Although school turnaround has been studied extensively in Western contexts such as the United States, the applicability of remedies to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries has not been extensively studied. The literature that exists predominantly uses a Western cultural lens. This article identifies four key dimensions of leadership for transformation of schools—what is leadership, who becomes a school leader, how are leaders supported, and do school leaders believe they can succeed—, contrasting between the Gulf region and the West; in doing so, the article seeks to explain why the solutions to school failure that originate from the West, widely understood around the globe, are either irrelevant or of limited use in this region. Drawing in part on the authors’ experience in establishing a leadership centre, through collaboration between the Ministry of Education in Bahrain and the Bahrain Teachers College, the article calls for systematic empirical studies to establish how each of the four dimensions inform region-specific approaches to leadership for school transformation and quality improvement. It concludes by arguing that researchers should explicitly consider the extent to which their findings can be translated into practical leadership action in a range of cultural settings.
This paper is a case study of one leadership preparation program, utilizing US school leadership standards and practices, offered in Egypt. This case study illuminates how cultural and policy distinctions impact differing necessities of educational leadership, and how those necessities conflict or concur with the international standards and assumed best practices. In particular, it serves as an exploration of policy borrowing, considering that leadership preparation in developed countries has been, on some levels, an issue of occupational field professionalization.
To build and maintain a genuine partnership between the school and those it serves requires sophisticated leadership. Leaders can develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to create effective community schools, and they should do so purposefully, choosing to learn, model, and practice successful strategies in all aspects of their work. Such leadership is valuable in every kind of school, not just in those that fully embrace the community school approach.
Educational researchers have increasingly paid attention to how practitioners can access and utilize research knowledge, but the field still has been unable to create a research tradition and corresponding diffusion model that directly and uniformly influences teachers' practice. One reason for this is the contested status of teaching as a profession and the competing interests, as well as clashing research assumptions, about knowledge in education. This article explores the field of medical education research to understand, from a comparative approach, how members of an established profession use research knowledge to increase expert practitioner skill. Based on a comparison that considers the fundamental differences in education and medicine, the article calls for the unification of a scholarly community that provides tangible theory and evidence that can be explicitly used by professors of education, student teacher supervisors, instructional coaches, professional development providers, and teachers to guide their daily work practices.
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