This paper stems from research that examined the impact of the rural context upon the career patterns of women educational administrators in rural public school districts in the state of Texas. The study examined two pertinent issues for women in rural education: (a) the nature of rural communities and its relationship to female career paths in…

The purpose of this research project was to engage in self-reflective analysis of leadership development as an ongoing process of social action towards democratizing education. Four White women connected by their work as educational leaders, teachers and administrators, engaged this topic by conducting a dialogical analysis of their experiences in…

The feminist phase theory (Tetreault, 1985) was used to examine the cultural patterns embedded in a department of a large, urban university, to classify how the faculty in the department perceived women, and to examine how our own behavior as two newly hired associate and assistant professors contributed or did not contribute to these patterns of…

The classic fairy tale, the "Wizard of Oz," may have some lessons for female teachers considering school administration. Just as Dorothy, female educators experience the same perplexing emotions, questioning the right career destiny, experiencing stormy situations that thrust them into career paths, exploring the unpredictable paths to their…

This Manual should serve as a primary resource for site operators. It is organized so that all sites, no matter where they are in their development, will be able to find the information and resources they need to grow their initiative. In addition to offering suggestions on how to organize and conduct activities, this Manual provides research and…

This report is published jointly by the Institute for Educational Leadership (Washington, DC) and the Illinois Education Research Council (IERC) as part of its Issues in Education series. The report focuses on two areas in which state policies and programs can have particular influence on school leadership: licensure, certification and…

Teacher leadership is a concept that is gaining increasing interest from both practitioners and researchers. This article presents findings from three case studies in the UK that can be characterized as exhibiting developed, emergent and restricted teacher leadership. Differences and similarities between the schools were examined, leading us to…

This article reports findings from a study of headteachers and spirituality. It is intended to give some insight into the importance of spiritual experience as a phenomenon which enables leaders to be better resourced internally and find deeper meaning, and to provide evidence of the significance and influence of spiritual experience for…

This article critically examines two sets of ideas that have influenced educational reform in the recent past: managerialism and market approaches. It is argued that while each can be demonstrated to have led to useful change, neither provides a basis for future improvement in education. A recent example of change within the State School sector of…

The headteacher's role in school improvement and the changing nature of the role suggest the need to investigate how new school leaders learn their jobs, that is, their socialization to the leader role. This study has two purposes: (1) to identify the content and methods used in the professional and organizational socialization experiences of new…

This article investigates the perceptions of English headteachers to questions addressing the setting of goals and the effects of external pressure on headteachers. The research utilizes semi-structured interviews with headteachers from a variety of contexts. These interviews were used to write individual headteacher "portraits", which were then…

This article explores several issues about school leaders, career stages and performance. It draws upon various pieces of research, including the longitudinal study of secondary headteachers which began in the early 1980s at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), to raise some key issues about headteachers' careers, the various…

This article proposes that effective leadership in intercultural schools requires authentic understanding and related action; and that this can only be sought through a dedication to ongoing leadership learning. After briefly introducing the metaphor of authentic leadership, outlining the influence of culture on school leadership and the context…

This article adopts "irony" as a frame for understanding some of the consequences of the reform movement in the UK. A distinction is drawn between the ironies that are endemic in all organizations and rooted in ambiguities and dilemmas, and the ironies that specifically flow from the disjunction between central policies and the contingent…

This article attempts to provide a foundational understanding of school learning as moral activity as well as intellectual activity. It first develops a distinction between general ethics and professional ethics, and provides an initial explanation of the moral good involved in learning. The moral good of learning is then connected to the…