Ng, David Foo Seong

This article presents part of the findings drawn from a larger study on school leadership in 28 Singapore primary schools. This article discusses the perceptions of 224 key personnel (i.e. teachers with formal leadership titles) and 462 teachers (i.e. classroom/subject teachers without a formal leadership position) of their school leaders’ enactment of instructional leadership and the predictive relationships between instructional leadership and teacher competences. The key findings were (i) Singapore school leaders were perceived to adopt a selective instructional leadership approach and (ii) instructional leadership practices that focused on promoting professional development and positive school climate were strongly associated with teacher competences. The article contributes to the growing knowledge base on the enactment of instructional leadership in non-Western settings and specifies the relationships between instructional leadership and teacher-level variables.

This study examined distributed leadership in Information Communication Technology reform in a government school in Singapore. The study adopted a naturalistic inquiry approach, involving the case study of a school. The study found that leadership for ICT reform is distributed according to functions of transformational, instructional, emotional and strategic management of resources. The key enabling factors are an official leadership position, access to expertise, support by senior management, and interpersonal synergies amongst the leaders. Transformational leadership is performed mainly by senior management. Instructional leadership is performed mainly by middle management. Both senior and middle management provided emotional leadership.

In this paper, we propose that successful education needs to fulfil three purposes while being cognisant of time and context: (1) learning, (2) lifework and (3) well-being. An education system is successful if it can develop future-ready individuals who will continue to learn beyond graduation, take on future lifework, and thrive in a changing society and environment. The future is context-situated and context-dependent. We have chosen to examine the economic, social and environmental context of Singapore to provide insight on the values, skills and knowledge that are required of future-ready learners. We have compared the trajectories of other high-income nations with those of Singapore. Traditional teaching and learning practices no longer serve us well in the new realities that emerge. Education practices need to evolve in tandem to meet the demands of the 21st century. The roles that school leaders play include creating teaching and learning environments where these practices can be implemented. In our review of leadership practices and concepts, we have found that it is important for school leaders to question existing assumptions of teaching, learning and leadership practices in order to advance the development of 21st century skills, knowledge, values, and habits in learners.

Educational leadership for the 21st century calls for a new and different working relationship between educators. In addition to well-known approaches to educational leadership such as transformational, strategic, educative and organizational styles, the notion of parallel leadership is receiving much attention with growing evidence from Australian schools that this leadership style facilitates school improvement. Parallel leadership challenges teachers and members of the school management to establish a more collaborative working relationship. Such leadership entails mutualism between administrator leaders and teacher leaders, a sense of shared purpose and an allowance of individual expression and action by respective leaders (Andrews & Crowther, 2002). Nurturing parallel leadership involves a change in the roles and responsibilities of principals – to lead in metastrategic development – and of teachers – to lead in pedagogical development. Such leadership is an impetus for essential processes of schoolwide professional learning, culture building and approach to pedagogy which will enhance and sustain school outcomes, thus giving IDEAS schools a cutting edge. This enables the knowledge-generating capacity of schools to be enhanced and sustained. Based on data obtained from interviews and fieldwork observations we introduce an elaborated version of the’ black box’ (Crowther, Hann & Andrews, 2002) and provide a discussion on how three principals in Singapore schools, as part of the IDEAS project, embrace the role of ‘strategic leaders’ in the context of parallel leadership. As these principals progress with developing parallel leadership, we expect valuable insight to emerge as to how parallel leadership is functioning in these schools, thus enabling us to provide at a later stage, a more conclusive answer as to what a parallel relationship between teachers and principals looks like in the Singapore context.

Many school leadership programs are set and delivered in specific modules or workshops in order to achieve a pre-determined set of competencies, knowledge, and skills. In addition, these programs are driven by the faculty member and the prescribed content. As Singapore schools become more complex in the roles and responsibilities to educate the future of the nation, new ways to develop school leaders is needed. This study investigates the effects on leadership learning based on a complexity theory based design leadership program. The learning outcome emerged as practical leadership knowledge that participants generated as they actively participate in the leadership program. A serious implication of complexity-based design would mean shifting from an “objective and course-driven” learning to “learning that emerged and process-driven.”

This study investigates the impact of Instructional Leadership practices and School Culture on staff performance in Singapore schools. It is one of the three collaborative research projects drawn from a programmatic study. The programmatic study itself builds on the previous MOE funded baseline study on school leadership and organization change (OER CD 3/10).