This book explores school processes that shape student learning and principals' leadership. It uses an interdisciplinary approach by applying the complexity governance and leadership theories drawn from public administration and leadership discourse in education. The strength of this book lies in identifying the latent processes that determine governance and leadership using interaction, inter-relatedness and interdependence through explanation building used in advanced qualitative analysis which hitherto rarely used in education. For this purpose, it first draws organised data developed as leadership function-behaviour interaction in the book School leadership in India: Styles, functions, behaviours and practices written by the same author and published by Routledge in 2025. Another important feature of the volume is how it applies robust theories drawing from public administration and educational leadership using an interdisciplinary approach that was rare to find in studying school governance and leadership.
This book will be of interest to researchers, academicians working in the area of educational leadership and management, school and teacher education in universities, research institutes, think-tanks working on education policy, good governance and public policy in general. It is also relevant in management institutes, public administration, development studies and public policy in universities.
N. Mythili is working as Associate Professor at Mahindra University, Hyderabad. As a founding faculty for developing Indira-Mahindra School of Education, she started the Ph.D. programme in Education in 2021.
She participated the Education Leadership Seminar 2024 and shared her study on "Educational leadership and policy intervention in Telangana government schools pertaining to English as the medium of instruction" at International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP)-UNESCO, Paris, in April 2024.
Currently, she leads the research and discourse on school leadership and gender and school leadership in the Indian context through her research monographs and peer-reviewed articles published at international and national levels. Her recent works include Women in School Leadership published by Sage, a book chapter titled "Ethical Dilemmas" addressed by women principals in Bloomsbury International Handbook of Gender and Educational Leadership and a book chapter on regional diversity and school leadership in India with Springer Nature. Besides, she has worked on regulatory mechanisms of NCTE on teacher education in India. She has been a reviewer of many national and international journals on educational leadership.
Her research project on pedagogical leadership is being used to redefine the roles of principals as pedagogical leaders taking a shift from administrative roles in 30,000 schools affiliated to CBSE (India and abroad), NVS and KVS schools. This theme on pedagogical leadership and its application to schools in the form of annual pedagogical plan has been included in the School Quality Assessment and Accreditation Framework (SQAA) as a component, which all schools have to comply with as per the Gazette notification.
Before joining Mahindra University in 2021, she worked as Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, Delhi (NIEPA), from 2013 to 2021. She was deeply involved in research, large-scale implementation of education policy and professional development of school leaders known as School Leadership Development Programme (SLDP) through the Ministry of Education, India. She was the national coordinator for eight states for developing school leadership in India and has worked with all states and UTs of India in different capacities. She was a member of the national Resource Group of NISHTHA programme launched by NCERT in 2019. She designed and implemented the one-year postgraduate Diploma in School leadership and Management at NIEPA from 2014 to 2016. She has written modules on school leadership for NCSL-NIEPA, NCERT and the Government of Telangana that are being used by all government schools.
Earlier, she also worked at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Azim Premji Foundation, Bengaluru, and Centre for Multi-Disciplinary Development Research, Dharwad, Karnataka. She completed her Ph.D. from the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, Karnataka, in 2006.
