Examines role conceptions of newly appointed urban principals to identify personal and organizational forces influencing the emergence of transformational leadership. Responses from 158 new principals reveal their role concepts, while incorporating some aspects of transformational leadership, remain along traditional lines and suggest district…

Reviews relevant literature on systemic change and community participation. Explores leadership styles of principals in four community-minded middle schools. Administrators should be aware of their individual leadership styles and their effects on others' behavior. Principals wishing to foster empowerment in schools should move toward a…

Visionary leaders who take risks, transform schools, and initiate innovations will not emerge from current mentoring structures (comprised of selection, compatibility, sanctions, and conformity), unless these structures are altered. Discusses contradictions between the mentoring paradigm and the call for transformational leaders, and recommends…

Explores the relationship between transformational leadership practices and art. Choosing leadership models that support connectedness and value the actualization of self and organization holds promise for living and working in troubled times. Artful leadership may help create aesthetic and dynamic spaces for teaching, learning, and leading. (24…

A "binocular" perspective on leadership combines the analytical, transactional leadership present in organizations and the more personal, transformational leadership needed in communities. School systems are both hierarchical bureaucracies and moral communities, requiring leaders who simultaneously attend to both realities in a balanced…

James MacGregor Burns's conceptualization of transforming leadership stressed the moral and educative nature of the leader-follower relationship. However, critical examination of Burns's account uncovers philosophical and technical difficulties with some of his central claims. Transformative leadership may be structured more for domination than…

In management theory, attention to the emotions is increasing, mainly for economic reasons. Within the management of education, so-called transformational leadership is becoming the new orthodoxy, and a central aspect of it is emotional intelligence. This can be interpreted sociologically, from both Durkheimian and Weberian perspectives. It is…

This article describes the details about a local school board meeting in a suburban high school auditorium outside Philadelphia. The district superintendent had committed suicide a few days earlier in the midst of hearings about his alleged misdeeds on the job. In this article, the author assesses what measures could have been taken to avoid such…

Leaders may need to serve as mentors to activate transformational leadership and promote positive work attitudes and career expectations of followers. To test this premise, incremental effects of transformational leadership and mentoring over each other were examined using N=275 employed MBAs. Respondents with supervisory mentors reported…

This article focuses on James P. Spillane's research on distributed leadership. Spillane is the principal investigator for one of the largest studies ever conducted on distributed leadership in education. With $1 million from the National Science Foundation, he has for the past five years led a team of other researchers at Northwestern in studying…

A part of a day's work for middle school educators involves making decisions about school expenditures, academics, activities, and hiring. This brief article observes that student leaders are increasingly participating in decisions about school programming, finances, activities, and even hiring. If given the chance to contribute, middle level…

This article focuses on leadership practices and teacher mentoring in an urban school context. A central perspective of this discussion is the role of the urban school principal in implementing and facilitating mentoring arrangements that will lead to competence, retention, and improved student achievement. Results from a case study of a mentoring…

The field of educational leadership is currently in flux and transition. Scholars and practitioners are being compelled to engage concepts and frames of thinking that are substantively different from the traditional paradigm that has served as the foundation for educational leadership for some time. Included in this new way of perceiving…

On 29 November, 2004, NCSL held its first distributed leadership conference. A website, and pack of materials complemented this event. The pack comprises a variety of research findings on distributed leadership in school and materials to support schools in their development of this management concept. In this article, the author presents a summary…

In this article, author Bobby Leonard asserts that the best institutions in India today are good in Policies Systems and administration. However, the key is developing a new generation of education based workforce under the hands of a good leader. India requires transformational leaders, leaders who can transform educational systems and who are…