Principal leadership and school effectiveness: From the perspective of “countries of origin”

This study examines the methodologies and findings of the recent influential publications stemmed from a few large-scale government-funded projects led by top scholars in the field of educational leadership. The authors have been leading, if not dominating, the trend of research in this field for decades. These publications all put the relationships between principal leadership and school improvement and/or student achievement at the centerpiece. All published in peer-refereed journals in the past 10 years, the selected studies feature the width and depth and advances of research on educational leadership. Apart from a review of the methodological variety, the strengths and limitations will also be pinpointed. The author will move a step further to synthesize the main findings and extract the common themes. Although “syntheses of this sort lose some of the rich detail found in individual cases”, they may give readers “a better sense of what is similar and different across cases and countries” (Day & Leithwood, 2007, p. 3). It is hoped that this study, standing on the shoulders of the giants, will outline the recent development of research in educational development in line with their countries of origin. Copyright © 2013 The Comparative Education Society of Hong Kong.