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This chapter explores the potential impact of middle leaders on their learning environments and on learning outcomes, focusing primarily on authenticity in leadership in schools. In outstanding schools, middle leaders are very active and visible in their curriculum areas, as well as more broadly around the school. They work together to build leadership capacity through the promotion of shared leadership practices based on a collective ethic of responsibility. They actively influence others to break down silos between departments and teams within a school. It is through the quality of their engagements that they project, maintain, and sustain their presence and influence with and on others. The work of authentic middle leaders is transformational insofar as they promote and support transformational teaching and learning for their students.

There is a vast amount of literature which identifies characteristics of effective schools and effective classrooms. This paper examines selected studies and their findings and provides an organizing framework which tries to relate these findings to one another and to the school and its environment. A number of implications for school improvement are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to undertake a personal, historical, analytical and interpretive investigation of the evolution of the concept of authentic leadership in educational administration/leadership over a number of decades.

The paper includes the author's reflections on his own journey on the topic as well as an analysis of the contributions of great researchers, theorists and writers since early in the twentieth century but, especially, since the early 1960s.

While there is no coherent body of literature on the development of the concept of authentic leadership, there is a general discernible trend starting with a focus on self (know thyself, to thine own self be true); to considering and defining self in relationships; to accepting that there is a moral force behind notions of self-fulfillment; to recognising that authentic leaders operate in a real post-modern (perhaps post-post modern) world of pressures, paradoxes and ethical challenges. This is often a world of standards, assessment and accountability for performance outcomes.

The paper draws on the author's own research journey and legacy on the topic as well as the contributions of “giants in the field” who have continually pushed the envelope when exploring the topic and closely interrelated topics.

What do school administrators do when discharging their administrative responsibilities? How do they spend their days? Their weeks? Their years? What constitutes the basic content of their administrative behavior? Despite decades of research in educational administration, we are unable to answer these deceptively simple, but fundamental questions. This lacuna in the literature provided encouragement for pursuing this present study as a relatively untapped approach to describing and analysing the administrative behavior of school superintendents. The central problem of the study was to observe and describe the actual on‐the‐job behavior of the superintendent of schools so as to develop a composite view of his administrative behavior.

An attempt is made to redefine educational leadership and to create a new “practical theory” of educative leadership which is of relevance to all concerned with the management of education. The approach, techniques and early outcomes of a research project in Australia designed in 1985 and mounted in 1986 to create the new “theory” are reported.