Successful school, successful principal: A comparative study of the findings of "International Successful School Principal Project" (ISSPP)

The school principals have an outstanding influence on the school outcomes, as much as the researchers define their role as a second effective factor on the student educational improvement. The question that »what are the characteristics of a successful school and principal? « has attracted the attention of many researchers and international researches and ISSPP has been one of the most important ones. This review study has analyzed findings of 7 countries, i. e. , Australia, Denmark, England, Norway, Sweden, USA and China. For this purpose, the content of the relevant published papers in the two special issues of “Journal of Educational Administration” were compared and analyzed. Using coding procedure, open and axial codes were identified with regard to the research questions. The results showed that successful schools have 61 characteristics in 12 dimensions and successful principals have 23 characteristics in 4 dimensions. The results have been discussed in the final section of the paper.