Implementing teacher leadership in Malaysian schools: Exploring secondary principals’ perspectives

Objective: The purpose of this study is to explore principals’ perspectives on the concept of teacher leadership, the strategies that they employed to support teacher leadership practice and the challenges and issues that principals faced while implementing teacher leadership. Methodology: This qualitative case study uses interview sessions with 10 purposely selected principals from various types of secondary schools. All schools are public schools that are administered and funded by the Ministry of Education, Malaysia. Findings: The study reveals that principals had a comprehensive understanding of the concept of teacher leadership; in fact, principals were able to list teacher leaders’ characteristics and provide definitions for the concept of teacher leadership. In exploring principals’ strategies to support teacher leadership practice, five themes emerged: developing future leaders, a mentoring programme, involving more teachers as teacher leaders, practising an ‘open door’ policy and providing more opportunities for teachers to offer mutual assistance. In terms of the challenges for teacher leadership practices, principals shared particular issues such as the unwillingness of teachers to become teacher leaders due to their heavy workloads and challenges in eading senior teachers. Significance: This study supplements the literature that explores teacher leadership within the Malaysian schooling context, which has hitherto been understudied. Thus, the concept of teacher leadership needs more in-depth investigation and evaluation to ascertain its suitability within Malaysia's educational system. For the Ministry of Education, this study notes some practical implications for improving teacher leadership in Malaysian schools.

Leading through COVID-19: New Zealand secondary principals describe their reality

School principals were required to engage in crisis leadership throughout New Zealand’s first seven-week COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020. Eighteen school principals from a range of secondary schools were interviewed about their experiences. The challenges they faced included preparing students and teachers for online teaching and learning for an unknown length of time, supporting student and staff wellbeing, and communicating clearly and compassionately to all stakeholder groups. Their opportunities related to strengthening digital teaching and learning, distributing leadership and resetting direction. This study identifies a number of implications for future crisis leadership practice including: preparing, attending to wellbeing, communicating effectively, leading collaboratively and taking opportunities.

Lessons from leading through COVID-19: Secondary principals’ perspectives

School principals were required to engage in crisis leadership throughout New Zealand’s first COVID-19 Alert Level Four lockdown that began in March 2020. Eighteen school principals from a range of secondary schools were interviewed about their experiences and the findings of this study are discussed in relation to the leadership capability framework. This research reveals that principals acted with empathy in prioritising wellbeing over learning, demonstrated community responsiveness by using multiple ways of communicating, encouraged collective leadership, led with optimism, demonstrated resilience, and took opportunities to shift practice in their schools.

Renewing the Promise and Potential of School-Based Management

School-based management (SBM) remains a “hot topic” in educational circles. This article explores the reality of SBM internationally. It focusses on the perceptions of selected Australian public secondary principals who reflect on the drivers and impediments affecting their capacity to lead school-based innovation. While broadly supportive of SBM, the participants indicated that authority to make effective local decisions was ambiguous and inhibiting in the face of the managing system’s policies, procedures, and supervisory processes.

Learning for principals: New Zealand secondary principals describe their reality

Effective school leadership is widely acknowledged as having a positive impact on student achievement. However, there appears to be no deliberate process to sustain New Zealand principals’ effectiveness throughout their careers. This article discusses the views of current and former New Zealand secondary school principals about their complex role and the support they believe would help them make sense of the role and its inherent challenges. The findings suggest that while principals develop tacit knowledge from learning on the job, they have little opportunity to engage in the critical reflection needed for ongoing learning and development. Their suggestions for systematic and mandated support are provided.

Exploring K-12 Competency-Based Education Implementation in the Northeast States

This exploratory study uses data from 413 principals to examine whether and how competency-based education has been implemented in the Northeast states and the extent to which there is variation in implementation between states with different policies. Results suggest that competency-based practices that are most similar to current practices are reported more and practices that diverge from current practices are reported less. There were statistically significant differences between states with “advanced” and nonexistent competency-based education policies on three measures. Secondary principals could use this study to understand key features of the reform and the likely barriers and challenges to implementation regardless of their state policy context.