Instructional Leadership and the School Principal: A Passing Fancy that Refuses to Fade Away

TLDR: In this paper, the authors define the core characteristics underlying this approach to school leadership and management based upon both policy, research, and practice in school leadership, and the increasing global emphasis on accountability seems to have reignited interest in instructional leadership.

Abstract: One lasting legacy of the effective schools movement was the institutionalization of the term “instructional leadership” into the vocabulary of educational administration. Evidence from other recent reviews of the literature on principal leadership (e.g., Hallinger, 2001; Hallinger & Heck 1996; Southworth, 2002) suggest that twenty years later, the instructional leadership construct is still alive in the domains of policy, research, and practice in school leadership and management. Indeed, since the turn of the twenty-first century, the increasing global emphasis on accountability seems to have reignited interest in instructional leadership. This paper ties together evidence drawn from several extensive reviews of the educational leadership literature that included instructional leadership as a key construct (Hallinger, 2001, 2003b; Hallinger & Heck, 1996b; Southworth, 2002). The paper will seek to define the core characteristics underlying this approach to school leadership and management based upon both...