Educational Leadership for Teaching and Learning

This chapter examines educational leadership for teaching and learning, offering as backdrop the social, political, and historical trends that present often dichotomous complexities resulting from the dramatic shifts that have occurred in education from the 1980s to the present. It discusses predominant leadership trends, including perspectives about learning-centered leadership, instructional leadership, and distributed leadership. The chapter begins with a discussion about prevailing thoughts regarding leadership for teaching and learning. It continues by examining the critical discourse of the instructional leadership literature and the changing role of the principalship amid increased site-level accountability. The next area of discussion is grounded in the research on the central office and how efforts need to be mobilized to create sustainable learning across the system. The chapter concludes by forecasting the future landscape of leadership for teaching and learning, specifically addressing distributed leadership, partnerships, and building personal, interpersonal, and organizational capacity.