Karen Seashore Louis

University of Minnesota | UMN · Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development

Purpose: This study examines the sources and intensity of moral distress among school district leaders during the first full school year of the Covid-19 pandemic and investigates their coping mechanisms for addressing issues that create moral dilemmas for them. Design and Evidence: We draw on semi-structured interviews with 26 school district leade...

This study explores school district leaders’ strategies for managing the intersecting challenges of ambiguity, befuddlement, and contestation produced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on interview data from district leaders in the United States, the analysis is framed in existing research regarding how public administrators navigate competing valu...

The notion of belonging is an often-referenced but under-theorized concept in studies of school organization. The purpose of this study is to examine the politics of belonging in schools and accompanying implications for how schools are organized and led. This research employs an autophotographic methodology. Student participants took photographs a...

This article summarizes research that supports the importance of school leadership behaviors that focus on developing positive relationships with members of the school community and links these with effective school improvement.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine how context shapes leaders' caring approach in ways that influence organizational learning and the cultivation of professional capital. Design/methodology/approach This exploratory study draws on case study data from two schools. Within each school, the authors draw primarily on semi-structured inter...

Purpose This paper explores the emergence and shift in critical theories and problems-of-practice over the last 50 years. Design/methodology/approach Quipu is an Incan record-keeping system used across the Andes. Using multiple strings of different colors, hundreds of different knots were used to count, record historical events. The underlying ide...

Purpose This article explores the connection between Culturally Responsive School Leadership (CRSL) and Positive School Leadership (PSL) and how both engage with a concept that deeply connects both leadership expressions – trust. Design/methodology/approach A multi-year, single site case study method examined a district-level equity leader, and he...

Es recurrente la afirmación de que el liderazgo directivo no solo es el segundo factor intraescolar de mayor significación para la mejora de la calidad educativa, sino también de que su efecto sería mayor en los establecimientos escolares de alta complejidad sociocultural. sin embargo, dicha constatación empírica no suele ir acompañada de explicaci...

This article illuminates the key elements of a strong school culture that have been linked with sustainable school improvement. Policy literature and conversations highlight the importance of school culture as the softer strategy in school improvement. Within this context, this article reviews existing research literature to theorize the key elemen...

In this paper, we undertake four formative assignments: (1) We introduce the idea of positive school leadership (PSL) based largely on theory and research conducted outside the educational sector and introduce four orientations that anchor PSL; (2) we develop ideas about how asset-grounded concepts of leadership can be incorporated into schooling;...

Purpose We investigated the way in which structured, multiyear conversations about race and institutional racism occurred in suburban secondary schools with changing racial demographics. Research Framework The study draws on interpretive research traditions, in that we assume that how teachers understand race and racism will influence how they wor...

Part of the Positive School Leadership project

A la hora de analizar las realidades escolares y su movimiento a favor del cambio educativo, los conceptos de mejoramiento y liderazgo son difíciles de separar. Si el mejoramiento requiere de liderazgo para ser impulsado en los distintos niveles del sistema escolar, el liderazgo educativo necesita a su vez de la perspectiva del mejoramiento, para t...

In November 2015, the National Policy Board for Educational Administration — a coalition of nine professional associations — adopted the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL), a set of guidelines for the training, certification, hiring, evaluation, and supervision of school principals and superintendents. While it draws heavily from...

This chapter lays out the general challenges facing US principals in different sorts of schools in a variety of settings. The US federal role in public education has intensified since the 1980s, with the passage of several bills aimed at improving equity of educational opportunity. In order to describe how these federal, state, and district mandate...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether principals can have an impact on organizational learning (OL). The authors use a cultural perspective, based both in the emerging literature from positive psychology and the relatively well-developed research tradition in studying the nature and impacts of OL to address four questions: fi...

This study retrospectively examines the emergence and development of a new class of full-time non-tenure track employees in a large land grant research university in the U.S., which created the employment category in 1980. We employ cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) to explore how this class of employees became institutionalized within the...

