Leadership for learning as an organization-wide practice: evidence on its multilevel structure and implications for educational leadership practice and research

Leadership for learning has emerged as a framework that subsumes the core characteristics of instructional leadership, transformational leadership, and distributed leadership. It acknowledges that leadership responsibilities are shared across stakeholders, inviting wider sources of leadership. If leadership for learning conceptualizes leadership as an organization-wide practice beyond that of an individual (e.g. the school principal), its measurement must accordingly invite perceptions and experiences of diverse stakeholders at multiple levels. Focusing solely on principals’ or teachers’ leadership perceptions is problematic since it fails to capture the unique lived realities teachers or principals experience concerning leadership enactment. It also limits the capacity to examine whether and how these multiple perspectives exert same or divergent impacts on staff development, school culture, and student learning. Thus, this study employed leadership for learning as its theoretical framework and rigorous multilevel factor analysis techniques to examine the extent to which individual teachers, teachers collectively, and principals show distinct perceptions of leadership practices. Four-fold cross-validation multilevel factor analysis revealed conceptual distinctions in how the three entities experience leadership practices distributed across the school. We also present implications for educational leadership research, practices, and policy.