In this article, we deepen understandings of leadership resistance to youth voice initiatives (YVIs) by interrogating the resistant actions of a group of white district leaders who initiated a student voice program to support transformative district improvement. We engaged a fusion collaborative autoethnographic research design rooted in critical race methodology to analyze our experiences of district resistance to a youth voice initiative. Our analytical narrative reveals how district leaders’ web of resistant practices obscured their goals, allowing them to exploit a group of students of color, district teacher, and university partners to promote their public image of being leaders committed to justice and equity. The specific resistant practices that leaders engaged in included (a) maintaining a lack of transparency around their goals for the initiative; (b) controlling the agenda of all interactions with youth and facilitators; (c) positioning course instructors in contradictory binaries such as trustworthy/untrustworthy; and (d) determining the value and presence of expertise among youth, course facilitators, and district leaders. Our Whiteness as property analysis illuminates district leaders’ deployment of resistance as a means to protect school leadership as a propertied expectation associated with whiteness.

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This article investigates how the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) redesigned its three-course instructional leadership strand to operate as a continuous three-semester learning experience that sequenced and emphasized an active learning pedagogy. This accounting elaborates the design and use of this pedagogy to support aspirant leaders in progressing through a continuum of knowers, assessors, and demonstrators of instructional leadership practice. Finally, we discuss the tensions that emerged from this approach to instructional leadership learning.

With strong connection to schoolwide policy and vision and to the realities of the daily life of teachers and students, the department chair is uniquely positioned to play an important role in advancing instructional effectiveness (Printy, 2008; Weller, 2001). This article provides an in-depth look at the efforts of three urban comprehensive high schools to revision the role of department chair as instructional leader. The case studies identify building a shared vision, trust, role clarity, professional development, modeling, and application as critical elements of leadership development. The article defines the role of department chair as instructional leader and examines the effects of efforts to strengthen this role. Findings suggest that department chairs found their new role to be motivating and enriching, but significant training and reshaping of school norms were needed to provide the skills and legitimacy for them to lead instructional improvement in their departments. Urban schools educate half of the minority students in the United States and about 20% of White students (National Center for Education Statistics, 2005). Urban high schools represent a particularly significant challenge for educational leaders, due to their large size, cultures of professional isolation, diffuse academic goals, economic and cultural diversity, and the magnitude, complexity, and urgency of presenting problems (Hipp & Weber, 2008). Intensified new instructional leadership demands have been added to the list of traditional responsibilities shouldered by urban high school principals for successful management of school structures, cultures, and daily operations. Within this environment, urban high school principals have had

Background Across the recent research on school leadership, leadership for learning has emerged as a strong framework for integrating current theories, such as instructional, transformational, and distributed leadership as well as effective human resource practices, instructional evaluation, and resource allocation. Yet, questions remain as to how, and to what extent, teachers and leaders practice the skills and tasks that are known to be associated with effective school leadership, and to what extent do teachers and leaders agree that these practices are taking place in their school. Purpose of the Study We examine these issues through applying a congruency-typology model to the validation sample of the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL), (117 schools across the United States, including 3,367 teachers and their school leaders) to examine the extent to which there may be significantly different subgroups of teacher and leader responders to the survey, how these subgroups may cluster nonrandomly in schools, and to what extent the subgroups of teachers and principals are aligned or not on their perception that the skills and practices of leadership for learning take place in their school. Research Design We used multilevel latent class analysis (LCA) to identify significantly different types of teacher and leader responders to CALL, including a cross-level interaction to examine the extent to which there is a typology model of teacher responders across schools and the extent to which the teacher subgroup responses align with the leader of the school. Findings We find that there are three statistically significant different subgroups of teacher responders to CALL, low (31.4%), moderate (43.3%), and high (25.4%). In addition, these subgroups cluster nonrandomly across three different types of schools: schools with low leadership for learning (40.2%), moderate leadership for learning (47.0%), and the smallest subgroup, schools with high leadership for learning (12.8%). Conclusions Our findings suggest that a congruency-typology model of leadership for learning is useful for understanding the context of practice, as schools may be on a continuum of practice in which there is strong alignment between teacher and leader responder types in the low and high schools—indicating problematic or beneficial contexts—but that leaders in the moderate type may be working to move their school towards instructional improvement through leadership for learning. As a quantitative phenomenology, this study provides a rich contextual analysis of the relationship between teachers and leaders on a multisource feedback survey of leadership for learning in schools.