Educational leadership

Educational leadership is the practice and study of guiding schools and other educational organizations toward learning goals through decisions, relationships, and organizational change.

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Instructional leadership: A leadership approach that prioritizes teaching quality, curriculum, and student learning. It focuses educational leadership directly on the core work of teaching and learning.
School organization: The formal structures, roles, and processes through which a school coordinates its work. Leadership operates through these structures while also influencing how they function.
School improvement: A sustained effort to strengthen a school's teaching, organization, and student outcomes. Leaders coordinate improvement priorities, resources, and follow-through across the school.
James MacGregor Burns: An American political scientist whose work distinguished transactional and transforming leadership. His account of transforming leadership informed later approaches to leading educational change.
Transformational leadership: A leadership approach that builds shared purpose and motivates people to pursue organizational change. It explains how school leaders can mobilize staff around a common improvement effort.
Educational administration: The coordination and management of education systems, institutions, and their resources. It overlaps with leadership but emphasizes administration and organizational operations more directly.
Teacher professional development: Structured learning that develops teachers' knowledge and practice throughout their careers. Leaders shape the conditions, focus, and support for teachers' ongoing learning.
Bernard Bass: A leadership scholar who developed and extended the theory of transformational leadership. His framework gave school leadership research a widely used model of leader behaviors.
Distributed leadership: An approach that treats leadership as work shared among people and shaped by their interactions and situations. School leadership often depends on teachers and teams exercising influence alongside formal leaders.
Pedagogy: The theory and practice of teaching, including the methods and relationships that support learning. Knowledge of teaching helps leaders judge whether organizational decisions support learning.