Technology as a lever of innovation in school leadership
Researchers in the field of educational management, administration and leadership (EMAL) are increasingly interested in understanding how schools are embracing digital innovations and the unique ways that these digital changes are impacting the roles and possibilities of P12 school leadership. To explore how this is happening in the field, this special issue is focused on how digital technologies can be a lever of innovation for school leaders.
In this special issue, we focus on how P12 educational leaders have implemented, sustained and pushed innovative, digitally driven practices forward in their respective settings. Theoretically, this special issue provides empirical examples of how innovations are adopted and spread as detailed in the theory of diffusion of innovations by Everett Rogers. The diffusion of innovations theory lays out how innovations (in this case, digital innovations) are adopted over time by groups of users (i.e. innovators, early adopters, late adopters and laggards). Articles in this special issue will highlight how innovators and early adopters are leveraging digital innovations to do school leadership differently.
Manuscripts in this special issue include practices and initiatives that illuminate how school leaders are being innovative and how school leaders are changing schooling with and because of technology. Considering the instant technological changes brought on by COVID-19 in the spring of 2020, understanding how school leaders innovate through digital technologies is both timely and needed. Understanding school technology leadership is essential in understanding good school leadership in a modern digital era (Richardson et al., 2015). Even more so, the practices that school leaders engage in that have been empirically shown to impact student learning (Hitt and Tucker, 2016) directly applies to school technology leadership (Dexter et al., 2016). Thus, by highlighting these bright spots in the field, we are opening possibilities for innovation to take hold in other places.
One interesting theme that arose from the eight articles in this special issue is the affordances of artificial intelligence for school leadership generally, and the decision-making specifically. For example, Wang begins the conversation by cautioning the field of educational leadership to not fully rely on artificial intelligence for decision-making. Wang keenly suggests a balance approach to relying on the technology to crunch data with using moral reasoning in school decision-making. To further that discussion, Tyson and Sauers look at how seven school leaders engaged in conversations with their teachers about using an artificial intelligence system. They found that the use of an artificial intelligence system required that the school leader proactively create structures to engage in conversations about the data to best help teachers make informed instructional choices.
Lawrence, Militello, Tredway and Simon researched a novel way to prepare school leaders through virtual reality. The researchers created the system to improve classroom observation and analysis skills. Based on how leaders make decisions within scenarios in a virtual world, the students and instructors in a pre-service leadership preparation program at East Carolina University were better poised to interrogate decisions in a safe place before any harm could be done.
One challenging set of decisions that all school leaders must engage in is around student behavior. Understanding the big picture of a student's behavior has always been a challenge, where many leaders are often responding to a point in time instance. To address this issue, Borowiec and Cho conducted a study on how digital behavior management platforms facilitate organizational learning by giving leaders robust data in real time to help them make better moral decisions around student discipline. The authors lay out novel ways that schools are using this class of technology for both organizational problem-solving and collaborations with families.
Richardson, Watts and Sterrett conducted a study on the challenges of being a digital principal. Situating the challenges in the organizational framing work of Bolman and Deal (2013), they present challenges noted from interviews with 12 award winning digital principals. By focusing on political, structural, human resources and symbolic frames, the authors detail how innovation in schools was pushed forward by making decisions that crossed all four frames.
The work by Lamb and Weiner goes deep into how superintendents and technology leaders in four districts lead from one component of the structural frame, being infrastructure. As such, Lamb and Weiner explored how school leaders who have transitioned into a digitally suffused learning environment, stay attuned to various nuances of infrastructure. The researchers investigated leadership decisions around physical, cultural, instructional and leadership infrastructures. Taking a systems approach, the authors present a model for how leaders have and can respond to supporting 1–1 learning initiatives.
Dexter, Francisco and Luke Luna impress upon the reader the need to understand how leaders make decisions regarding technology deployment in their districts. By going deep with five districts, Dexter highlighted how instructional technology decisions can be logical and well thought out if informed by data and a clear understanding of organizational capacity.
Decision-making around instructional technology implementations is not made solely by the school leader. These decisions are often distributed and collaborative. Dexter and Barton investigated the efficacy of taking a team-based approach to instructional leadership. By focusing on middle school mathematics and science class, the researchers showed that a team approach improves the performance of teachers and students.
This special issue concludes with two commentaries. The first is from Justin Bathon, a professor at the University of Kentucky and Ira David Socol, a provocateur and thought leader in the field. Bathon and Socol provide an insightful treatise on the need to recode schooling and to think about a new normal that is made possible with digital innovations. The second commentary is from Scott McLeod, a professor at the University of Colorado Denver. McLeod puts out a strong call for more researchers to focus on the intersection of technology and educational leadership.
Many researchers in the field of educational management, administration and leadership have long been committed to the core ideals of social justice and equity. The COVID-19 pandemic only highlighted the role that digital technologies play in both addressing and exacerbating issues of inequality and injustice. The onus is on us to show that there are better ways to do schooling and that digital technology is part of that way forward. As researchers, we must take up the charge to better understand what is happening in schools, where digital innovation has taken hold and how this is changing teaching and learning.
