Leadership for 21st century schools: From instructional leadership to leadership for learning

A legacy of the effective schools movement has been the institutionalization of the term into the vocabulary of educational leadership and management. Instructional leadership came to prominence as a paradigm for school leadership and management in the 1980s in the USA before being eclipsed by transformational leadership in the 1990s. Instructional leadership has recently reincarnated as a global phenomenon in the form of “leadership for learning”. In this lecture, I will identify the defining characteristics of instructional leadership, elaborate on the predominant model in use, report on empirical evidence about its effects on teaching and learning, and reflect on the transformation of instructional leadership in its reincarnated form of “leadership for learning”. During the 1980s an emerging body of research on effective schools (Bossert, Dwyer, Rowan & Lee, 1982; Edmonds, 1979; Hawley & Rosenholtz, 1984; Purkey & Smith, 1983) focused the attention of policymakers and scholars on the principal leadership. This research asserted that the “instructional leadership” role of the principal was crucial to school effectiveness (Bamburg & Andrews, 1990; Bossert et al., 1983; Dwyer, 1986; Edmonds, 1979; Leithwood & Montgomery 1982). Earlier efforts to study the impact of principal leadership had begun to identify professional leadership dimensions of the principal’s role that impacted school success (e.g., Erickson, 1967; Gross & Herriott, 1965). Nonetheless, it was a key legacy of the effective schools movement to focus global attention on instructional leadership.