Abstract
Fifty years of theory and research offer increasing levels of support for the assertion that principal leadership makes a difference in the quality of schooling, school development and student learning. In the current context of global education reform, however, recent inquiries have focused on identifying how teams of school leaders contribute to school improvement and student learning. This chapter reports on findings drawn from a series of empirical analyses that assessed the effects of collaborative leadership on school improvement capacity and student learning in a large sample of primary schools in the state of Hawaii over a 4-year period. Our findings support the prevailing view that collaborative school leadership can positively affect student learning in reading and math through building the school’s capacity for academic improvement. The research further extends this finding, however, by offering empirical support for a more refined conception that casts leadership for student learning as a process of mutual influence in which school capacity both shapes and is shaped by the school’s collective leadership.
This chapter was previously published in and reproduced with the permission of School Leadership and Management, 2010.
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Notes
- 1.
 Note that the general tests of the model reported in this chapter have been compared for both reading and math, and show a similar trend of results in both subjects. Some of the analyses reported in other related papers examined learning outcomes in mathematics or reading.
- 2.
 In growth formulations, it is common for the initial state of each variable to be correlated with its growth, or change, over time (shown with two-headed arrows in the figure). Correlations have no causal interpretation. The models presented in Fig. 27.1 are also multilevel, in that each includes a within-school model explaining the effects of student background variables on their achievement growth trajectories.
- 3.
 The total sample in the prior reports ranged from 194 to 202 schools.
- 4.
 For example, the comparative fit index (CFI), which compares the adequacy of each proposed model against a ‘poor-fitting’ model, should be above 0.95 for an adequate model fit to the data (with 1.0 indicating a perfect fit). In all models tested, the CFI coefficients were 0.99.
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Hallinger, P., Heck, R.H. (2011). Collaborative Leadership and School Improvement: Understanding the Impact on School Capacity and Student Learning. In: Townsend, T., MacBeath, J. (eds) International Handbook of Leadership for Learning. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1350-5_27
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