School principals are confronted with a variety of issues as they provide leadership and organization to their schools. Evidence is growing that successful school leaders influence achievement through the support and development of effective teachers and the implementation of effective organizational practice (Davis, Darling-Hammond, LaPointe,…

For high school and middle school principals, the ability to create and maintain positive recognition and identity both personally and for the school is crucial for support from all stakeholders. Finding proactive ways to do this is not much different than the way a large corporation develops a campaign for a major product. Nine principles for…

Effective group leaders possess specialized counseling skills and abilities; however, attention to group leadership training appears to be lagging behind that of individual counseling. In this phenomenological study we explored group leaders' perceptions of their training and experience. Twenty-two professional counselors participated in…

A theory of women's leadership development within the context of Christian higher education is proposed, based on qualitative research involving 16 participants. Motivators to advance into leadership roles were: (a) a sense of relational responsibility; (b) awareness of calling and giftedness for leadership, and (c) a mentoring relationship…

This article highlights the practices of administrators and master teachers who are trying to balance the needs for accountability, prescribed curriculum, and learning standards with a broader view of education that gives equal importance to skills not so easily quantified by standardized tests. The author makes a case for the use of careful…

Research is limited on how metacognition is facilitated and manifested in socially situated online learning environments such as online discussion forums. We approached metacognition as the phenomenon of interest partly through a methodological objective to evaluate the relevance of a metacognition construct and partly through a content objective…

All school leaders at some point will find themselves confronted by the need to shepherd their school communities through emotionally draining experiences. Death requires school leaders to act with compassion, care, and awareness that they are modeling for young people how to grieve. Few better examples of servant leadership exist. Communication…

Counterintuitively, the more one develops as a leader, the less of a leader one becomes. What do great leaders do? Great leaders are ambitious first and foremost for the cause, the mission, the work--not themselves. Educators as "serving leaders" sense that every action they take, together with every decision that they make, either…

Does teacher professional development make a difference? How do we know? While researchers and policy-makers acknowledge that teacher professional development (PD) needs to be assessed and evaluated, there is often little clarity as to how this can be achieved. Evaluation of teacher PD by schools has been described as the weak link in the PD chain…

The underlying theoretical argument in this article views municipal school superintendents in the Nordic context as middle managers in organizational theory terminology. Empirical support for this discussion emerges from national data collected among Norwegian school superintendents in 2009. Findings show that the actual work and leadership…

With science teachers facing comprehensive curriculum reform that will shape science education for decades to come, high school department chairs represent a critical resource for instructional leadership and teacher support. While the historical literature on the department chair indicates that chairs are in prime positions to provide…

While literature abounds on the experience of the adolescent in the "coming out" process and the impact that the event has on the family system, few interventions that are designed specifically to assist parents have been proposed. Parents of lesbian, gay, and bisexual adolescents face challenges that they may never have anticipated and,…

Leadership is everyone's responsibility-even first graders. The most important contribution that any educator can make in an era of unrelenting change is identifying and developing aspiring leaders. Elementary school teachers can embed leadership development opportunities into the classroom to foster leadership dispositions and skills…

In this ethnographic case study, Ann M. Ishimaru examines how a collaboration emerged and evolved between a low-income Latino parent organizing group and the leadership of a rapidly changing school district. Using civic capacity and community organizing theories, Ishimaru seeks to understand the role of parents, goals, strategies, and change…

This article is intended to provoke thought and discussion about what it takes to be a department chair and what it feels like to be a department chair. To accomplish our purpose, we draw an analogy between test pilots and department chairs based on Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" (1979). We reason that test pilots and department…