Kenneth Leithwood's research while affiliated with University of Toronto and other places
What is this page?
This page lists the scientific contributions of an author, who either does not have a ResearchGate profile, or has not yet added these contributions to their profile.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
Publications (182)
Leaders’ practices or overt behaviors are the proximal causes of leaders’ effects on their organizations; they also dominate the research about successful leadership and often the content of leadership development programs, as well. But knowledge about those practices is, at best, a necessary but insufficient explanation for successful leadership a...
Purpose
This study extends research on one of the most frequently cited school leadership frameworks by examining the psychometric properties of the instrument designed to assess many of the practices included in that framework.
Design/methodology/approach
Using data collected from 1,401 teachers the study examined the instrument’s measurement inv...
This paper reviews the results of 63 empirical studies and reviews of research in order to identify those school leadership practices and dispositions likely to help improve equitable school conditions and outcomes for diverse and traditionally underserved students. Guided by a well-developed framework of successful school leadership, results indic...
Purpose: This study tested a set of variables mediating school leadership’s influence on students referred to as “The four paths model.” Each path in the model includes variables with significant direct effects on student learning and which are malleable to practices included in an integrated model of effective school leadership. Research Design: E...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to test the effects of nine district characteristics on student achievement, explored the conditions that mediated the effects of such characteristics and contributed to understandings about the role school-level leaders play in district efforts to improve achievement.
Design/methodology/approach
Data for the...
This special issue of the International Journal of Education Policy & Leadership (IJEPL), Research in the Canadian Context, marks a significant milestone for the journal. Throughout our twelve-year history, we have sought to publish the best research in leadership, policy, and research use, allowing authors to decide the topics by dint of their res...
Conducted in British Columbia, this mixed-methods study tested the effects of nine district characteristics on student achievement, explored conditions that mediate the effects of such characteristics, and contributed to understandings about the role school-level leaders play in district efforts to improve achievement. Semistructured interview data...
This postscript uses a framework explaining the influences on principals' practices in order to highlight key findings from the four papers in this journal issue and to surface five insights related to such findings. These five insights highlight important qualities associated with effective leadership and point to several areas in need of further...
Purpose: Replicating and extending earlier research, this mixed-methods study inquired about the characteristics of effective school leadership networks and the contribution of such networks to the development of individual and collective leaders’ professional capacities.
Design: The study used path analytic techniques with survey data provided by...
Purpose
This study is a quantitative exploration of a new construct the authors label as “academic culture (AC).” Treating it as generalized latent variable composed of academic press (AP), disciplinary climate (DC), and teachers’ use of instructional time, the purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of this construct to be a key mediato...
School leaders’ influence on student achievement is largely indirect. Using systematic review techniques, this chapter assesses the impact that leaders have on their students when they focus their improvement efforts on those teacher emotions or dispositions known to have direct effects on teaching and learning in the classroom. Building on an earl...
This chapter provides a brief overview of the Ontario Leadership Framework (Leithwood, K, The Ontario leadership framework with a discussion of the research foundations. Institute for Educational Leadership, Toronto, 2012), a comprehensive description of those leadership practices and personal leadership resources the “best available evidence” sugg...
This chapter describes the third and final stage of a large scale study about the nature and consequences of distributed school leadership. Assuming considerable variation in patterns of distributed leadership in schools, the first stage and aimed to identify those patterns; four distinct patterns were identified and are described in this chapter....
The past quarter century of school leadership research has, among many other things, produced two broad claims now assumed by most of the research community to be exceptionally robust (e.g., Marzano, Waters, & McNulty, 2005; Heck & Hallinger, 2014; 2009; Robinson, Hohepa, & Lloyd, 2009):
School leadership has small but significant effects on studen...
Parent involvement in their children’s learning is widely acknowledged as having a positive effect on student academic success. Of particular relevance is the finding that the influence of parent engagement can mitigate differences in socioeconomic status (SES) and family background. Family background is a multi-dimensional concept that includes th...
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. Bu...
While considerable evidence indicates that school leaders are able to make important contributions to the success of their students, much less is known about how such contributions are made. This book provides a comprehensive account of research aimed at filling this gap in our knowledge, along with guidelines about how school leaders might use thi...
