Introduction

Abstract

The chapters in this book are organized around a model or conception of school leaders’ influence “travelling” along four “paths “to “reach” students. This chapter provides an overview of this model, how and why it was developed and results of empirical tests of the model as a whole.

According to this four-path conception of how school leadership influences student learning and well-being, the job of the leader is to enact those practices likely to improve the status of selected variables on these paths, in particular those variables not yet sufficiently developed to realize their potential impact on student learning and well-being. Teacher trust, for example, is known to make significant contributions to student learning but only when such trust among teachers is high. So a principal in a “low trust” school might chose to improve the level of teacher trust as one means of improving student learning; teacher trust is a “key condition” on what we describe below as the “Emotional Path” linking leaders’ influence to student learning.

The four paths in this conception of how leaders influence student learning include the Rational, Emotional, Organizational and Family Paths. Variables on the Rational Path are rooted in the knowledge and skills of school staff members about curriculum, teaching, and learning – the technical core of schooling. The Emotional Path includes the feelings, dispositions, or affective states of staff members, both individually and collectively. Variables on the Organizational Path include features of schools that structure the relationships and interactions among organizational members including, for example, cultures, policies, and standard operating procedures. Variables on the Family Path include those reflecting family expectations for their children, their culture and support to students, and community orientations toward school and general education. The variables on each of the four paths are potentially alterable by the school and its leadership.

Evidence presented in the book identifying the most productive leadership practices to improve the status of key variables on the four paths comes from research on the effects of several different models of school leadership including, for example, instructional leadership and transformational leadership.