Leading learning effectively

Learning leadership is not, of course, solely the province of school leaders. The learning and work of every pupil and teacher is influenced by (and influences) the work of school leaders. Indeed, a review published in 2009, School Leadership and Student Outcomes: Identifying What Works and Why: Best Evidence Synthesis (see further reading), found that leadership involvement in staff development was the single most important factor affecting student achievement.Because of the current climate and considerable interest in how practitioners at all levels can be involved in the leadership of learning, we have, for the first time in this TLA research summary, experimented by adding implications for teachers in England as leaders of learning in the main body of the text. We would very much value your comments on this.Approaches to the leadership of learning are particularly important, so in this month's summary we have tried to set out the broad research terrain and to focus in on detailed evidence about how school leaders set the climate for professionals' learning as a means of enhancing pupil learning. Our study, Handbook of Instructional Leadership - How Successful Principals Promote Teaching and Learning, (Blase, J., Corwin Press, 2004, 2nd edition), explores questions such as how can school leaders reduce isolation and encourage collaboration amongst teachers, in a way that will focus attention on learning and diffuse good models of professional practice through their schools? How can they get a positive response from fellow professionals to changes which may need to be made? Above all, what specific things can they do to lead shared learning effectively in their schools?The researchers asked over 800 teachers from a range of schools across diverse regions of the United States about the characteristics of school principals which they believed had affected them professionally. They analysed the data to highlight positive and negative examples of leaders' behaviour and found evidence of ways in which successful instructional leaders: supported reflective practice used good mentoring techniques encouraged coaching and collegial investigation to deepen whole staff understanding of the learning process.  Although the study specifically investigated teacher responses to school principals, we think that all teachers and leaders of learning in schools - head teachers, deputies, subject co-ordinators, heads of departments, Advanced Skills Teachers and others - will find the results of the study helpful, particularly in the context of the increasing emphasis on distributed leadership in the UK. You may also wish to refer to a GTC commissioned study by Harris & Muijs (2004) on teacher leadership (see further reading).In order to set these important and detailed, but perception-based findings in the context of a wider evidence base, this summary starts out with a summary of key points on the leadership of learning taken from a literature review on schools as learning organisations. This was chosen because it is systematic and comprehensive and it examines evidence about a range of factors affecting learning, including the role of school managers and the nature of pupil learning.