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Educational Leadership and Management for Quality: Past, Present and Future

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A special issue of Education Sciences (ISSN 2227-7102).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2024 | Viewed by 6335

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Dora Ho

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Guest Editor

Department of Early Childhood Education, The Education University of Hong Kong, 10 Lo Ping Road, Tai Po, Hong Kong SAR, China
Interests: early childhood education; educational leadership and management; education policy; curriculum and pedagogy; teacher professional development

Dr. James Ko

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Department of Education Policy and Leadership, The Education University of Hong Kong, 10 Lo Ping Road, Tai Po, Hong Kong SAR, China
Interests: educational leadership; educational effectiveness; organisational learning; school improvement; teacher professional development

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The terms “leadership” and “management” are sometimes used interchangeably. Many examples in the literature and research suggest that leadership concerns an organisation’s mission, vision, strategy, direction, and transformation. In contrast, management is concerned with implementing a school’s mission, vision, and operation, ensuring the organisation is run effectively and efficiently to achieve its goals. The importance of leadership and management in the processes related to quality education is unceasingly at the centre of discussion. Various conceptual models have been proposed for the study of quality leadership and management in the past few decades. A voluminous body of work in leadership theory, research, and practice continues to grow yearly.

To appreciate the changing nature of quality leadership and management, we must understand the various paradigms that have evolved over the years and the theoretical lenses that have shaped the education landscape. The study of quality leadership and management is more complex and dynamic, associated with the movement of education reforms globally and locally. Many current and emerging societal issues are turning leadership boundaries into frontiers. Right around the corner, the Fourth Industrial Revolution represents a fundamental change in how we live, work, and relate to one another. Education institutions are crucial to managing the possibilities and challenges ahead in the future of striking societal shifts. Quality leadership and management must reflect the demand for lifelong learning to cope with technological changes in artificial intelligence and digitalization.

In this Special Issue, we welcome work from a broad range of international contexts that examine quality leadership and management in all educational stages, from early childhood education to higher education and vocational training. We wish to invite researchers, scholars, and educators to offer either theoretical or empirical original contributions. Articles that employ various disciplines and methodologies are welcomed equally. We would greatly appreciate the work of those who offer new insights into and/or reflections on how quality leadership and management in education is approached within the local contours of social-cultural–historical understandings and provide conceptual, political, and/or practical implications with relevance for the international scholarship in quality leadership and management around the world.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Dora Ho
Dr. James Ko
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

education reform
leadership development
leadership paradigm
organizational learning
quality education
school improvement

Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

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15 pages, 792 KiB

Open AccessArticle

School Leadership and Management in Sindh Pakistan: Examining Headteachers’ Evolving Roles, Contemporary Challenges, and Adaptive Strategies

by Dhani Bux Shah, David Gurr and Lawrie Drysdale

Educ. Sci. 2024, 14(5), 440; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14050440 - 23 Apr 2024

Viewed by 906

Abstract

This research investigates headteachers’ leadership and management roles and challenges in leading government secondary schools in Sindh, Pakistan. Employing a qualitative hermeneutic phenomenology methodology, forty semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty headteachers. The thematic analysis of the data explored that headteachers were performing several academic and administrative-focused responsibilities, although their involvement was more administrative than academic and entailed more management than leadership. However, headteachers faced enormous challenges in leading and managing their schools. Some critical challenges were a lack of basics in terms of clean water, reliable electricity, and sufficient school furniture. Others included a lack of funds, a shortage of teachers, managing professionally weak teachers, teacher union issues and a lack of authority. Nevertheless, some headteachers were making admirable efforts to address these challenges. This research may open a window to understanding the roles and challenges of headteachers and inform policymakers of how-to better support headteachers in leading their schools successfully in the 21st century. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Educational Leadership and Management for Quality: Past, Present and Future)

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21 pages, 4299 KiB

Open AccessArticle

School Reform: New Future-Ready Quality Outcomes and Proposed Measures

by David Ng and Daryl Ku

Educ. Sci. 2023, 13(12), 1246; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13121246 (registering DOI) - 17 Dec 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1448

Abstract

As we increasingly emphasise the importance of developing future-ready outcomes for learners, we will need to also expand new capabilities to measure such outcomes. AI, big data, and analytics are examples of such new capabilities. Ideation is one of six habits of practice we have identified that will prepare students for the future. In this paper, we present a means to computationally appraise ideation quality as one such capability. We have developed a heuristic to appraise the ideation quality of university student essays using natural language processing, a branch of artificial intelligence concerned with the understanding of human languages. Our heuristic allows for ideation quality to be quickly quantified in the form of an ideation score. So, instead of going about the process blindly, we now have a means to provide a point of reference to allow students to give measured consideration to their ideation. Unlike a learning outcome, a future-ready habit is more of a predisposition. Consequently, it is not coherent with conventional assessments, which rather seek to evaluate than to guide. This heuristic represents an outcome of our evaluation of a new problem space in education and is, at the same time, a novel expansion into a space that exploits new capabilities. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Educational Leadership and Management for Quality: Past, Present and Future)

