Intension, Current Implementation and Improvement Path of Instructional Leadership: A school Case of Hong Kong

This paper aims to analyze the implementation status of instructional leadership of a HK primary school that benefits in mid-ranking and mainly uses instructional leadership to develop their curriculums. Instructional leadership is the result of introducing leadership concepts into the teaching field, and it reflects the changing trend of school management to a certain extent. At present, the research on instructional leadership is limited to the principal's leadership, which limits the overall function of instructional leadership. By investigating the actuality of school and the implementation of school policies and programs, the paper deeply analyzes the existed problems in a Hong Kong school and offers optimization suggestions: strengthen the school distributive leadership construction, promote the professional development of teachers and curriculums, establish a diversified evaluation system, develop an organizational culture of democratic cooperation and improve the curriculum leadership of principals.

Indigenous Health Leadership: A Kaupapa MāoriPerspective from Aotearoa – New Zealand

This article describes the challenge of addressing indigenous health leadership to reduce ethnic disparity in modern healthcare. The indigenous New Zealand population, Māori, are disadvantaged across many health domains including the socioeconomic determinants of health. The Treaty of Waitangi, considered New Zealand’s founding document, outlines Māori autonomy and leadership, and can be applied to a model of health equity. Leadership frameworks in this sense must incorporate ethical and servant leadership styles across a shared, distributive leadership model to develop safe and equitable health environments where Indigenous ways of being and knowing are not subjugated. This is a shift from traditional hierarchical paradigms of the past and acknowledges Māori as having the autonomy to lead and maintain equitable health outcomes.

Autonomía escolar al servicio del éxito educativo para todos

In this paper we examine how the educational autonomy has been configured in the light of national legislation and also of the European political framework, analysing its evolution towards a regulation that exercises a posteriori control, based on accountability, and that is linked to the neoliberal postulates. In view of this dangerous drift and the evidence that autonomy cannot be decreed, we present the results of a qualitative research that analyzes how a school in Cantabria (Spain) builds an inclusive educational project that responds to the needs of its context, making use of its own space of autonomy. We used data production strategies such as semi-structured interviews, document analysis, discussion groups with students and teachers (including the leadership team and the school counselor) and participant observations. We submitted these data to a process of analysis, using inductive and deductive strategies, and inferred some keys that can illuminate the development paths of autonomy in other schools: the construction of an School Educational Project shared by the community; the exercise of a distributive leadership; internal training initiatives; and the processes of evaluation in a spiral (internal and external).

Instructional Leadership

While principals are ultimately accountable for instructional leadership, they also are burdened by the increasing demands of the administrative job and, therefore, must rely on the capable teaching professionals to help carry out the instructional mission of the school. Indicators of instructional leadership for teacher leaders include coaching and mentoring, collaboration, and understanding the context of school and community. This chapter addresses the constructs of instructional leadership, including 1) understanding effective instructional practices, 2) alignment of school-wide instructional systems, 3) use of data to improve instruction, 4) the fostering of collective continuous improvement, and 5) inclusion of collaborative professional development for school personnel to build professional capacity and leadership in all. The intersection between principal and teacher leader roles, as a premise for distributive leadership, will be explored and proposed with recommendations for future research.

Empowering Academic Stakeholders through Distributive Leadership

The Philippine educational system has engaged into an intensive strategic collaborative pedagogical setting in which education is not only mobilized by educators and school administrators; but more so with the participation of all concerned sectors of society. Everyone is an academic stakeholder par excellence – family, community, local government units, religious sectors, and private industry partners. Moreover, the focus of this present paper is to put forward a discursive analysis among various academic stakeholders into a strategic leadership framework as contextualized into local academic school setup. The primary argument of this paper is that constructivist education at least in the Philippine context is interpretatively structured into a distributive type of academic leadership wherein leadership is primarily decentralized yet collaboratively distributed among primary and secondary stakeholders. Hence, this study is advancing a principle of “distributive leadership through stakeholder mobilization”.