My research is focused on modern digital technologies and understanding their impact on school leadership, school transformation, innovation, and educational decision-making. My primary interest is exploring how school administrators lead technology-suffused, innovative learning organizations that prepare students to be future-ready for an ever-expanding digital world. This has led me to carry out research efforts in a variety of settings. Below, I describe the three major lines of my research inquiry.
Research Focus 1: Innovation and School Technology Leadership
The bulk of my research has addressed how school administrators lead digitally suffused schools. Many projects I have undertaken have become foundational for charting the field’s direction. For example, in collaboration with Dr. Scott McLeod at the University of Colorado Denver, I investigated the presence of school technology leadership in the educational leadership profession via an analysis of conference proceedings and published literature in the field. This effort resulted in two pieces published in leading journals in the field (i.e., Journal of School Leadership and Journal of Research in Leadership in Education). These articles laid a foundation for the field. Since that time, I conducted and published a variety of studies including a focus on virtual school leadership, technology-savvy district leadership, digitally innovative principals, acceptable use policies, and social media use by school leaders.
Little is known about how modern digital technologies are being used to prepare school leaders. To address this dearth, I collaborated with two colleagues to understand how principal candidates who earned a degree online were perceived and ultimately treated by school district hiring managers. This investigation resulted in two publications in top educational leadership journals (Journal of Educational Administration and the International Journal of Leadership in Education). In a subsequent practitioner application, I was invited by the editor of The School Administrator to publish an article about online preparation for K-12 principals. The School Administrator is the leading practitioner magazine for superintendents and is delivered monthly to nearly every superintendent and central office administrator in the country.
Most recently, I was invited to co-author, with Drs. Sara Dexter and John Nash, a chapter in the Handbook of Research on the Education of School Leaders on the topic of school technology leadership. Other authors in this handbook include Martha McCarthy, Mark Gooden, Bruce Barnett, Ed Fuller, Gary Grow, and Joseph Murphy. Having this chapter included in this prestigious handbook signaled that the field of educational leadership has embraced school technology as a critical area of research within the broader field.
I recently published a longitudinal study on technology-savvy superintendents titled, District Technology Leadership Then and Now: A Comparative Study of District Technology Leadership from 2001-2014. This work began over a decade ago when I published three articles on the topic. However, I revisited the study in 2015 to see what shifts occurred over time. This comparative study was published in the highest-ranked journal in the field, Educational Administration Quarterly.
I secured a book contract with Routledge in Fall 2019 to co-author a book tentatively titled Future-Ready School Leadership: Innovative Practices for Deeper Learning. For this project, we interviewed 30 innovative, future-ready, deeper learning school leaders to talk about how they lead new school models. In the Fall 2019, Dr. Justin Bathon (University of Kentucky) and I will travel to these school to better understand how teaching and learning are changing under innovative school leaders. The publisher has already earmarked this book to be highlighted in their Eye on Education list.
Research Focus 2: Technology in Less-Developed Countries
Examining technology in less-developed countries has been a fruitful avenue of inquiry and continues to result in many exciting projects. For example, I have extensively researched technology and leadership in Cambodia. I elected to publish some of this work in open access journals so that academicians, government officials, and field workers in less-developed countries could have access to my research. One such article published in the International Journal of Education and Development Using Information and Communication Technology has been downloaded 7,385 times. Among the readers of this work were faculty members at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, who invited me to work on their U.S. Department of State-funded research project investigating the use and perceptions of technology by teachers and students in three upper-secondary schools in Cambodia. The results of this latter research were published in the top journals in the field of information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D). The connections I made during this research project also led to me leading other research projects in Cambodia, where I investigated leadership, technology, and human rights issues. In 2016, I was invited to write a chapter on digital technologies in Cambodia. This work was published in the Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia in 2016.
Additionally, because of my work in this area, I was invited to keynote at a conference in Indonesia in June 2014. The audience were over 300 faculty members, students, and government officials. Because of this international focus to my work, I was also asked to work on a Millennium Challenge Corporation Grant in the Republic of Georgia.
I hosted two visiting scholars at the University of Kentucky: Dr. Mehmet Sincar from the University of Gaziantep, Turkey, and Dr. Kannan Sathiamoorthy from the University of Malaya, Malaysia. Both professors, highly respected at their institutions, spent time at the Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE) and with other faculty from the University of Kentucky to understand school technology leadership and to initiate similar efforts in their home countries. As a result, I was invited to visit with, talk to, and present to faculty at the University of Malaya in Malaysia. Through these connections, I led an international research effort with these colleagues to create a database of all one to one laptop initiatives in the world. The resultant article was published in a highly regarded open-access journal, has been downloaded 14,827 times.
Research Focus 3: Leadership Development in International and Intercultural Contexts
I have investigated school leadership in various international contexts. For example, in partnership with Drs. Scott Imig from the University of New Castle in Australia and Abdou Ndoye from Qatar University, I researched the impact of leaders’ diversity awareness via an international sojourn. Our first collaborative piece focused on shifts in diversity awareness of school leaders because of a mandatory graduate requirement to study abroad. This work was published in the leading educational leadership research journal, Educational Administration Quarterly. We published a second piece about that international work in the International Journal of Leadership in Education. I took another group of doctoral students to London in Summer 2018 and measured the pre-service school leaders’ shifts in self-efficacy towards cultural diversity after engaging in this international internship. I am currently writing up this article for submission in Fall 2019.
Through my involvement with two professional organizations (the University Council for Educational Administration and the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society), I worked with collaborators from Finland, South Africa, England, New Zealand, Norway, Australia, Hong Kong, and Ireland to investigate effective school leadership across international contexts. Because of this work, I co-authored an article focused on how school leaders in India enacted social justice.
I have also combined this intercultural research with my focus on the school technology leader. I co-authored a study published in the Journal of Research in Rural Education in which we examined school technology leadership in Native American schools across the US. This was the first study that looked at the intersection of these high-needs schools and technology leadership. I expanded this research protocol to other unique schooling environments such as virtual schools and international schools.
My passion for international school leadership has culminated in a book project. I am in the copyediting phase of my first book that looks at leadership and innovative practices of leadership in international schools. This book project brings together 23 chapters telling stories of leadership and innovation in international schools from around the world. This book is the first of a string of future projects that will highlight leadership and innovation in international schools.
In the Summer 2019, I was invited to publish a piece with my doctoral student in the Journal of Professional Capital and Community. This journal was founded by Dr. Andy Hargreaves, who is a prominent name in the field. This article is based on work she did through her dissertation in international schools in Southeast Asia where she measured the impact of professional development on professional capital.