This mixed-methods study inquired about characteristics of districts which influence changes in student achievement and how those characteristics are developed. Staff in 49 Ontario districts were surveyed to estimate the status of nine district characteristics on changes in provincial tests of math and language achievement over five years. A cross-...
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to inquire about the characteristics of effective school leadership networks and the contribution of such networks to the development of individual leaders’ professional capacities.
Design/methodology/approach
– The study used path-analytic techniques with survey data provided by 450 school and district lea...
This review of research was prompted by the widespread belief that at least in a significant number of secondary schools, department heads are an underutilized, if not untapped, source of instructional leadership, the type of leadership critical to secondary-school improvement initiatives. Forty-two methodologically diverse empirical studies were u...
Este estudio, basado en la síntesis de una investigación inédita sobre liderazgo transformacional en la escuela (LTE) realizada en los últimos catorce años, aborda la naturaleza del LTE y sus efectos sobre el logro de los estudiantes empleando métodos de revisión que incluyen un meta-análisis estándar y técnicas de recuento. Los resultados muestran...
Parent involvement in their children’s learning is widely acknowledged as having a positive effect on student academic success. Of particular relevance is the finding that the influence of parent engagement can mitigate differences in socioeconomic status (SES) and family background. Family background is a multi-dimensional concept that includes th...
School leaders’ influence on student achievement is largely indirect. Using systematic review techniques, this paper assesses the impact that leaders have on their students when they focus their improvement efforts on those teacher emotions or dispositions known to have direct effects on teaching and learning in the classroom. Building on an earlie...
This study reviews evidence about the overall influence of direction-setting leadership practices (DSLPs), 1 of 4 major categories of practices included in a widely known conception of effective leadership (e.g., Leithwood & Louis, 2011) and a focus of many other such conceptions, as well. This study also inquires about how direction-setting practi...
Purpose
– Trust among teachers in schools is significantly related to student achievement and trust in school leaders is an important influence on such trust. The purpose of this study is to identify leadership practices which teachers interpret as signs of trustworthiness on the part of their principals.
Design/methodology/approach
– Evidence for...
Based on a synthesis of unpublished transformational school leadership (TSL) research completed during the last 14 years, this study inquired into the nature of TSL and its effects on student achievement using review methods including standard meta-analysis and vote-counting techniques. Results identify a wider range of TSL practices than typically...
Background: Using meta-analytic review techniques, this study synthesized the results of 79 unpublished studies about the nature of transformational school leadership (TSL) and its impact on the school organization, teachers, and students. This corpus of research associates TSL with 11 specific leadership practices. These practices, as a whole, hav...
This chapter argues that evidence about student performance is clearly essential for school leaders to successfully carry
out their school improvement task. But such information provided by large-scale assessment is often fraught with limitations
and is always woefully insufficient. Actually improving student performance also requires information o...
This chapter argues that policymakers in one nation need to be cognizant of policy
trends from other countries. Specifically, the authors consider converging policy
trends for organizational learning
, instructional leadership
, and culturally responsive practices
across the seven nations featured in this volume. The chapter then briefly addresses...
The effects of leadership on student learning are largely indirect. This means that to be successful, leaders must eventually have influences on conditions that directly influence student learning. Such conditions include, for example, the quality of classroom instruction, the nature of the curriculum taught, and the disciplinary climate in the sch...
In this article we tie together evidence drawn from several extensive reviews of the educational leadership literature that included instructional leadership as a key construct (Hallinger, 2001, 2003; Hallinger and Heck, 1996a, 1996b; Southworth, 2002). This article defines the characteristics underlying this approach to school leadership based upo...
Purpose: This article describes and reports the results of testing a new conception of how leadership influences student learning (“The Four Paths”). Framework: Leadership influence is conceptualized as flowing along four paths (Rational, Emotions, Organizational, and Family) toward student learning. Each path is populated by multiple variables wit...
This article presents the results of research into the impact of principal turnover on schools, and the ability of schools to mitigate the negative effects of frequent turnover by distributing leadership in the schools. The findings from this qualitative and quantitative analysis show that rapid principal turnover does indeed have a negative effect...
This study examined data use and conditions influencing data use by typical principals and teachers, as well as the relationship between data use and student performance. The analysis drew upon a multi-method investigation of leadership at the school, district, and state levels. The findings emphasize the leadership of principals in establishing da...
