In a rapidly changing society, education and schools are faced with diverse challenges. Over the past decades, the New Public Management and local management of schools seem to have shaped educational policies, school reform, and school improvement in many countries. School leadership for ensuring and developing the quality of schooling has become more crucial and complex than ever before. As a result, school leaders’ practices and their work effectiveness and efficiency have become a major concern for policy makers and educational authorities. Their health, resilience and well-being have become a major concern for school leader associations.
Despite a large number of studies underpinning the importance of school leadership for school effectiveness and improvement (e.g. P. Hallinger & Heck, 2010; Hallinger & Huber, 2012; Huber & Muijs, 2010; May, Goldring, &. Huff, 2009; Robinson, Lloyd, & Rowe, 2008), so far very few studies have examined school leaders’ functions, practices, work conditions and their impact on school quality development as well as on their own health and resilience. Contingency approaches, being aware of context on various levels and different areas, are small in number, even if many research findings can be very well explained by various kinds of fit, in particular person-environment fit. Moreover, there is a lack of international comparative studies that systematically examine these topics and their interdependency on a global scale.
This planned study was already presented at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) of the European Educational Research Association EERA (2016, 2017, 2018) with Jim Spillane as discussant, World Educational Research Association in conjunction with the American Educational Research Association AERA Annual Meeting (2017) with Vivianne Robinson as discussant, the Asia Leadership Roundtabel ALR (2017, 2019), and the World Education Leadership Symposium WELS (2017, 2019).
The purpose of the World School Leadership Study (WSLS) project is to research and monitor the profession of school leadership nationally and internationally.
The data will be analysed and reported nationally with an ideographical perspective and internationally with a comparative perspective. Two levels of research questions guide the research.
Level 1 Research area-specific questions:
Level 2 Cross research area questions (some examples):
The data will be collected using a mixed-methods approach. The International common design of the study comprises a country report (document analysis and expert interviews) and an online survey. The optional part of the study includes further focus in-depth studies, the end-of-day log and interviews or case studies.
The WSLS is conducted by an international research consortium that includes international scholars in the field of educational management and leadership and experts in areas such as health and specific research methodology and analytical techniques who will work collaboratively to conduct the study, disseminate findings and draw attention to implications for practice. In this way, the consortium as a whole covers a range of areas within social science and can be characterised as interdisciplinary. The work related to the international research collaboration, data collection, data handling and international comparative data analyses is coordinated by Prof. Dr. Stephan Huber, Head of the Institute for the Management and Economics of Education (IBB) at the University of Teacher Education Zug (PH Zug), Switzerland (Huber@EduLead.net). Country partners are responsible for funding the national research conducted in their own countries.
© 2022 Institut für Bildungsmanagement und Bildungsökonomie