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14 pages, 532 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Professional Learning Communities in Chinese Preschools: Challenging Western Frameworks

by Alfredo Bautista, Rongrong Xu, Fangmei Cen and Weipeng Yang

Educ. Sci. 2023, 13(10), 1055; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13101055 - 20 Oct 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1468

Abstract

In the education field, professional learning communities (PLCs) are regarded as an effective method for fostering professional development for teachers, enhancing student learning and achievement, and promoting school reform. Quality leadership and management are understood to be essential for schools to become effective PLCs. Mainly proposed by Western scholars, existing PLC frameworks explicitly or implicitly assume that PLCs should be initiated and led by teachers themselves, following a bottom-up approach. The goal of this conceptual overview paper is to challenge certain taken-for-granted core principles of Western PLC frameworks by analyzing the current approach to PLCs adopted by preschools in mainland China, which follow a top-down leadership and management approach. We review multiple research streams, including policy frameworks and regulations, as well as the most relevant conceptual, theoretical, and empirical studies published in recent years. After reviewing China’s core socio-cultural traditional values, we describe the recent policies that have mandated the establishment and implementation of PLCs in Chinese preschools. We then review several recent studies that demonstrate that, despite profound differences to Western frameworks, PLCs in Chinese preschools are effective in benefitting teachers and highly regarded by the relevant stakeholders. The literature shows that Chinese preschools enact culturally situated versions of PLCs, characterized by some standard PLC principles (e.g., shared vision, collaboration, and collective responsibility) alongside features that resonate with Confucian values (e.g., strong hierarchical structure, guidance of external experts, internal leadership support, and greater emphasis on ecological support rather than personal agency and autonomy). We conclude that Chinese preschools merit international attention, as their approach to leadership and management allow us to reconsider certain core principles of Western PLC frameworks. Future directions for PLC policy and practice are suggested. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Educational Leadership and Management for Quality: Past, Present and Future)

21 pages, 325 KiB

Open AccessArticle

What Matters in Leadership Practices among Estonian Upper Secondary School Principals?

by Kaisa Tamkivi and Eve Eisenschmidt

Educ. Sci. 2023, 13(9), 925; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13090925 - 11 Sep 2023

Viewed by 880

Abstract

High standards are required to succeed in the state upper secondary school system and many challenges have to be met. School principals with their leadership experience and practices are key actors to ensure the achievement of these goals. The study aims to find out Estonian state- operated upper secondary school principals’ understandings of their leadership practices and supporting factors of their work. The data were collected with semi-structured interviews with eight school leaders. They were analysed with directed content analysis and leadership practices were analysed in four dimensions: setting directions; building relationships and developing people; developing the organisation to support desired practices; improving instructional programmes. An inductive approach was used to analyse data to explore the supporting factors. The findings showed that principals followed all dimensions of successful leadership practices. An important dimension appeared to be building relationships with students and teachers. The main concern in their work regarding school improvement challenges was teachers’ workload. Principals saw the strength in having trustworthy and supporting relationships with the operator and being part of the state upper secondary school network. It would be recommended to systematically assess and develop the leadership competencies of school leaders along the dimensions of successful leadership and to closely address the professionalism and support of the school operator, because it was identified by school leaders as an important factor influencing their work. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Educational Leadership and Management for Quality: Past, Present and Future)

Review

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32 pages, 6941 KiB

Open AccessReview

The Intellectual Evolution of Educational Leadership Research: A Combined Bibliometric and Thematic Analysis Using SciMAT

by Turgut Karakose, Kenneth Leithwood and Tijen Tülübaş

Educ. Sci. 2024, 14(4), 429; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14040429 - 19 Apr 2024

Viewed by 592

Abstract

This study aims to describe the century-long trajectory of educational leadership research (ELR), including changes over time in its main and subsidiary themes, as well as its most influential authors, papers, and journals. The study combines the bibliometric performance and science mapping analysis of 7282 articles retrieved from the Scopus and WoS databases. SciMAT software (version 1.1.04) was used to analyze changes over four sequential time periods and to exhibit the thematic evolution of the field—Period 1 (1907 to 2004), Period 2 (2005 to 2012), Period 3 (2013 to 2019), and Period 4 (2020–2023). Research during Period 1 focused on principals and included efforts to distinguish between their administrative functions and forms of ‘strong’ leadership contributing to school improvement. Period 2 included research aimed at understanding what strong principal leadership entailed, including the development and testing of more coherent models of such leadership. While instructional and transformational leadership models were prominent during Periods 1 and 2, Period 3 research invested heavily in conceptions of leadership distribution. Early research about ‘social justice leadership’ appeared during this period and eventually flourished during Period 4. While principals were an active focus through all Periods, the leadership of others gradually dominated ELR and accounted for the broader leadership theme found in all four periods. The results point to the evolutionary nature of ELR development, which eventually produced a relatively robust knowledge base. Experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic suggest that crises such as this might prompt more revolutionary orientations in the ELR field. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Educational Leadership and Management for Quality: Past, Present and Future)

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