This article identifies characteristics of school districts that have been exceptionally successful in closing gaps in achievement among diverse groups of students, including students in challenging circumstances. Evidence for the paper was provided by 31 studies. These were studies, published in the past ten years, which reported original evidence...
Leadership development is much on the minds of reformers and policy makers who believe, with some justification, that effective
leadership is a necessary component of almost any successful large-scale reform effort. We describe a major leadership development
initiative in the province of Ontario, Canada (Leading Student Achievement), aimed at impro...
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...
This review examined 57 post-1990 empirical studies of school size effects on a variety of student and organizational outcomes. The weight of evidence provided by this research clearly favors smaller schools. Students who traditionally struggle at school and students from disadvantaged social and economic backgrounds are the major benefactors of sm...
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...
There is a significant strand of theory and research about turning around underperforming organizations; however, very little of it speaks to the unique mission and character of schools. This literature is unambiguous in its claim that leadership is the pivotal explanation for success, suggesting that efforts to better understand the nature of succ...
Current interest in distributed sources of leadership is pervasive among both researchers and practicing leaders (e.g., Harris,
2009; Hammersley-Fletcher and Brundrett, 2005; Storey, 2004). Nevertheless, systematic evidence is modest, at best, about
the factors that influence the nature and extent of distributed leadership in schools, as well as th...
Purpose: This study aimed to estimate the impact of collective, or shared, leadership on key teacher variables and on student achievement. As well, it inquired about the relative contribution of different sources of such leadership and whether differences among patterns of collective leadership were related to differences in student achievement.
Me...
Purposes: This study aimed to improve our understanding of the nature, causes and consequence of school leader efficacy, including indirect influences on student learning. We asked about district contributions to school leader efficacy, whether leader self- and collective efficacy responded to the same or different district conditions and the effec...
Policy makers and leadership developers now admonish both aspiring and practicing educational leaders to base what they do
on evidence of “best practice”. Some argue, however, that today’s best practices stand a reasonably good chance of being unsuitable
for schools in the future. Unfortunately, effective leadership in future schools is empirically...
In this paper the authors provide a synopsis of their results to date by organising them in response to four questions. These are questions about: leadership actions that account for sustained improvement or effectiveness in their school over at least several years; how the influence of these actions is exercised; differences among heads’ leadershi...
This article provides an overview of the literature concerning successful school leadership. It draws on the international literature and is derived from a more extensive review of the literature completed in the early stage of the authors’ project. The prime purpose of this review is to summarise the main findings from the wealth of empirical stud...
This paper extends the introduction to the authors’ study of successful school leadership and how it influences pupil outcomes begun in the Editorial introduction. Critical to an appreciation especially of the external validity of their results is an understanding of the policy context in which the English leaders in their study found themselves; t...
This study, based on interviews with 31 principals, was undertaken in response to quantitative evidence from a larger mixed-methods project that found school leaders’ collective efficacy to be a crucial link joining district leadership and conditions to school conditions and student learning. Results of this study suggest that districts contribute...
In this study, we inquired about patterns of leadership distribution, as well as which leadership functions were performed by whom, the characteristics of nonadministrative leaders, and the factors promoting and inhibiting the distribution of leadership functions. We consider our account of distributed leadership in this district to be a probable e...
This article explores the relationship between distributed leadership and organizational change. It draws upon the existing
literature to consider whether distributed forms of leadership influence development and change in schools. The article examines
the research base relating to distributed leadership and organizational outcomes. It focuses on h...
The leadership of school principals is an enormously powerful influence on the quality of schools and the learning of pupils. While the work of principals has been examined intensively over the past 20 years, almost no effort has been made to understand the role from an international or cross-cultural perspective. This book contributes significantl...
“If the goal of education or educational reform is improving students’ learning, what is the most important means of achieving that goal?” Ask the average person this question and see what kinds of answers you get. Whether you ask parents, students, businesspeople, politicians, educators, or the proverbial “man in the street,” the answer usually ha...
This multimethod study generated and tested a “best evidence” model of school improvement processes (SIP) capable of improving student achievement. Initially developed through the review of a comprehensive body of previous empirical research, the model was further refined through a 2, 5-year longitudinal study in 10 schools. A quantitative test of...
