Exploring school leadership profiles across the world: a cluster analysis approach to TALIS 2018

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine leadership for learning practices across the world by establishing profiles of leadership at school and country levels. Consequently, the study brings to our attention the (ir)relevance of school and system features for leadership for learning. The paper contributes to the field through the use of an extensive exploratory approach across a varied set of school leadership measures collected from both teachers and principals and contextualized in 42 different educational systems participating in the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018. Consequently, this work has the potential to generate hypotheses regarding the understanding of the complex nature of school leadership worldwide. Surprisingly, the findings reveal that clusters at the country level primarily do not reflect countries with geographical, linguistic, or political proximity. Such clusters were expected, given the evidence found in the literature that shows leadership to largely be determined by contextual, societal, and cultural values. Nevertheless, the analysis identifies five profiles of leadership across schools, the majority of which can be found in most countries participating in TALIS.