This article examines the importance of caring in schools and school leadership. It analyzes the concept of caring and how it functions and introduces a model of caring school leadership situated within this broader exposition. The analysis and model are informed by literature including academic and professional works from education and education-r...

This paper investigates how key elements of school culture are associated with teachers’ capacity to find and act on new information. We analyzed survey data from 3,579 teachers located in 117 schools which were a randomly selected sample from 9 states in the US. We found that school cultural components such as academic press, student support, and...

Purpose: This article (1) analyzes and synthesizes literatures from philosophy and education to propose a conceptual framework for caring in schools and caring school leadership and (2) reports the results of an exploratory analysis of the relationship of caring principal leadership to school-level supports for student academic learning. Conceptual...

A major research project, conducted in the United States, examined the effects of leadership at multiple levels on student learning. Although that study resulted in a book (Leithwood & Louis, 2011 ), further analysis provides additional insights into the way in which formal and informal leaders function in schools. These additional analyses have no...

As a group, the papers reaffirm, with a variety of different data sources, the importance of emotions (Hargreaves, 2002). What we see, consistently (although none of the papers use the term) is the importance of the principal’s “emotional intelligence.” This is, of course, not surprising given the accumulating evidence that there is a direct relati...

Tracing organizational theory (OT) early framings (Perrow, 1970) to more recent applications in schools, this essay suggests organizational change may be a productive central focus for future OT thinking. Positing that organizations exist so that mutually agreed upon outcomes may be generated; it is argued that discovering how learning occurs withi...

In the final chapter of the book, Lorna Earl and Karen Seashore Louis reflect on the question where to from here? They situate data use in a policy and politics context. Working with data does not happen outside political and cultural context of particular societies and schools. Also, they discuss the different views on educational change and accou...

Resumen This paper examines how teachers and administrators who were involved in a multi-year effort to engage in distributed leadership interpreted their experiences. We lay out and apply an argument for using an interpretive perspective to study distributed leadership. Collective sensemaking around distributed leadership is illustrated by an in-...

This paper examines how teachers and administrators who were involved in a multi-year effort to engage in distributed leadership interpreted their experiences. We lay out and apply an argument for using an interpretive perspective to study distributed leadership.Collective sensemaking around distributed leadership is illustrated by an in-depth anal...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the author's commentary on the special issue of Journal of Educational Administration entitled “Systemwide reform: examining districts under pressure”. Design/methodology/approach – The author gives her personal opinions, draws upon her recent experiences in the national study of US district leader...

Improving education is a key priority for governments around the world. While many suggestions on how best to achieve this are currently under debate, years of academic research have already revealed more about how to encourage change than is sometimes assumed. This volume brings together for the first time some of the most significant work of Kare...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how US school leaders make sense of external mandates, and the way in which their understanding of state and district accountability policies affects their work. It is posited that school leaders’ responses to external accountability are likely to reflect a complex interaction between their percepti...

This article addresses an issue that has not been well explored in empirical research, namely whether local education agencies (districts) have an impact on student learning. We assumed that local district effects on learning would be largely indirect, mediated by how teachers work together in schools (in professional communities) and the quality o...

The musical, 1776, popularized a deeply embedded belief that the United States became a country when several colonies declared their independence from England. The legal basis for cooperation was not, however, fully accomplished until 1790, when a limited and highly contested constitution was ratified by all of the colonies. Two features of this ea...

The English seem to delight in the policy process. Along with a deeply embedded tradition of public debating and argumentation, there is a historical focus (evident in the popularity of Shakespeare’s histories) on the role leaders play in visibly shaping national identity. The importance of ceremony and the articulation of clearly defined roles and...

We determined early in this project that we wanted to compare the English and Dutch political cultures because the language of New Public Management (NPM) has been prominent in educational discussions there for several decades. NPM has engaged ministers and other key political figures, and there is also evidence of policy borrowing, particularly in...

