Hills: The Australian Council for Educational Leaders
Abstract:
Echoing the local demands and educational reforms in a global context, Taiwan has been launching a series of reform policies to revitalise school teaching and to prepare students for the new century. Leadership for learning, a new paradigm of school leadership in the 21st century, offers an alternative avenue for school management. The concept subsumes features of power sharing and constructivist perspective of teaching and learning. Using a distributed perspective, leadership practices through the development of professional learning community were investigated and how leadership practices affect school outcomes was further explored. The quantitative findings indicate that vision building was the most obviously perceived function of leadership practices in Taiwan. It was accompanied by shared and supportive leadership being the significant predictors for teaching practice. Learning for change and shared personal practice exerted impact on teacher professional learning. It reveals that leadership embedded in the context of professional learning community has the potential to foster school capacity for development, teacher practice of classroom and professional learning.