Leadership for structural initiatives

As mentioned above, the functioning of a school is determined by its structure, which comprises organisational, group and individual levels. As the driving force in development, school leaders need to ensure that operations at every level are sufficiently smooth and coherent to support school performance in various areas. Leadership for structural initiatives involves the development of initiatives to modify and enhance internal school structures to improve a school’s operation, decision making and working relations at the organisational, group and individual levels.

With advances in leadership research in the last few decades, some important categories of leadership for structural initiatives have emerged, such as multi-level learning leadership (Cheng, 2011), distributed leadership (Spillane, 2006; Harris, 2004), participative leadership (Benoliel and Somech, 2014), collaborative leadership (Hallinger and Heck, 2010), shared leadership (Wang et al., 2014) and teacher leadership (Gonzales and Lambert, 2014). These types of leadership are distinguished by the development of different initiatives to promote school members’ active participation and collaboration in decision making, development and professional practice at various levels. These categories have been used quite widely in research and practice in recent years.

For example, Cheng (2011) contended that to facilitate the educational changes required to ensure students’ sustainable development and lifelong learning in the twenty-first century, and to meet the numerous challenges arising from the rapidly changing educational environment, schools should operate as structural systems of multi-level action learning, involving individual learning, group learning and organisational learning[3]. To support students’ continuous learning at the individual and group levels, it is also necessary to support teachers’ professional learning at individual and group level and promote learning at the level of the organisation. The resulting system of multi-level learning will not only sustain continuous student learning but improve teachers’ professional expertise and support the development of the whole school.

How can such a multi-level learning system be developed? School leadership is crucial. Multi-level learning leadership involves the development of initiatives to establish the necessary mechanisms and conditions to facilitate the action learning of students, teachers and all other school members at various levels, as well as increasing their capacity for high performance and continuous development in a rapidly changing educational context. School leadership is to a large extent also a process of action learning, as school leaders accumulate action knowledge and wisdom from their practice.

Although the concepts of distributed leadership, participative leadership, collaborative leadership, shared leadership and teacher leadership differ in certain respects in theory and practice, nearly all of them emphasise members’ participation and collaboration in leadership at different levels of an organisation (here a school). It would be worthwhile to investigate the contribution to school performance made by the interaction between these various types of leadership for structural initiatives and the functional, structural and cultural forms of school autonomy.