Exploring the journey of school improvement: classifying and analyzing patterns of change in school improvement processes and learning outcomes

By Philip Hallinger, R. Heck. 2011

239 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Based upon case study research, Jackson (2000) earlier proposed that school improvement could be conceptualized as a journey, and that the improvement challenges which schools face are determined, in part, by their location in that journey. This study sought to build upon these propositions by determining if it was indeed possible to classify schools according to different patterns of academic growth during their “school improvement journeys”. Then the research examined whether these patterns of school improvement could be linked to contextual conditions of the schools and changes in specific alterable school-level variables. The study found that schools could be successfully classified according to several predominant patterns of school improvement and that these patterns of growth in learning could be linked to features of the school context as well as to changes in collaborative, learning-directed leadership and school academic capacity.

Subfields: Education, Information Systems and Management, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a908c55b30f7a42679130e90a8bb7095cd158b9e

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Citations in the corpus

Building school-wide capacity for improvement: the role of leadership, school organizational conditions, and teacher factors (2012, background): “While policy-makers, scholars, and practitioners acknowledge the importance of building school-wide capacity for continuous improvement, empirical evidence on the suggested claim is still very thin (Hallinger & Heck, 2011 ).”
Teachers’ capacity for organizational learning: the effects of school culture and context (2016, background): “A recent longitudinal study, for example, suggests that the development of a sustained cultural capacity to focus on improvement has a long-term effect on student achievement but not necessarily on short-term improvements (Hallinger & Heck, 2011).”
Department-Head Leadership for School Improvement (2016, background): “Most of the research justifying this claim, however, is about the influence of principal leadership and by far the bulk of this research has been conducted in elementary schools (e.g., Hallinger & Heck, 2011).”
Novice School Principals’ Sense of Ultimate Responsibility (2014, background): “Problems of practice were experienced differently, in part, because the social conditions of novices’ transitions to the principalship differed (Author, Bush, 2011; Cheung & Walker, 2006; Hallinger & Heck, 2011; Hargreaves & Fink, 2006).”
Unpacking the effects of culture on school leadership and teacher learning in China (2020, result): “This finding strengthens prior assertions that successful enactment of instructional leadership is dependent on cultural and institutional features of the school context (Clarke and O’Donoghue, 2017; Day, 2007; Hallinger, 2018; Hallinger and Heck, 1996, 2011; Ng et al., 2015).”
Emotional intelligence can make a difference: The impact of principals’ emotional intelligence on teaching strategy mediated by instructional leadership (2018, background): “Because the major aim of instructional programs is to enhance student learning and outcomes (Hallinger and Heck, 2011), its linkages to student engagement, giving feedback, and doing instructional delivery are understandable.”