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Kenneth Leithwood: Centre for Leadership Development, Ontario Institute for Studies In Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Doris Jantzi: Centre for Leadership Development, Ontario Institute for Studies In Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Most school reform initiatives assume significant capacity development on the part of individuals, as well as whole organizations. Efforts to reform instruction encompassed in the "teaching for understanding" movement (e.g. Ball and Rundquist, 1993), for example, often require teachers to:"...think of subject-matter content in new ways... [be] much more attentive and responsive to the thinking of students"... and [become] more adventurous in their thinking (Putnam and Borko, 1997, p. 1229)."
Initiatives such as this one also depend on high levels of motivation and commitment on the part of school staffs to solving the often complex problems associated with their implementation. "Reform documents", Putnam and Borko point out, "stop short of offering concrete images and prescriptions for what this new reformed teaching should be like". This assertion could be made for most reform initiatives. As a consequence, whether a reform iniative actually improves the quality of education or simply becomes another "fatal remedy" (Seiber, 1981) hinges on the work of implementors. And the extent to which they do this work depends a great deal on the their commitments and capacities.
Transformational approaches to leadership have long been advocated as productive under conditions fundamentally the same as those faced by schools targeted for reform (Yukl, 1994; Leithwood, 1994). Considerable evidence suggests that transformational practices do contribute to the development of capacity and commitment (e.g. Yammarino et al., 1998). Much less evidence is available, however, about whether these socio-psychological effects actually result in organizational change and enhanced organizational outcomes, especially in school contexts (for a recent review of this evidence, see Leithwood et al., 1996): exploring this question was our purpose in this study.
Framework
This is the third in a series of studies concerned with the effects of different forms and sources of leadership using two comparable, relatively large data bases (Leithwood and Jantzi, 1998, 1999). Each study in the series has been guided by a framework consisting of the same mediating and dependent variables but focused on a different independent (leadership) variable. According to this framework, the influence of leadership on student...