A puzzling feature of contemporary education emerges from two widely shared assumptions that are contradictory and incompatible. The first is that modern educational institutions have the same degree of rich diversity as modern airports—in other words, the educational world is becoming flat. The second is that in the educational sphere, global meet...

We began our book by outlining a simple set of categories that can be used to describe a political culture, but we have concluded that the dimensions that we chose are, by themselves, too simple a tool to capture all of the challenges that await each of the governments we have examined. Nonetheless, we also discovered some intriguing confirmation t...

This chapter explicates a core assumption of our collaborative project: This history of educational development and policies within a country will affect the way new ideas are received from outside and are incorporated into national and local discussions within that country. We look at history as a critical component of culture because it creates c...

As noted in chapter nine, when it comes to educational policy, the United States might be better thought of as 50 countries tied together with packing tape. Education in the United States has historically been a local affair, and as recently as the mid-1960s, change in schools from outside came indirectly from professional networks and textbook pub...

Principals have a strong role to play in forming school cultures that encourage change. Changing a school's culture requires shared or distributed leadership and instructional leadership. A multiyear study found that three elements are necessary for a school culture that stimulates teachers to improve their instruction: 1) Teachers and administrato...

Using survey responses from a national sample of US teachers, this paper provides insight into 2 questions: (1) Do 3 specific attributes of leadership behavior – the sharing of leadership with teachers, the development of trust relationships among professionals, and the provision of support for instructional improvement – affect teachers' work with...

This article examines whether centrally developed initiatives at the state level have an impact on how districts in the U.S. think about their role in providing direction and support for student learning, and also examines how districts view the strategies that state governments use to initiate change at the local level. Our focus is on smaller dis...

Accession Number: ED519152; Acquisition Information: Educational Research Service. 1001 North Fairfax Street Suite 500, Alexandria, VA 22314. Tel: 800-791-9308; Fax: 800-791-9309; e-mail: ers@ers.org; Web site: http://www.ers.org; Education Level: Elementary Secondary Education; Reference Count: 5; Journal Code: MAY2011; Level of Availability: Not...

Expanding the sources of leadership in schools has been a reform theme since the mid 1980s. Using exploratory factor analysis and regression, we examine the following questions: (1) How does leadership style affect principals’ openness to community involvement? (2) Is a principal's openness to community involvement related to student achievement? A...

This article explores the role of leadership, experts, and expertise and the functioning of teams in nine schools that modeled an exemplary integration of technology to support schoolwide instructional improvement. Through cross-case analysis, we identified three different staffing patterns and two different support patterns in how the technology i...

The two fields of leadership studies and school change have increasingly converged over the last 30years. This paper reviews the origins of the intersection, and the development of research themes in three areas: The role of leaders in shaping and using organizational culture, the agency of teachers in the change process, and the importance of lead...

In this article, the role that formal leaders play in helping distributed leadership take root and flourish in schools is explored. The focus of the study is an urban middle school, one of six cases in a larger three-year investigation of distributed leadership in two mid-Atlantic states. Using interview and document-based data, the authors illustr...

As I pointed out in the first edition of this handbook, theories of knowledge utilization and educational improvement have been closely linked since Havelock’s (1969) classic literature review. This connection is also apparent in practice. On the one hand, school improvement depends on the implementation of new ideas – in the form of both programs...

Of all the “big” ideas now on the landscape of educational leadership, few are more prominent than “distributed leadership.” In a matter of a few short years, the idea of distributed leadership has evolved from a theoretical consideration of naturally-occurring social influence processes in school organization (e.g. Gronn, 2000; Spillane et al., 20...

This chapter summarizes recent evidence about the links between successful leadership and student learning. Results of a wide-ranging review of literature, initially completed several years ago (Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004) and regularly updated, are combined with key findings from a large-scale study of leadership and student lea...

Purpose: The leadership of the principal is known to be a key factor in supporting student achievement, but how that leadership is experienced and instructionally enacted by teachers is much less clear. The purpose of this study was to examine various factors that are often present in principal—teacher interactions and teacher—teacher relationships...