ISBN 978 1 84478 822 4
This is a wide - ranging review of theory and evidence about the nature, causes and
consequences for schools and students of successful school leadership. We undertook the review
for several purposes. One purpose was to provide a state-of-the-evidence description of what is
already known about successful leadership. We an...
Using data from a larger 4-year evaluation of England's National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies, this study tested the effects of a school-specific model of transformational leadership on teachers (motivation, capacities, and work settings), their classroom practices, and gains in student achievement. Some 2,290 teachers from 655 primary schools...
Purpose
– To synthesize the results of the seven country reports covered in the special issue of JEA on successful school principalship.
Design/methodology/approach
– Presents the main themes of the articles with their main implications and benefits. Examines the different models.
Findings
– The country reports provide encouraging signs of progre...
This paper uses evidence about transformational forms of leadership in schools provided by 32 empirical studies published between 1996 and 2005 to answer questions about the nature of such leadership, its antecedents, and the variables that both moderate and mediate its effects on students. Results indicate significant, primarily indirect effects o...
Policy makers, their staffs and those responsible for the preparation and ongoing professional development of school leaders
are the primary audiences for this chapter. The general orientation of the chapter is premised on the belief that policy makers
pursuing an accountability agenda for schools rarely have an opportunity to fully appreciate (a)...
In workplace health interventions, engaging management and union decision makers is considered important for the success of the project, yet little research has described the process of making this happen. A case study of a knowledge-transfer process is presented to describe the practices and processes adopted by a knowledge broker who engaged work...
Both 'strategic' and 'distributed' forms of leadership are considered promising responses to the demands placed on school systems by large-scale reform initiatives. Using observation, interview and survey data collected as part of a larger evaluation of England's National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies, this study inquired about sources of leader...
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...
This article examines the effects of transformational school leadership on the commitment of teachers to school reform, and the effort they are willing to devote to such reform. It does so by building on the knowledge from both educational and non-educational research into such effects. A model of such effects is tested using two approximately comp...
Demonstrating the contribution of leadership development programs to student learning has become a problem of considerable recent interest to both school reformers and those attempting to improve how school leaders are prepared. This article describes an innovative approach to improving school leadership developed by the Greater New Orleans School...
Socioeconomic status is strongly related to student learning by shaping the family culture. Strong family cultures provide children with intellectual, social, and emotional capacities that greatly improve their chances of school success. The wider community also contributes to the capacities needed for school success. Therefore, a variety of interv...
The effects of principals’ transformational leadership practices on teachers’ commitment to change are examined in this study in Hong Kong primary schools. Mediating variables in the study included school culture, strategies for change, school structure, and the school environment. Results suggest strong significant effects of transformational lead...
Guided by a synthesis of theory on human motivation and evidence about teachers’motivation to implement school reform, this study aimed to better understand the responses of teachers and school administrators to government accountability initiatives and to assess the extent to which leadership practices had a bearing on those responses. Interview d...
Reflecting the prevailing sentiment of the public-at-large, governments in many parts of the world show little patience for
the usual pace of educational change. One of the primary reasons for this impatience is the largely uncontested link, in the
minds of many policy makers, between a globally competitive national economy and the quality of a nat...
Variation in the success of large-scale reform is afunction of many factors interacting at many ``levels''.Built on a selective review of the evidence aboutlarge-scale reform, this paper provides a framework forexplaining such variation, as well as assessing progressin that direction. Relevant factors influencing reformsuccess, according to the fra...
The first International Handbook of Educational Leadership and Administration (Leithwood et al.) was published in 1996 and quickly became something of a best seller for reference works within education. Such success, we suggest, was at least partly due to the unprecedented global waves of concern for improving schools launched in the mid 1980's, co...
Citations
... Por ejemplo, Sun & Leithwood (2014), tras una revisión documental de 24 estudios que evaluaban efectos directos del Liderazgo Transformacional Escolar (LTE) (Kvashnina & Martynko, 2016), en el logro de los estudiantes, encuentran una relación pequeña, pero con significativo efecto positivo directo, con un coeficiente de correlación promedio de 0.09. Los autores también encuentran que algunas prácticas de LTE como "construir estructuras de colaboración" y "proporcionar consideración individualizada" hicieron contribuciones mucho más grandes en los logros de los estudiantes (r= 0.17 y r=0.15 respectivamente), que otras prácticas, las cuales oscilaron entre r= 0.03 y r= 0.05. ...
