Leadership Preparation for Culturally Diverse Schools in Cyprus, Norway, and the United States

Exploring partial school autonomy

“…Reinforcing the above is the fact that the European Union calls on member countries to make continuing professional development and training of school leaders more intensively and widely available (European Trade Union Committee for Education, 2012a). Additionally, when focusing on Cypriot education, the study's findings are consistent with other recent research data, which underscore the inadequacy of the present system of school leaders' preparation (Johnson et al, 2011) and reveal the need to bring about key reforms to the training programmes so that they become appropriate and sufficient in order to meet the needs of modern educational leadership (Michaelidou and Pashiardis, 2009;Nicolaidou and Petridou, 2011;Sophocleous, 2012). From all of the above it is concluded that the design and implementation of a new school leaders' training system, which will promptly and effectively prepare principals to meet their multiple and complex duties, must be set in high priority by the stakeholders of the Cyprus educational system, since it is expected to produce multiple and important benefits to the education system at large.…”

“…Although there is no consensus on the notion that effectiveness should be measured based solely on test results and their anticipated benefits (i.e. economic growth) (Beech and Lang, 2011;Mulford, 2012), international evaluations of students' achievement in tests, conducted mainly by the OECD and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, have managed to attract considerable interest from governments around the world and have had a significant impact on educational policies (Bieber and Martens, 2011;Johnson et al, 2011). Within this context, many researchers perform cross-country studies, in an effort to identify good practices leading to improved student results.…”

A Model of Successful School Leadership from the International Successful School Principalship Project

“…All the principals were restless folk, seeking new ideas, new ways to do things, new opportunities for their schools, and so they are always developing as professionals. The development of the successful principals was a focus of both books two and three which included several dedicated chapters, e.g., [31][32][33][34].…”

Guest editorial

“…Scholars have amply demonstrated that context matters (Johnson et al , 2011; Pollock and Winton, 2016), and that awareness of contexts should always be central to the study of health and well-being. In an ever-changing educational landscape, principals are on the front line of social, political, cultural and technological changes that are occurring at the organizational, local, national and international levels.…”