Effective schools 10 years on: factors and processes enabling the sustainability of school effectiveness

The Effectiveness of Madrasah: Analysis of Managerial Skills, Learning Supervision, School Culture, and Teachers’ Performance

“…Internal factors are closely related to the roles of school administrators, principals, teamwork, pedagogical work organizations, and school culture. External factors are related to demographic transformation, school market dynamics, school policies, and educational programs (Bellei, Morawietz, Valenzuela, & Vanni, 2019). School effectiveness is related to the level of concordance between the results achieved and the expected results based on the objectives, targets, intended outputs set by the school (Hartnell, Ou, & Kinicki, 2011).…”

The role of school leadership in schools that work sustainably on school improvement with professional learning communities

“…By sustaining professional development approaches such as PLCs (hereafter referred to as sustainability), teachers and school leaders can work continually and effectively on educational challenges (Cordingley, 2015;Desimone, 2009;Dunst et al, 2015), so that all students can benefit from their work. Implementation with a limited duration leads to impacts with limited durations (Bellei et al, 2020) and to staff members' aversion towards the future implementation of professional development approaches (Chung et al, 2017). Additionally, as professional development approaches are often disconnected (e.g., Bellei et al, 2016;Borko, 2004;Fullan, 2004), the personal and economic resources invested by staff members in a particular approach that could have been invested elsewhere are wasted (Askell-Williams & Koh, 2020).…”

“…Leadership is assumed to be a key factor influencing sustainability (e.g., Bellei et al, 2020;Harris & Jones, 2010). Not only have formal leaders such as principals been found to be change agents important for sustainability (Andreou et al, 2015;Bambara et al, 2009;Drits-Esser et al, 2017;Hollingworth et al, 2018;Santangelo, 2009), but also others such as teachers can fulfill that role (Fullan, 2004;King, 2016;März et al, 2018;Ng & Nicholas, 2013;Prenger et al, 2020;Spillane, 2006).…”

“…Although previous research has identified different leadership practices that seemed to contribute to the sustainability of professional development, leadership was seldom the main topic of the research (cf. Andreou et al, 2015;Bellei et al, 2020;Gaikhorst et al, 2017), which often emphasized interviews and self-reports to come up with largely normative descriptions in relation to leadership (Azorín et al, 2019). Scholars have called for research into the enactment of leadership in general (Harris & DeFlaminis, 2016;Hubers, 2020;Leithwood et al, 2020), as well as in relation to sustainability (Prenger et al, 2020).…”

“…Previous studies showed that the organizational context is important for explaining the effectiveness of professional development (Coburn et al, 2009;Kennedy, 2010;Wolthuis et al, 2021), and sustainability (e.g., Askell-Williams & Koh, 2020;Bellei et al, 2020;McNaughton, 2019). This study adds that the school's context might also be vital for leading sustained professional development.…”