ABSTRACT
The construct of instructional leadership is comprised of two words— instructional and leadership. Policy, researchers, and professional organizations have consistently defined instructional leadership through the elements of instructional practice—the to-do list. Learning is the primary focus of instructional leaders. This chapter expresses that there is a difference between the practice of management and the practice of leadership. Managers attend to the checklist of tasks while leaders also attend to the human dynamic. Research on instructional leadership has further served to segment the instructional leadership construct. Most notable are the emerging studies that compare instructional leadership to other theories of leadership practice. Studies on instructional leadership are most often focused by the element of instruction. In their comparison of what they identified as two different theories of leadership practice—instructional leadership and transformational leadership—Shatzer et al. (2014) found that instructional leadership as they defined it has a slightly greater effect on student achievement than transformational leadership.
