Shared instructional leadership may support informed decision making on matters of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Given the various organizational processes and outcomes associated with this construct, it is important to be able to measure the degree to which it exists in schools. In this article we propose the Shared Instructional Leadership Scale and report its reliability and the validity of its factor structure. The scale was designed to assess the extent to which faculty perceive that principals, teachers, and school staff collaborate on instructional leadership practices. Drawing from a sample of 422 teachers nested in 107 schools, we generated four sub-samples to examine its psychometric properties. Next, using exploratory factor analysis techniques, we found the Shared Instructional Leadership Scale factor structure to be stable across all four sub-samples. Finally, we conducted confirmatory factor analysis on a second school-level sample ( n = 103) and the results confirmed the Shared Instructional Leadership Scale had a unidimensional structure. We conclude with a discussion of the potential of the Shared Instructional Leadership Scale to inform practice and implications for future research, including directions for further scale validation.
PurposePrincipal instructional leadership and teacher participation in decision-making are conceptualized as shared instructional leadership (SIL) – a management philosophy that positively impacts student academic performance. However, the statistically meaningful relationship between SIL and student performance remains controversial as SIL functioning is influenced by various fundamental school conditions shaped by education policy, including high-stakes accountability, school autonomy and teacher professionalization. The authors examined the relationship between three SIL policy configurations and promising student performance: inclusion, exclusion and insensitive to SIL.Design/methodology/approachThe authors used fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis on data obtained from the Program for International Student Assessment (2015) results, including principals' responses to leadership questions and school conditions shaped by policy, and student science scores in 64 countries and areas.FindingsThe role of SIL in student performance varied among the three configurations, and the condition of teacher professionalization in the configuration was consistently associated with high student performance.Originality/valueSIL can create conditions for continued professional development of the teaching workforce in conjunction with school conditions shaped by policy.
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