The Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) collects data from representative samples of teachers and principals across the world about their practices and work conditions, school and classroom contexts, and attitudes, motivation, and satisfaction with their profession and jobs. Given the growth of participating countries, the number of constructs assessed, and the volume of publications based on secondary analyses of the freely available data, it is reasonable to claim that TALIS represents one of the major data sources in the field of international educational research. This study provides a systematic literature review of secondary analyses of TALIS data, summarising the past 15 years of TALIS research. The review includes a synthesis of 238 peer‐reviewed journal articles, providing bibliographical information about articles as well as the scope and impact of analysis of TALIS data across time, countries, and populations. Moreover, the article summarises information about the most prevalent research themes that have been investigated. The findings highlight the importance of TALIS data in the broader educational research scope, emphasising themes such as teacher characteristics, and teacher professional practices. Lastly, the review provides insights into methodological approaches to study and analyse TALIS data and calls for more caution in analysing complex survey data with respect to how clustering and multigroup design are handled.

In this paper, we report on teachers’ and principals’ shared perceptions regarding beliefs, rules, trust, and encouragement of new initiatives. Collectively, these are aspects of leadership for learning (LFL) describing an overall shared climate in schools. We demonstrate how these perceptions on school climate differ across teachers and principals within and across countries. Moreover, we report how different perceptions of school climate are associated with leadership style. We analyze data from 37 countries that participated in the last cycle of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) in 2018. To build the measurement model, we employ multigroup multilevel confirmatory factor analysis, whereas multivariate linear regression is used to inspect associations. Overall, principals and teachers differ in their views of school climate. In the majority of the countries, principals report stronger school climate than teachers. We further confirm these perceptual differences between teachers and principals by separately studying the relationships between teacher perceived school climate and principal perceived school climate with relevant leadership variables. In the entire sample, we find that principals’ perceptions of school climate are more strongly and consistently associated with leadership in schools. This relationship is particularly stable for distributed leadership. In the entire sample, leadership styles are weakly positively correlated with teacher perceptions of school climate too; however, this association is less pronounced and less stable within individual countries. The analyses conducted within countries revealed that the distributed leadership rather than instructional leadership shapes teachers’ perceptions of school climate. More discussion is presented on the need for alignment between different perceptions of school climate and leadership styles in the overall organizational quality.

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to examine leadership for learning practices across the world by establishing profiles of leadership at school and country levels. Consequently, the study brings to our attention the (ir)relevance of school and system features for leadership for learning. The paper contributes to the field through the use of an extensive exploratory approach across a varied set of school leadership measures collected from both teachers and principals and contextualized in 42 different educational systems participating in the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018. Consequently, this work has the potential to generate hypotheses regarding the understanding of the complex nature of school leadership worldwide. Surprisingly, the findings reveal that clusters at the country level primarily do not reflect countries with geographical, linguistic, or political proximity. Such clusters were expected, given the evidence found in the literature that shows leadership to largely be determined by contextual, societal, and cultural values. Nevertheless, the analysis identifies five profiles of leadership across schools, the majority of which can be found in most countries participating in TALIS.