School Leadership as a Factor of School Resilience

Master’s research work follows the study started in 2017 on the school effectiveness and effective school functioning. The notion of ‘resilience’ expands the notion of school effectiveness and brings it to a new level. Resilience research attest that effective schools minimize the negative influence of risk factors and adverse conditions. The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) define ‘resilience’ as positive changes which guide someone through adverse factors. The term ‘academic resilience’ is used to describe students who are successful in their studies despite their adverse socio-economic background. Both foreign and Russian researchers of school resilience claim that even when functioning in unfavourable socio-economic conditions, schools are able to show high academic results. The thesis offers to look at the school leader as a factor which doesn’t influence school resilience directly but via a teacher and a student, considered ‘masters of basic processes. Russian researches of school resilience seem not to give a clear perspective of the degree of school leadership’s influence on adverse students’ academic attainment. This is the problem of interest and, along with the applied approach which differs from generally accepted view of determinant role of the school leader for developing school resilience, makes the research scientifically relevant. Moreover, the methods used for the research differ from those used in previous works. The purpose of the research is defining relevant features of leadership in resilient schools of Saint Petersburg. Practical stage of research was conducted in five secondary schools of Saint Petersburg. The schools were defined as resilient basing on the comparative analysis of the social passports and academic reports. The results of the survey of 9 and 10 graders, teachers and headteachers were applied for extracting relevant feature of leadership with the use of the factor analysis. The main part of the research was carried out with “The Marzano Focused School Leader Evaluation Model”. It did not focus specifically on school leadership; the study did specify 11 factors that schools must attend to if they are to enhance student achievement and the school leadership implications regarding those 11 factors. The model identifies 24 categories of principal actions and behaviors. These 24 categories are organized into five domains. For our research we selected only those elements which correspond to the results of the factor analysis. The evaluation procedures included analysis of official documents, reports, surveys of teachers and students and interviews of school leaders and directors of studies. The empirical results led to the conclusions about the importance interaction and combination of inner and outer factors (rather than them being represented as a set of features) for school resilience development. The outputs described in the thesis seem important for further research work on resilience schools’ leaders’ actions.