School Leadership in India

This book explores how school leadership plays a significant role in addressing the issues of poor learning among students in India. It presents in-depth discussions on critical leadership practices that are influenced by the interaction between leadership styles, functions, behaviours and practices of school leaders using theoretical discourse. Besides, a conceptual framework is developed to understand the leadership phenomenon in the Indian context for the overall improvement of schools, student learning and self-development of leaders. While highlighting the issues and challenges faced by schools and school leaders, the book presents a number of vignettes created from the data on various aspects of school leadership practices indicating the styles, behaviours and functions in every chapter. The nature of the analysis is also unique to the discourse on educational leadership as it culminates in tracing the path traversed by the school leaders. The analysis is thematically organised into purpose-process-outcome that spreads across seven chapters. Besides the rigour of vast data that substantiates the arguments using mixed methods, it also vividly discusses the national initiatives undertaken in India to transform instructional and pedagogical leadership of principals and improve students learning in the past one decade or so.

The book will be of interest to researchers of education, leadership education and development and school education in university departments of education, management, public administration, development studies and sociology that use interdisciplinary approaches. It will also be useful for school educators, academicians, school leaders, policymakers and teacher educators not only for teaching and research but also for school leadership development for practitioners.

N. Mythili is currently working as an associate professor at Mahindra University, Hyderabad. As a founding faculty for developing Indira-Mahindra School of Education, she started the Ph.D. programme in education in 2021 and headed the school for a year.

She participated in the Education Leadership Seminar 2024 and shared her study on “Educational leadership and policy intervention in Telangana government schools pertaining to English as the medium of instruction” at International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP)-UNESCO, Paris, in April 2024. Currently, she is leading the research and discourse on school leadership and gender and school leadership in the Indian context through her research monographs and peer-reviewed articles published at international and national levels. Her recent works include Women in School Leadership, “Mastering the Art of Addressing the Ethical Dilemmas by Women Principals” as a book chapter in the Bloomsbury International Handbook of Gender and Educational Leadership and a book chapter in Regional Diversity and School Leadership in India with Springer Nature. Besides, she has worked on regulatory mechanisms of NCTE on Teacher Education in India. She reviews many national and international journals on educational leadership.

Her research project (along with a group of principals working in CBSE schools) on “Pedagogical Leadership” is being used to redefine the roles of principals as pedagogical leaders taking a shift from administrative roles in 30,000 schools affiliated to CBSE (India and abroad), NVS and KVS schools. This theme on pedagogical leadership and its application to schools in the form of an Annual Pedagogical Plan has been included in the School Quality Assessment and Accreditation Framework (SQAA) as a component, which all schools have to comply with as per the Gazette notification.

Before joining Mahindra University in 2021, she worked as an assistant professor at the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, Delhi (NIEPA), from 2013 to 2021. She was deeply involved in research, large-scale implementation of education policy to facilitate educational reforms in the country that focused on the professional development of school leaders known as the School Leadership Development Programme (SLDP) through the Ministry of Education, India. She was the national coordinator for eight states for developing school leadership in India and has worked with all states and UTs of India in different capacities such as curriculum and material development, capacity development, establishing leadership academies and research and development. She was a member of the National Resource Group of the NISHTHA programme launched by NCERT in 2019. She designed and implemented the one-year post graduate diploma in school leadership and management at NIEPA from 2014 to 2016. She has written modules on school leadership for National Centre for School Leadership (NCSL)-NIEPA, NCERT and the Government of Telangana, which are being used by all government schools.

Before joining NIEPA, she worked at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Azim Premji Foundation, Bengaluru and the Centre for Multi-Disciplinary Development Research, Dharwad, Karnataka. She completed her Ph.D. from the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, Karnataka, in 2006.