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Seashore Louis has enjoyed a long and productive career, contributing many key understandings to the field; among them, foundational theorizing regarding professional community, organizational learning and the role of principal leadership in organizational and student learning. In each, the role of organizational change and its bearing on school improvement has been a key focus of her research. Central to Seashore Louis' organizational change theorizing has been the contention that organizations are expected to produce outcomes (i.e. that they exist to do things), and in turn, those outcomes have consequences for the organization and its members. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the impact her work has had on the field of educational leadership research.

This article traces the development of Karen Seashore Louis' contribution to and work in organizational theory.

By focusing on Seashore Louis' contribution to our understanding of how professionals learn, both individually and together, and what they do with that information and knowledge, this article will synthesize Seashore Louis' contributions to understanding how change is established, enacted and experienced in schools, as well as how those understandings are informed by theorizing about the role of school culture, openness to new ideas and understandings, alternatives and multiple perspectives, and caring as it relates to leading schools.

The authors’ experience of learning from and with Karen Seashore Louis has deepened the authors’ own understandings of how schools work, how teachers and leaders learn, and the ways in which school organizations can thrive. Key to her influence is her ability to generate and use conceptual and theoretical lenses to explain why people act the ways they do, and how understanding those actions can help us all to improve. Her theorizing has provided the field clarity about what works, where it works and why it works while still problematizing our understandings and pushing for greater depth of understanding and analysis.

The purpose of this essay is to honor, position and reflect on key themes related to high school reform within the careerlong scholarship of Karen Seashore Louis. It is presented in relation to my own and others' key studies and book-length arguments regarding educational change, knowledge utilization, professional communities and innovation, over the past 30 years and up to the present time.

The article examines and interprets major works by Karen Seashore Louis and other educational change theorists that address repeated systemic failures, and episodic outlier efforts, at transformational change in high schools.

High school change has only failed if it is judged by the overarching criterion of system-wide transformation. Fair assessments of high school change must also examine accumulated incremental innovations. In light of the need for transformational aspirations in schools to mesh with transformational directions in society, the global pandemic and its aftermath may provide five key opportunities for long-awaited transformation.

There are different levels and degrees of innovation. Incremental innovation is as important as wholesale transformation. The growing number of networked outliers of innovation raises questions about the false equation of whole system change with bureaucratic state reform. Although the influential literature on whole system change is rooted in a small number of English-speaking countries, transformational change on a system-wide basis already exists in Northern Europe and parts of the Global South. Last, the pandemic and other major disruptions to the global social order have produced conditions that are highly favorable to transformational change in the future.

Despite the continuous growth of empirical studies exploring professional learning communities (PLCs) across different education systems, little is known about PLC instruments developed and used in existing research. This article aims to capture a full picture of existing PLC instruments developed since 1990. In so doing, the authors also pay attention to the seminal work of Karen Seashore Louis in alignment with the theme of the special issue.

Based on the authors’ searching databases, the authors identified eleven PLC instruments and 26 applied studies using the PLC instruments since 1990. Following this, the authors closely reviewed the identified studies and their relationships (i.e. which one influences which).

The authors’ review illuminates the measurement domains, conceptual origins and methodological soundness of the existing instruments and captures the impact of Louis's work on the applied studies using PLC instruments.

Given that PLCs are seen as a policy measure to sustain and scale up school improvement internationally, the authors’ review provides a better understanding of what and how researchers have measured the effect of PLCs on school improvement. As the first of its kind, the authors believe that their findings can give researchers valuable ideas about how to develop and use a PLC instrument.

This paper explores the emergence and shift in critical theories and problems-of-practice over the last 50 years.

Quipu is an Incan record-keeping system used across the Andes. Using multiple strings of different colors, hundreds of different knots were used to count, record historical events. The underlying idea of Quipu was that the intersection of knots and strings is a way of making memory tangible. I use the image of Quipu as a framework to organize my analytic memories and interpretation of research on school organization across spaces, people and generations.

I explore my own research and that of others who have influenced me, linking the strings of organizational theory to the knots representing changes in the educational environment that motivate research.

The paper is, in part, not only a reflective review of the literature but also a summation of the problems-of-practice that have engaged me and other scholars over a relatively long period of time.

The purpose of this study is to examine how context shapes leaders' caring approach in ways that influence organizational learning and the cultivation of professional capital.

This exploratory study draws on case study data from two schools. Within each school, the authors draw primarily on semi-structured interviews with teachers and leaders.

The authors found that school context and the accompanying leader beliefs shaped the structures and practices where organizational learning occurred, and thereby influence the diffusion of organizational learning in the school and the flexibility by which organizational lessons can be applied.

This research demonstrates that the context and place in which schools are situated influence how problems are apprehended and addressed. Leaders' relational approach, bounded by this context, influences how members of the school develop professional capacity. Larger scale studies would help clarify the nature of these effects.

Although context has been shown to influence leadership, no study has examined the links between context, leaders' relational approach and organizational learning.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether principals can have an impact on organizational learning (OL). The authors use a cultural perspective, based both in the emerging literature from positive psychology and the relatively well-developed research tradition in studying the nature and impacts of OL to address four questions: first, is principal’s cognitive trust in teachers’ professional capacities related to knowledge sharing/OL among teachers?; second, is principal’s trust in teachers’ professional capacities related to teachers’ reports of being in a caring school setting (relational trust)?; third, is principal caring related to knowledge sharing/OL among teachers?; and fourth, is principal trust particularly important in school contexts with low income students?

An existing database that includes principal and teacher surveys in 116 schools in the USA provides the basis for examining the four questions. Optimized scaling techniques were used to develop measures of principal trust in teachers professional capacities, teachers’ perception of principal caring, an indicator of academic support for students that includes a social justice of equity emphasis, and capacity for OL. The demographic characteristics of the student body and school size were used as possible moderating variables. The data were subject to both regression and path analysis.

Principal trust was directly related to teachers’ perceptions of principal caring, and indirectly related to OL. The measure of academic support for students had the strongest direct effect on OL. While the percentage of non-white students and school size had some relationship to OL, they do not change the overall results. The model, which supports the role that principals play in fostering both equity and OL is sustained when the authors examine student achievement.

The limitations of the study stem largely from the nature of the sample and measures, which are confined to 116 schools in the USA, and a secondary analysis of a cross-sectional survey database. Because understanding the dynamics of a relationship-based/positive leadership perspective require detailed qualitative studies and longitudinal data, the results are presented as suggestive of issues that should be studied further.

Both trust and OL have been extensively studied both in education and other settings. However, few studies have simultaneously examined leadership, different types of trust and OL and none have done so in the context of positive psychology. The contribution of this analysis is thus empirical (extending the boundaries of what is known using concepts that are familiar) and theoretical (beginning the development of a theory of positive leadership that incorporates multiple factors associated with healthy and productive school environments).