The Effect of Trust on the Relationship Between Instructional Leadership and Student Outcomes in Hong Kong Secondary Sch
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The Effect of Trust on the Relationship Between Instructional Leadership and Student Outcomes in Hong Kong Secondary Schools Paula Kwan1
Published online: 28 May 2015 De La Salle University 2015
Abstract In discussions on the contribution of leadership in improving schools, transformational leadership and instructional leadership are, more often than not, portrayed as disparate practices. The former argues for developing teacher collaborative capacity in schools, whereas the latter advocates establishing controlling measures on teaching quality; both lines of thought attract their own supporters. The recent finding that instructional leadership practices have a greater impact on student learning has apparently marginalised researchers’ attention paid to transformational leadership. This study argues that both leadership practices are important to student performance; transformational leadership can foster a trusting environment in schools for facilitating the effective enactment of instructional leadership. Based on a dataset on Hong Kong viceprincipals, this quantitative study found that the widely recognised link between instructional leadership and student outcomes did not hold in low-trust schools. As transformational leadership was conducive for trust building, its role in shaping student performance should be re-addressed.
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s40299-015-0242-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Paula Kwan [email protected] 1
Department of Educational Administration and Policy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong
Keywords Transformational leadership Instructional leadership Trust Student outcomes
Introduction Instructional leadership and transformational leadership are considered as two incongruent practices in the literature. The two approaches differ in their fundamental assumptions about the role of school principals in improving schools; the former focuses on their direct supervisory approaches to monitor teachers’ performance and students’ learning, whereas the latter examines their developmental endeavours to build teacher capacity and commitment with a view to enhance teaching quality. The discussion in the literature has been found favouring different leadership approaches at various points in time in response to the changes in school environment. Instructional leadership was considered to be the most influential factor in shaping student learning in the 1970s, but it gave way to transformational leadership in the 1990s. The increasing call for accountability in the wake of educational reform in the 2000s has placed a heightened focus on schools to improve student learning outcomes, which in turn, has brought instructional leadership back onto the agenda of researchers. The significance of instructional leadership in educational management has been further substantiated since Robinson et al. (2008) reported that its effect on student outcomes was conside
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