... The adoption of collaborative and network-oriented approaches to educational leadership is imperative for successfully addressing the intricate challenges that schools confront and meeting the demands of evidence-based learning practices for all students (Chestnutt et al. 2023;Leithwood et al. 2023). This approach to educational leadership underscores the significance of the network and the individual actors comprising it, as the strength and quality of the connections and relationships between network actors are necessary for effective leadership practices (Tipurić 2022). ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/556302262861824-1509644203043_Q64/Jingping-Sun.jpg)
... The earlier sections relating to learning-centred leadership and personalised learning have made clear the complexity of information systems required and the skills needed to interpret data and then communicate that analysis. Leaders can be expected to employ 'evidence-driven decision-making' and work is needed on developing relevant quality indicators for such things as school culture, pupil engagement and collaboration among staff (Leithwood et al 2007). The new arrangements for extended schools and the idea of successful engagement with parents suggest leaders need performance indicators beyond measures of value-added academic performance. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/278452264554510-1443399601959_Q64/Scott-Bauer-3.jpg)
... For such expertise to be exercised in schools, there need to be strong professional communities bound by a strong sense of collective responsibility for improving student learning. Such school capacities depend on active, highly competent, and confident instructional leaders working everyday in schools with teachers to refine teaching (Leithwood, 1994; Leithwood and Prestine, 2002). At the base of such instructional leadership must lie the firm belief that all teachers are capable of delivering high quality lessons and assessment tasks. ...
... • Shared leadership that values teachers' participation in making decisions (Hord, 1997, Leithwood, Jantzi and Steinbach, 1998. ...
... The research anticipated that involving diversified evaluation subjects in the assessment of P. E. learning would lead to a more holistic and comprehensive understanding of students' experiences. The findings aligned with this expectation, demonstrating that students, parents, and the broader community contribute unique perspectives that enrich the evaluation process (Leithwood, 2021;Wang & Degol, 2016). Their involvement provided a broader view of P. E. learning, extending beyond traditional quantifiable measures. ...
... Research has found that leadership influences student achievement (Bryk et al., 2010;Fullan, 2010;Grissom et al., 2021;Leithwood & Louis, 2012b;Louis, Dretzke et al., 2010;Penlington et al., 2008;Sergiovanni, 1984). Therefore, school leaders must exercise their skills, knowledge, and beliefs (Leithwood & McCullough, 2021;Louis, Dretzke et al., 2010;Wahlstrom & Lewis, 2008) to enhance student achievement (Bryk et al., 2010;DiPaola & Tschannen-Moran, 2003). What they choose to do intentionally is referred to as "leadership agency" (Bandura, 2006). ...
... In a broader sense, it refers to all procedures that lead to student learning, including managerial behaviors (Hallinger, 2013). Leithwood et al. (2020) posit that instructional leadership theoretically encapsulates all that a principal does during the day to support the achievement of students and teachers. Hallinger (2000) and Kwan (2011) suggest that defining the school's mission and framing and communicating the school's goals are the principal's responsibilities. ...
... Also, when it comes to local education authorities (LEAs), earlier research offers important insights into how successful LEAs operate and support school managers in various contexts (see, e.g. Anderson and Daly, 2013;Leithwood, 2010;Leithwood et al., 2019;Liljenberg et al., 2022;Nordholm, 2016;Rorrer et al., 2008). However, less attention has been paid to the level above the LEA level, i.e. the level of the national school agency (i.e. the Swedish National Agency for Education -SNAE). ...
... It became a foundational building block for a culture of continuous improvement that encouraged the development of school norms that support an openness to change in the direction of the purpose or vision of the school. The content and clarity of a principal's vision has been linked to educational reform efforts as well as student outcomes and is consistent with an array of relevant and well-established works in the literature on successful school leadership, including studies of the ISSPP [14][15][16]. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/277535989485584-1443181144897_Q64/Alma-Harris.jpg)
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/272683220860941-1442024154227_Q64/David-Hopkins-12.jpg)
