The Impact of Leadership on Student Outcomes
By Christopher W. Day, Q. Gu, P. Sammons. 2016
944 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Purpose: This article illustrates how successful leaders combine the too often dichotomized practices of transformational and instructional leadership in different ways across different phases of their schools’ development in order to progressively shape and “layer” the improvement culture in improving students’ outcomes. Research Methods: Empirical data were drawn from a 3-year mixed-methods national study (“Impact Study”) that investigated associations between the work of principals in effective and improving primary and secondary schools in England and student outcomes as defined (but not confined) by their national examination and assessment results over 3 years. The research began with a critical survey of the extant literature, followed by a national survey that explored principals’ and key staff’s perceptions of school improvement strategies and actions that they believed had helped foster better student attainment. This was complemented by multiperspective in-depth case studies of a subsample of 20 schools. Findings: The research provides new empirical evidence of how successful principals directly and indirectly achieve and sustain improvement over time through combining both transformational and instructional leadership strategies. The findings show that schools’ abilities to improve and sustain effectiveness over the long term are not primarily the result of the principals’ leadership style but of their understanding and diagnosis of the school’s needs and their application of clearly articulated, organizationally shared educational values through multiple combinations and accumulations of time and context-sensitive strategies that are “layered” and progressively embedded in the school’s work, culture, and achievements. Implications: Mixed-methods research designs are likely to provide finer grained, more nuanced evidence-based understandings of the leadership roles and behaviors of principals who achieve and sustain educational outcomes in schools than single lens quantitative analyses, meta-analyses, or purely qualitative approaches. The findings themselves provide support for more differentiated, context sensitive training and development for aspiring and serving principals.
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cfb8cbcc39026990e1322f1a9ebfe0ed4d5eeef4
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In Developmental and Educational Psychology
In Education
Citations in the corpus
- An integrated model of principal transformational leadership and teacher leadership that is related to teacher self-efficacy and student academic performance (2020, methodology): “A collaborative leadership model validated by the empirical evidence (Day, 2011; Day et al., 2016; Hallinger & Heck, 2010; Marks & Printy, 2003) highlights that school principals would adopt “the layering of fit-for-purpose combinations and accumulations of within-phase leadership strategies and…”
- Does Leadership Matter? Examining the Relationship among Transformational Leadership, School Climate, and Student Achievement. (2015, background): “Similar to mathematics achievement, as suggested by previous research (Braughton & Riley, 1991; Finnigan & Stewart, 2009; Hallinger & Heck, 1996; Robinson et al., 2008), when a leader demonstrates trust in a teacher’s skills and encourages the development of creative instructional strategies, readin”
- The relationship between principal leadership and teacher collaboration: Investigating the mediating effect of teachers’ collective efficacy (2020, background): “For this reason, Hallinger (2003), Marks and Printy (2003), Shatzer et al. (2014) and Day et al. (2016) proposed integrated models of leadership that embrace coexistent attributes of both instructional and transformational leadership.”
- Transformational leadership, leader–member exchange and school learning climate: Impact on teachers’ innovative behaviour in the Netherlands (2020, background): “One of the most important school organizational factors related to student and teacher behaviour is leadership (Day et al., 2016; Gumus et al., 2018).”
- Is Transformational Leadership Theory Passé? Revisiting the Integrative Effect of Instructional Leadership and Transformational Leadership on Student Outcomes (2020, background): “Among the 18 constructs incorporated by Day et al. (2016) in their “dynamic representations” of leadership model, none of them was related to principals’ characteristics nor to school structure. In the studies of Marks and Printy (2003) and Urick and Bowers (2014), a categorization of the respondent”
- Emotional intelligence can make a difference: The impact of principals’ emotional intelligence on teaching strategy mediated by instructional leadership (2018, background): “It is therefore necessary to increase understanding of instructional leadership, particularly with regard to the ways that contextual factors shape instructional leadership in the Chinese context (Day et al., 2016; Hallinger et al., 2016; Qian, Walker and Zheng, 2016).”
- Seven strong claims about successful school leadership revisited (2020, background): “…evidence, has grown from 14 to 22 over the past decade; the last of these practices (Participate with teachers in their professional learning activities) has been added to acknowledge a key finding from a widely cited review of leadership research reported by Robinson, Lloyd, and Rowe (2008).”