Gute Schulführung soll das Lernen und damit die Bildung der Schüler*innen stärken. Unter dem Begriff «Leadership for Learning» hat die internationale Schulführungsforschung verschiedene Modelle entwickelt und Hinweise für ein wirkungsvolles Führungshandeln erarbeitet. Die international wichtigsten Erkenntnisse und Modelle von renommierten Autor*innen werden teilweise zum ersten Mal auf Deutsch vorgestellt. Ferner werden konkrete Umsetzungen an Schulen im deutschsprachigen Raum präsentiert.

This contribution to the leadership discourse challenges the grand narratives which have shaped our views as to who leads and who follows, and considers how inert ideas have become embedded in policy and practice internationally. How have we been persuaded to understand leadership to be an individual quality and schools as an expression of unique and powerful individuals? It revisits our long-held assumptions of positional authority, the reflex nature of followership and intolerance of dissent and sheds light on the insights from the Carpe Vitam Project, which examined the nature of leadership and learning in the context of international comparison. It argues for a view of professionality that centers on collegiality rather than individuality, where teachers are agential rather than compliant, where the driving force is moral purpose and where knowledge is created and shared by teachers leading learning.

This paper explores a teacher leadership development programme initiated by a university-based educational innovation centre that convened 40 teacher leaders from 22 different school districts across Florida for an 18-month voluntary professional learning experience. Underpinning this initiative was a theory of teacher leadership development aimed at developing a culture of professional learning at individual teacher, school and district level. It was designed to challenge, at both school and district level, a perceived ambivalence among senior leadership to teacher led-initiatives aimed at enhancing the professional knowledge and skill of their colleagues. Findings indicate that participation in a university-sponsored programme, as well as developing collaboration among teachers, served to promote a commitment to teacher-led leadership. Further, the researchers identified specific strategies which would encourage Fellows to explore new areas of learning. This also entailed confronting obstacles and disincentives employed by teaching colleagues and senior leaders at both school and district level. This article explores not only the conditions and practices that shaped the programme but also the larger contextual factors that determine when, how, and if teacher leaders are able to exercise leadership.

Thinking critically requires a new cognitive vocabulary, argued A.N. Whitehead nearly a century ago. We are liberated, or confined, by the words and concepts we use to confront inert ideas. How we understand and share our thinking about learning and how it is led require a problematisation of both big ideas. The example from Cambridge of five key principles for leading learning is presented as a different way of thinking about where leadership may lie, requiring careful study as to where the initiative occurs, how decisions are made and by whom. Reference to Alexander’s complaint ‘Still no pedagogy’ refers, in part, to the inhibitions of language used to refer to learning and leadership so that we come to understand this less as a matter of what leaders or teachers do but what learners do or how learning is made manifest. The opportunity to find new spaces for learning and leadership and the relationship between them is exemplified in Hong Kong where students are released from the dictats of curriculum and assessment and the authority of teachers through ‘other’ forms of individual and collegial-led learning.

While the phrase 'leadership for learning' has become common currency, what meanings and implications does it conceal? What else might leadership be for and to whom does the 'learning' apply? How to revive and revisit the essence of learning-led leadership buried beneath the legacy of managerialism, narrow conceptions of accountability and performativity? Drawing on a number of studies of head teachers' and teachers' lives primarily in England and Scotland, this article explores the insidious influence of policies which have disempowered teachers and considers what may be done to reignite the 'passion' which so many teachers initially brought to the job. With an eye to the future and the issue of sustainability, the article finishes with the ecology of learning and teaching and the dilemma space between the probable and the desirable. Quoting the Futures Forum the educational challenge is to 'keep the lights on today and to find a way of keeping them on a generation from now in very different circumstances'.

Educational effectiveness research (EER), especially over the past twenty years, has investigated the relationship between student outcomes and the key characteristics of schools that make a difference. It has been international in scope, with a central focus on achievement of students from a wide range of social backgrounds. The field has not been without its critics, their issues concerned primarily with what are seen as the narrow compass of its focus, the methodologies that have been employed, and its applications in different national and cultural contexts. This chapter provides an overview of the seminal critical debates in EER, highlighting the challenges and opportunities within them. First, concepts and definitions of effectiveness are explored, raising two key questions, as follows. What do we mean by ‘effectiveness’? Effectiveness for whom and for what? In response to these questions, we consider the impact of the outcome measures of ‘effectiveness’ currently in use in educational systems across the globe. Secondly, the chapter deals with criticisms of the methodological orientation of the field, arguing that while quantitative data and multilevel modelling are helpful in ascertaining effect sizes and providing a descriptive picture at a level of generality, these methods tend to leave an unhelpfully large percentage of the variation unexplained; nor, it is argued, do they provide insights into the processes and complex social phenomena at work in individual school and classroom contexts. Thirdly, we examine the field’s relationship with policy and practice. Although close links with practitioners and policymakers may have helped effectiveness findings to filter into practice, this has occurred in a selective fashion, with policymakers cherry-picking the politically expedient, rather than the more nuanced, findings of research studies. The result has been overly simplistic headlines and findings used to fit with political ambitions.