Purpose Instructional leadership has been an active area of educational administration research over the past 30 years. However, there has been significant divergence in how instructional leadership has been conceptualized over time. The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of 25 years of quantitative instructional leadership research, up through 2013, using a nationally generalizable data set. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted a meta-narrative review of 109 studies that investigated at least one aspect of instructional leadership using the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) administered by the US National Center for Education Statistics. Findings There were four major themes of instructional leadership research that analyzed SASS data: principal leadership and influence, teacher autonomy and influence, adult development, and school climate. The three factors most researched in relationship to instructional leadership themes were: teacher satisfaction, teacher commitment, and teacher retention. This study details the major findings within each theme, describes the relationships between all seven factors, and integrates the relationships into a single model. Originality/value This paper provides the most comprehensive literature review to-date of quantitative findings investigating instructional leadership from the same nationally generalizable data set. This paper provides evidence that leadership for learning is the conceptual evolution of 25 years of diverse instructional leadership research.

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This study investigated the differences between how individual teachers perceive leadership for learning and how teachers collectively perceive leadership for learning, using a large nationally generalizable dataset of 7,070 schools from the National Center for Education Statistics 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). This study used cross-validation multilevel factor analysis to find that individual teachers view leadership for learning as consisting of six factors (school influence, classroom control, collegial climate, student attendance, neighborhood context, teacher commitment) whereas teachers collectively (e.g., as a faculty) perceive three factors that are non-isomorphic with the individual-level factors (instructional leadership, management, social environment). These results imply that teachers collectively have a functional view of leadership, while individual teachers have views more aligned to specific areas of influence. This article provides the beginning of a theoretical framework for future multilevel educational leadership research into teacher leadership and leadership for learning.