چکیده (انگلیسی):

The research reported in this article builds on work commenced eight years ago
with reviewing the literature and models of successful school leadership for
improved student outcomes. When the findings of this review were combined
with the results from case studies of successful schools it resulted in a preliminary
model of successful school principalship. We examined a range of areas using
further analysis of the case study data, detailed analysis of the subsequent
quantitative surveys (developed in part from the preliminary model) and actual
school literacy and numeracy results. We also included a measure of teacher
perceptions of student social development. This inclusion is consistent with
evidence that social skills have become many times more important in
determining students' relative life chances in the 21st Century than cognitive
outcomes alone. The final part of our research used model building and powerful
multi-level statistical analyses of the survey data. In this way, we examined all the
factors that may influence a school’s success with student outcomes. Model
building allowed us to construct inherently logical and theoretically defensible
representations of the “world” in which successful schools exist, and the models
can be statistically tested to see how well these representations explain the reality
portrayed by the data collected.