Investigating the Links to Improved Student Learning ExEcutivE Summary of rESEarch findingS

5 Collective leadership is linked to student achievement through teacher motivation (strongest) and characteristics of work settings, such as school and district size, or the age of the students taught. Introduction Educational leadership can have strong, positive, although indirect, effects on student learning. The full report of our study—Learning from Leadership: Investigating the Links to Improved Student Learning—provides evidence and analyses to substantiate this claim. As well, our study also unpacks how such leadership has these strong positive effects. Contextual variables matter greatly, we know, as do worthwhile academic programs and instructional practices. But educators must decide how to respond to the contexts in which they work, and they must select, shape, and implement academic programs and instructional practices. In these efforts, another factor comes into play—leadership. Leaders in education—including state-level officials, superintendents and district staff, principals, school board members, teachers and community members enacting various leadership roles—provide direction for, and exercise influence over, policy and practice. Their contributions are crucial, our evidence shows, to initiatives aimed at improving student learning. It is obviously important, therefore, to better understand the links between leadership and learning. We need to know what successful leaders do, and we need to know how they do it. About these questions, there is still much to be learned. Since the late 1990s, however , the Wallace Foundation has engaged in multiple ways to examine, understand, and improve leadership in educational settings across the United States. Our study grows out of this national effort. With support from the Wallace Foundation, we have conducted extensive research over a five-year period throughout the U.S. in an effort to describe successful educational leadership and to explain how such leadership can foster changes in professional practice, yielding improvements in student learning. The framework for our study (see Figure 1) represents our assumptions about aspects of the larger school system, including leadership at several levels, which interact to influence student learning. The effects of school leadership directly influence school and classroom conditions, as well as teachers themselves, and indirectly influence student learning. Other influences on school leaders arise from stakeholder groups—including the media, unions, professional associations, and community leaders—and from leaders' personal and professional experiences. According to this framework, the factors directly responsible for student learning are school and classroom conditions, teachers' instruction and their professional community, and student/family background conditions. Leadership is viewed as central in addressing and facilitating the work …