Editorial. Managing Leadership at the School Level

Educational Leadership in the XXI Century implies leading and managing teaching, “the core technology of schooling”(OECD, 2013: 60). This new issue of IJELM develops a magnificent model of how to lead teachers and schools taking primarily into account all tasks related to teaching and learning.
In this issue, IJELM brings together articles with very different subjects and perspectives but almost all centered in school learning, leading and teaching. However, the articles share some common ideas about the main topics of our Journal, those of leadership and management:

All the authors recognize that educational leadership must be at the same time “instructional” and oriented to student outcomes, “transformational” and oriented to transform and develop students, teachers and educational organizations, and “distributed” and oriented to create new structures for interaction and to develop learning communities. These three features are in some way present in each one of the papers.

Another common-core concept is that of “accountability” and the need to measure leadership taking into account student outcomes. The authors also relate leadership with the improvement of organizations that evolve, as we have just said, until becoming professional learning communities where knowledge is shared.

Vision, mission and values are other core concepts in this second issue of IJELM. The articles and the book review offer examples of compromise with improvement, and any change or improvement implies a vision and an aim. Trust seems to be the central value related to leadership and to the possibility of changing things, and this word and concept is repeated along the whole issue. There is a clear recognition that trust is something needed to improve organizations and something always linked to all successful leadership practices.