Abstract

In this paper I present the results of a mixed-methods investigation of educational leadership in Romanian upper-secondary schools. In a sample of fourteen institutions, teachers responded to a questionnaire eliciting perceptions of leadership practices by the school head teachers. The same practices constituted the basis of a series of semi-structured interviews with the heads, whose main conclusions were integrated with those of the quantitative data analysis. Results confirmed initial theoretical assumptions about the nature of the leadership practices, grouping the 18 activities included in the measurement scale in four dimensions of practice: setting the school’s goals and mission, promoting teachers’ professional development, coordinating learning and teaching and the implementation of the curriculum, and creating a safe and secure learning and teaching environment. Across all these dimensions, teachers’ ratings of school leaders’ actions were particularly high, with few significant between-school differences. This homogeneity of practices emerged from the interviews as being based in a set of stringent external pressures. These constraints were viewed by a majority of school leaders as severely limiting their repertoire of leadership activities and as also directly connected to high levels of perceived poverty, across all school stakeholders and levels.