Instructional leadership refers to the actions school leaders take to improve teaching and learning in their schools: setting academic goals, overseeing the curriculum and instruction, and shaping a climate in which learning is the central purpose. The idea places the principal not only as an administrator of buildings, budgets and timetables but as someone who works directly on the quality of classroom practice. For four decades it has been one of the most studied concepts in educational administration, and it remains central to debates about how leadership contributes to school improvement.
Origins
The concept grew out of the effective schools research conducted in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Studies of schools that achieved unusually good results with disadvantaged pupils repeatedly pointed to a strong principal focused on instruction as one of their shared features. Early conceptual work, such as Bossert, Dwyer, Rowan and Lee’s (1982) model of the principal’s instructional management role, tried to explain how principals’ actions might influence pupils through the organisation of the school rather than directly.
The framework that came to dominate the field was proposed by Hallinger and Murphy (1985). Their model, and the rating scale built on it, gave researchers a shared vocabulary and a way to measure instructional leadership across schools. By the 1990s, however, critics argued that the concept relied too heavily on a single, heroic principal and paid too little attention to teachers’ own leadership. Attention shifted for a time towards transformational and shared forms of leadership, before an emphasis on accountability for student learning brought instructional leadership back into focus in the 2000s (Hallinger, 2003).
The Hallinger and Murphy model
Hallinger and Murphy (1985) described instructional leadership in three dimensions, divided into ten functions.
| Dimension | Functions |
|---|---|
| Defining the school’s mission | Framing the school’s goals; communicating the school’s goals |
| Managing the instructional programme | Supervising and evaluating instruction; coordinating the curriculum; monitoring student progress |
| Promoting a positive school learning climate | Protecting instructional time; promoting professional development; maintaining high visibility; providing incentives for teachers; providing incentives for learning |
The model’s first dimension concerns direction: whether the school has clear academic goals and whether staff know and share them. The second covers the technical core of schooling, where the principal is involved in what is taught, how it is taught and how learning is checked. The third concerns the conditions that make good teaching possible, from guarding lesson time against interruptions to supporting teachers’ professional growth.
From instructional leadership to leadership for learning
Later work has moved away from treating instructional and transformational leadership as rival models. Transformational leadership focuses on building a shared vision, developing people and strengthening the capacity of the organisation, while instructional leadership focuses more directly on teaching and the curriculum. Hallinger (2003) argued that which approach suits a school depends on its external environment and local context. Marks and Printy (2003) proposed the term “integrated leadership” for schools where transformational leadership by the principal is combined with shared instructional leadership involving teachers.
The broader label “leadership for learning” is now widely used for this combined view. Hallinger’s (2011) review of four decades of empirical work presents a model with four dimensions: values and beliefs, leadership focus, the contexts of leadership, and the sharing of leadership. A mixed-methods study of successful schools in England by Day, Gu and Sammons (2016) likewise found that effective principals combined transformational and instructional strategies, layering them over time according to the school’s needs.
What the research shows
The most widely cited quantitative evidence comes from a meta-analysis by Robinson, Lloyd and Rowe (2008), drawing on 27 published studies of the relationship between leadership and student outcomes. Comparing types of leadership, they reported an average effect size of 0.42 for instructional leadership, against 0.11 for transformational leadership and 0.30 for other approaches. In other words, the average effect of instructional leadership was three to four times that of transformational leadership.
The same study grouped leadership practices into five dimensions. The largest average effect, 0.84, was found for leaders promoting and participating in teacher learning and development. Establishing goals and expectations, and planning, coordinating and evaluating teaching and the curriculum, each showed average effects of 0.42. Strategic resourcing (0.31) and ensuring an orderly and supportive environment (0.27) showed smaller effects.
These figures need careful reading. The comparison of leadership types rested on a small number of studies, with only five contributing effects for transformational leadership, and the original studies were mostly correlational. The effect sizes therefore describe the strength of associations rather than proof that a given leadership practice causes higher achievement. Reviews of the field also stress that leadership influences learning largely indirectly, through teachers, school climate and the organisation of instruction, and that findings from one system cannot be transferred automatically to another (Hallinger, 2011).
Related concepts
- Transformational leadership: focuses on vision, motivation and organisational capacity rather than on instruction directly.
- Distributed leadership: treats leadership as spread across several people in the school, including teachers.
- Teacher leadership: teachers’ influence on colleagues’ practice beyond their own classrooms.
- Educational supervision: in many systems, including Turkey’s, the formal evaluation and support of teaching is carried out partly by inspectors outside the school.
Measuring instructional leadership
The best-known instrument is the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (PIMRS), developed by Hallinger on the basis of the three-dimension model described above. It can be completed by principals and by teachers rating their principal, and it has been used in many countries. Other studies use instruments derived from Robinson’s leadership dimensions or from broader school leadership surveys such as the principal questionnaire of the OECD’s TALIS.
Evidence from Turkish Research
English summaries of Turkish graduate research on instructional leadership will be listed here as they are published in our Research Digests.
Key takeaways
- Instructional leadership is leadership focused directly on teaching, the curriculum and student learning.
- Hallinger and Murphy’s (1985) model, with three dimensions and ten functions, is the most widely used framework.
- In Robinson, Lloyd and Rowe’s (2008) meta-analysis, instructional leadership showed a larger average association with student outcomes than transformational leadership, and leaders’ involvement in teacher learning showed the largest effect of all.
- Current research favours combining instructional and transformational approaches and sharing leadership with teachers.
References
- Bossert, S. T., Dwyer, D. C., Rowan, B., & Lee, G. V. (1982). The instructional management role of the principal. Educational Administration Quarterly, 18(3), 34–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X82018003004
- Day, C., Gu, Q., & Sammons, P. (2016). The impact of leadership on student outcomes: How successful school leaders use transformational and instructional strategies to make a difference. Educational Administration Quarterly, 52(2), 221–258. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X15616863
- Hallinger, P. (2003). Leading educational change: Reflections on the practice of instructional and transformational leadership. Cambridge Journal of Education, 33(3), 329–351. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764032000122005
- Hallinger, P. (2011). Leadership for learning: Lessons from 40 years of empirical research. Journal of Educational Administration, 49(2), 125–142. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578231111116699
- Hallinger, P., & Murphy, J. (1985). Assessing the instructional management behavior of principals. The Elementary School Journal, 86(2), 217–247. https://doi.org/10.1086/461445
- Marks, H. M., & Printy, S. M. (2003). Principal leadership and school performance: An integration of transformational and instructional leadership. Educational Administration Quarterly, 39(3), 370–397.
- Robinson, V. M. J., Lloyd, C. A., & Rowe, K. J. (2008). The impact of leadership on student outcomes: An analysis of the differential effects of leadership types. Educational Administration Quarterly, 44(5), 635–674. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X08321509
Last reviewed: October 11, 2026