Tony Townsend

Educational effectiveness research (EER): a state-of-the-art review

Research and scholarship into educational effectiveness research (EER) is comprehensively reviewed from the UK, The Netherlands, the US, Cyprus, Belgium, Sweden, France, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and other societies, dating from the field’s origins in the 1970s. Issues include its history, methodological and theoretical advances, scientific properties of school effects, processes at school and classroom level behind these effects, the somewhat limited translation of findings into policy and practice across the world, and future directions for research and practice in EER and for all of the discipline more generally. Future research needs are argued to be a further concentration upon teaching/teachers, more longitudinal studies, more work on possible context specificity, exploration of the cross-level transactions between schools and their teachers/classrooms, the adoption of “efficiency” as well as “effectiveness” as outcome measures, and a renewed focus upon the education of the disadvantaged, the original focus of our discipline when it began.

Leadership and Learning: Paradox, Paradigms and Principles

This opening chapter explores the varied, and sometimes confused, interpretations of leadership for learning. As an introduction to this volume, it tries to lay some of the groundwork for navigating this complex territory, drawing on international studies which bring differing understandings of ‘learning’, ‘leadership’ and their interconnections. It suggests that there is important conceptual daylight between instructional leadership and leadership for learning, the key distinction to be found in the small but highly significant conjunction ‘for’. It concludes with an elaboration of five principles developed in a seven country study, suggesting that these may offer a scaffolding frame to bring to the wide-ranging discussions presented in the chapters contained in this book.

School leadership in the twenty-first century: different approaches to common problems?

This article identifies the major themes that emerge from the five selected articles in this special issue. Collectively, they demonstrate some trends occurring in the area of school leadership, but also show that individual countries are looking at these trends in different ways. It is an example of what might be called thinking globally but acting locally. The major trends that have been identified include the use of market terminology in educational settings, increased accountability and responsibility for school leaders, the move towards various strategies for distributing leadership beyond the principal and the increasing importance placed on the task of school leaders when it comes to promoting teaching and learning.

Fostering interdisciplinary research in universities: a case study of leadership, alignment and support

The aim of this paper is to describe actions designed to foster interdisciplinary research efforts at a major university in the UK. The study employed a descriptive mixed method case study approach to collecting and analysing the data used to draw its conclusions. One hundred and twenty-seven academic staff responded to the survey. The results of the survey were verified by 25 interviews with heads of colleges, heads of schools, research coordinators, research team leaders, and team members. These interviews were supported by document review to support the findings. Leadership is important at the college and university levels if interdisciplinarity is to thrive. According to the data, this seems to have not yet occurred at this particular institution. The university has done well with most of the big structures that enrich and support interdisciplinarity. However, ‘small’ structures such as clarity of meaning, motivation of staff, misalignment of old structures, time and workload, and loss of identify have impeded the move to university wide interdisciplinarity. A series of three recommendations are made to move the interdisciplinary project forward: stay clear on focus, extend the benefits of serendipity to more people, and remember that one size does not fit all.

Thinking and acting both locally and globally: New issues for teacher education

Over the course of education’s history, there have been four key shifts in the way in which education has been seen and organised. These are identified as Thinking and Acting Individually, Thinking and Acting Locally, Thinking Nationally and Acting Locally, and Thinking Internationally and Acting Locally. Each shift has seen a new set of imperatives for schools and teacher education. These changes now seem to be coming more frequently and the paper argues that, since we still have not achieved a quality education for all students, one further shift is needed, to Thinking and Acting both Globally and Locally. Such a move has implications for educational policy, and for both school and classroom practice. In turn, this shift identifies implications for the education of teachers and school leaders. The paper identifies what some of these changes might be and what teacher education needs to do to prepare teachers and school leaders for an increasingly complex future.

Searching high and searching low, searching east and searching west: looking for trust in teacher education

This paper considers what has been learned from reviewing the full set of papers in this special issue. It considers some of the major factors that have impacted on education and subsequently teacher education in recent times, namely rapid technological change and increasing globalisation and movement from one country to others, and then focuses on how standards, for schools, for the people in them and for teacher education, have been used to drive improvement in many parts of the world. Key issues that have emerged from this special issue are, first, whether teaching is a craft or a profession, which has implications on how teacher educators view themselves, as practitioners or researchers. Second, what is notable in a number of countries in this issue is the lack of trust being shown by politicians and communities to both teachers and teacher educators. This concluding paper considers why this is so and how it might be changed.

Third millennium leaders: Thinking and acting both locally and globally

This article considers change over educations history as being a series of successive waves from when education was delivered locally to individuals to the present when we “think globally and act locally.” It argues that to achieve universal student success we need to have another wave of both thinking and acting locally and globally. This shift will have implications for policy, school management, and classroom practice. To drive this, new ways of educating and supporting school leaders must ensure we not only focus on the what of leadership but also improve how leaders go about their business.

Voices from the field: What have we learned about instructional leadership?

Abstract This article documents perceptions of superintendents and principals when working under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2004–06. It uses data collected through the Voices 3 Project to consider three factors associated with instructional leadership as applied under NCLB, defining the schools mission, managing the instructional program, and promoting a positive school learning climate. Findings include that the narrowness of the curriculum objectives, the top-down hierarchical nature of decision making in the system, and the pervasively negative and punitive environment impact on the work of instructional leaders. The article argues that new approaches and leadership models are needed.

Thinking and Acting Both Locally and Globally: What Do We Know Now and How Do We Continue to Improve?

In the final chapter, John Macbeath and Tony Townsend try to bring together the key elements of what was found during the course of the handbooks chapters. One major issue is the need to find a way to restore balance to what the purpose of schools is and to support teachers, school leaders and even whole systems to promote leadership for learning in all of its breadth and complexity while both political and community interests still focus on maximising test scores on narrowly focused outcomes. They ask whether the term ‘leadership for learning’ is just another way of saying ‘instructional leadership’ and argue against this, but suggest that further research is necessary to tease out the differences between the two, and one possible area for such work is looking at school ecology as a means of supporting both leadership and learning.

Teacher education: An international perspective

The past 20 years has seen more changes in education than since education systems first became formalised in the mid to late nineteenth century. These changes have been brought about partly by technological developments, partly by increased globalisation and partly by changed demographics. These three factors have created a set of circumstances where the education of all the population has become more critical to the future success of nations and has become urgent because the speed of change continues to increase as time goes by. In terms of technological developments, in just two generations we have moved from the time when the president of IBM argued that there would be a world market for five computers to a time where computers are so much part of our lives that we cannot even remember what it was like before they changed our lives. This has helped to make the world smaller, to globalise the way in which we think about things, as changes in one part of our world resonate into all parts of the world. Whereas once we thought of the local community as our marketplace, as we sold the goods we produced to our neighbours, we now have access to products and services delivered from the other side of the world as well. Some countries have grouped together, such as in the European Union, and these alliances have changed how we live because of their impact on the economies, the employment regulations and, indeed, access to a range of services, in individual countries within the union.