Leading Schools Successfully: What We Now Know

Through consideration of the 11 cases in this book, this chapter discusses what researchers in the ISSPP have learned to understand about the purposes, personhood, and practices of successful school principals serving diverse communities in different national cultures, each with a different educational history. The refining and extension of the multi-perspective, multilevel, mixed methods research and its conceptual base over the last 3 years has enabled both the nuancing of knowledge shared in previous research findings by ISSPP members, first published a decade ago, and the emergence of important new knowledge. The recently developed and refined conceptual and methodological stance, informed by complexity theory, was used as a lens through which the authors of chapters in this book conducted their research. This enabled constructions of knowledge that reflected the nonlinear, multiple strategies and timely and time-sensitive clustering of actions used by successful principals as they enacted their broad, values-led, principled leadership, with agency and intelligent compassion, on the environmental uncertainties and internal and external challenges of change.