Purpose: Extant reports on states'policy differences are mostly descriptive and largely ignore the pervasive role of political culture on their educational policy-making processes. This article examines the effect of policy culture on states' policy-making mechanisms. There is evidence that a state's political culture is a significant mediating inf...

Peer-reviewed papers are the major currency in the realm of science. Without an appropriate number of publications in high-quality journals, scientists do not get university positions, are not promoted, and fail to get grants to fund their research. Decisions made about authorship are not always straightforward, as accepted practice sometimes confl...

Problem Statement: Since the 1980s, classical industrial unionism has been transforming itself in terms of redefining basic value system and strategies they use. Teacher unions are no exception. This paper draws on a study of a teachers union to initiate school-based change in a single state in the United States. The research was conducted as part...

The future of the scientific enterprise is vested in the next generation of scientists who are currently enrolled in doctoral programs and fellowships in the nation's universities. Because scientific education occurs in the scientific milieu, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows are directly influenced by the organizational and contextual for...

In this article, we revive work redesign theory, specifically Hackman and Oldham's Job Characteristics Model (JCM), to examine distributed leadership initiatives. Based on our early observations of six schools engaged in distributed leadership reform and a broad review of literature, including empirical tests of work redesign theory, we retrofit th...

Purpose:The authors review a volume that emerged from a 2-year participatory effort to look at new research directions in educational administration. The review is presented as a conversation between two researchers—an old-timer (Karen Seashore Louis) and a relative newcomer (Meredith Honig)—to probe for differences and convergence in perspectives...

This paper examines how trust affects teachers’ willingness to work with innovations introduced by central office administrators. Interview and focus group data collected over a three-year period in five schools are used to analyze the centrality of trust to teachers’ willingness to work with administrators to implement continuous improvement and q...

This article examines the relationship between trust and the development of distributed leadership. It presents a theoretical argument with supporting evidence from longitudinal fieldwork examining distributed leadership development in comparative cases of two secondary schools. The analysis suggests that trust matters in the design, performance, a...

The theme of this special issue of the Journal of School Leadership is teachers' professional learning communities. It is very satisfying to see that a major journal in educational leadership is focusing on a problem that was seen only dimly two decades ago. This contribution will examine the antecedents and underlying research traditions that have...

Educational changes require attention to system and organizational characteristics, as well as the development of networks of interpersonal influences.

To provide the first national data on the nature, extent, and consequences of withholding among life science trainees. In 2003, the authors surveyed 1,077 second-year doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows in life sciences at 50 U.S. universities, with a comparison group of trainees in computer science and chemical engineering. The study variab...

This article addresses conflicting statements about the impact of accountability policies in which some argue that testing undermines good teaching, while others claim that it stimulates improvement. The authors begin with the assumption that it is important to explore implementers’ cognitive perspectives in order to understand a policy’s effects....

Concerned about the lack of attention currently being given to dissemination and knowledge utilization in school reform, Karen Seashore Louis’ main purpose in this chapter is to ‘reconnect’ knowledge utilization and school improvement. In addressing her theme, she reviews the current “state of the art” in knowledge utilization theory, and discusses...

Over the past 30 years policy and evaluation scholars have often faced a serious question: Is our effort to produce “useable information” worth it? Does our potential audience care?

One assumption underlying accountability policies is that results from standardized tests and other sources will be used to make decisions about school and classroom practice. We explore this assumption using data from a longitudinal study of nine high schools nominated as leading practitioners of Continuous Improvement (CI) practices. We use the k...

One assumption underlying accountability policies is that results from standardized tests and other sources will be used to make decisions about school and classroom practice. We explore this assumption using data from a longitudinal study of nine high schools nominated as leading practitioners of Continuous Improvement (CI) practices. We use the k...

This report by researchers from the Universities of Minnesota and Toronto examines the available evidence and offers educators, policymakers and all citizens interested in promoting successful schools, some answers to these vitally important questions. It is the first in a series of such publications commissioned by The Wallace Foundation that will...