This project set out to identify what might constitute effective leadership of educational reform that seeks to raise the achievement of students not currently well served by the system. The hypothesis was developed from a further examination of the relevant literature supported by a series of in-depth interviews, conducted in 2005 and 2006 with leaders in the twelve schools who have been participating in the Te Kotahitanga research and professional development project since 2003.
An in-depth analysis of the decisions that leaders face when seeking to sustain the gains that have been made as the result of a school-wide reform in their schools was undertaken in terms of;
- the goals they set
- how they support teachers' implementation of a culturally responsive pedagogy of relations
- the changes they had made to institutional arrangements in the schools
- how they had spread the project to all staff, parents and community members
- what developments they had supported to increase the capacity of their staff to gather and use evidence of student progress in a formative manner
- what ownership had the leaders and schools taken of the project.
The literature and reported experiences of these leaders have been organised according to the GPILSEO pattern developed in Bishop and O'Sullivan (2005), as it was seen that this model proved to be very useful as an heuristic device for organising the data from the literature and the interviews into an hypothesis for subsequent testing.