).
This view is partly a methodological artefact arising from inappropriate and varying methods being utilised in attempts to reveal the effects--direct, indirect, antecedents, and recursive--of leadership on teaching and student achievement (De Maeyer, Rymenans, Van Petegem, van den Bergh, & Rijlaarsdam, 2007, pp. 125-126, 128). There is also the related problem of definition, with there being literally hundreds of definitions and conceptions of leadership (Northouse, 2007, pp. 1-13). Loose and varying definition makes accurate measurement of leadership effectiveness problematic (Bennett, Crawford, & Cartwright, 2003, pp. ix-x). W. Edwards Deming, the 'guru' of total quality management, consistently put the view that 'the most important measures are both unknown and unknowable' (e.g., see Deming, 1982). Albert Einstein said something similar.
Teacher effectiveness and performance are equally difficult to define and measure, as evident in the current debate over teacher performance or merit pay. The concept of rewarding teachers on merit is simple and has wide appeal, yet once performance is defined and 'unpacked', the issue becomes far from simple (Dinham, 2006). It follows that if defining and measuring teacher performance is difficult, measuring the influence that leadership might have on teacher and then student performance is even more so.
Additional issues with the measurement of leadership effectiveness include the fact that at any time, any leader will be perceived differently by those he or she works with: some will welcome a new approach, others will cling to the past; some will want decisiveness, others collaboration; what is needed in one situation or part of the organisation will be unsuitable in others. Thus, opinion on any facet of leadership can be polarised or bi-modal (see Scott & Dinham, 2003). In turn, leadership has been found to be the major predictor of teachers' satisfaction with school-based phenomena such as supervision, communication and decision making (Dinham & Scott, 2000).
As noted, school leadership traditionally focused on the principal but today it is recognised...
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