Focusing on school leadership relations between principals and teachers, this study examines the potential of their active collaboration around instructional matters to enhance the quality of teaching and student performance. The analysis is grounded in two conceptions of leadership-transformational and instructional. The sample comprises 24 nationally selected restructured schools-8 elementary, 8 middle, and 8 high schools. In keeping with the multilevel structure of the data, the primary analytic technique is hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). The study finds that transformational leadership is a necessary but insufficient condition for instructional leadership. When transformationaland shared instructional leadership coexist in an integrated form of leadership, the influence on school performance, measured by the quality of its pedagogy and the achievement of its students, is substantial.

Purpose: The study is a two-stage inquiry into the influence of high school principals and department chairpersons on the nature of science and mathematics teachers' community of practice participation. Of particular interest is the extent to which formal leaders influence the formation of productive communities of practice and the extent to which leaders affect teachers' professional beliefs and their instructional skills. Research Design: Using the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) Second Follow-up Teacher File, measures for the analysis are constructed with the Rasch model. Analysis proceeds in two stages using hierarchical linear modeling. The first stage investigates the importance of school leaders to mathematics and science teachers' participation in productive communities of practice. The second stage looks at the relationship between school leadership and teachers' competence and pedagogical skills, net of the influence of communities of practice. Findings: Results suggest that both principals and department chairpersons are instrumental in shaping opportunities for teachers to learn in communities of practice. Furthermore, results show that principals are well removed from the instructional concerns of teachers and that department chairpersons might serve to slow down the rate of instructional change. Conclusions: The connections between school-level leadership and teachers' social learning in their communities of practice have drawn the recent attention of those writing about and conducting research on teacher communities. Researchers, practitioners, and policy makers want to know if school leaders can make a difference in how teachers think about their work and the quality of their instruction in classrooms. Findings offer insight into important links in the causal chain between leadership and student achievement.

Transformational leadership by the principal appears to be a precondition of shared instructional leadership in schools, but it does not guarantee that principals and teachers will collaborate on curriculum and instruction. The present study, a content analysis of existing case studies, explores the ways in which teachers respond to transformational leadership by the principal, with attention paid to the influence and conditions that activate interdependent relationships and enhance shared transformational leadership and shared instructional leadership. A contrast school, where shared instructional leadership did not take hold, suggests that structures and processes that organize teachers’ work differently do not automatically result in the kinds of interactions associated with quality teaching and learning.

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Distributed leadership is a dynamic process and reciprocal interaction of the leader, the subordinates and the situation. This research was inspired by the theoretical framework of Spillane in order to contextualize distributed leadership and compare the variations using the Teaching and Learning International Survey 2013 data. The two-level structural equation model utilized the school contextual variables and staff characteristics as exogenous and endogenous variables simultaneously in order to investigate the reciprocal effects of these variables on each other, and the ultimate influences on the extent to which leadership is distributed. The results suggest mutual respect among staff, funding resource of the school, together with principal's gender and employment status, are critically important factors with regard to the extent of distributed leadership in a school.