The ceasefire after leadership paradigm wars

Over the past four decades, the concept of leadership has become increasingly more complex and elaborate. Considerable debate has emerged over the most suitable model for educational leadership and management. Dominating the literature are two conceptual models of instructional leadership and transformational leadership that challenged each other during the paradigm wars of 1990s in the socio-political context of education. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the interaction between models of instructional leadership and transformational leadership based on the historical background, their key characteristics, the construct's definitions and evolutions. In addition, the paper further considers the relationship between them. The results showed that the integration of instructional leadership and transformational leadership is useful for school systems that affect our current society. However the different lenses of this paper allow critics to focus on particular aspects of a model they consider important. Each lens has distinct benefits and limits.

Keywords:

leadership , instructional leadership , transformational leadership