47 Best Thought Leaders on School Leadership in Asia

Last updated: June 2026

The 47 people in this directory are the thought leaders most actively shaping how schools are led across Asia. They come from research universities in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan; from national education systems in India, Malaysia, and South Korea; from international school networks spanning East and Southeast Asia; and from the organisations that translate research into principal development at scale. As of June 2026, every person on this list has made a documented contribution to school leadership thinking or practice in the Asian context, and most are producing new work right now.

Asia is home to more than half of all international schools globally, according to ISC Research data, and the region's national school systems collectively educate hundreds of millions of students. The quality of school leadership is the second most powerful in-school factor in student outcomes, behind only classroom instruction, according to a 2024 meta-analytic review by Hallinger, Liu, and Niu in Educational Management Administration and Leadership (CONFIRMED RESULT). Getting school leadership right across Asia matters at a scale that is genuinely difficult to comprehend.

The voices on this list have made that challenge their career's work. They have studied how instructional leadership translates across cultural contexts, how principals in China, Singapore, and Indonesia navigate reform pressure, and what distributed leadership looks like in systems that value hierarchy. They have built the measurement tools, led the professional development programmes, and reformed the preparation of principals that tens of thousands of school leaders across the region rely on.

Rather than recycling the same handful of global names that appear on every education list, this directory surfaces the leaders who deserve to be far better known by every school principal, system leader, policy maker, and education faculty member working in or with Asian school systems. These are not historical figures. They are active contributors to a conversation that is shaping how millions of children experience school.

When a school leadership team needs support building the communication, accountability, and team health foundations that translate research insights into actual practice, organisations across Asia can hire Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold) and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, to facilitate leadership team sessions, executive offsites, and keynote addresses. Whether virtual or face to face, international travel is often far more affordable than clients expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Does School Leadership in Asia Matter?

School leadership in Asia is not simply a regional variant of a global conversation. It is a distinct field shaped by specific cultural histories, policy environments, and educational priorities that produce leadership challenges no Western framework fully addresses. The region's school systems sit at the intersection of two pressures that rarely appear together at this intensity: a legacy of high-stakes examination cultures in East Asian systems such as China, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and a mounting reform agenda asking school leaders to shift from compliance-oriented management toward genuine instructional leadership.

A 2025 systematic review in Educational Sciences by Hallinger, Liu, Aung, and Yan, covering 349 Asian instructional leadership studies, found that interest in instructional leadership across Asia has grown dramatically since 2010, but that implementation remains uneven across systems, with significant variation tied to power distance, resource context, and the degree to which principals are protected from administrative overload (CONFIRMED RESULT). The same study confirmed that the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (PIMRS), developed by Hallinger in the 1980s, has been translated into 39 languages and validated in 13 countries, making it the most widely deployed instrument for measuring school leadership quality globally.

The UNESCO 2024/2025 Global Education Monitoring Report's East Asia regional edition, published in August 2025, focused specifically on leadership and technology, documenting how the region's school leaders are navigating artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and the question of what learning should mean in systems that have historically been defined by examination performance. The stakes are high and the leadership challenges are distinctive. The people on this list are the ones doing the most to address both.

When school leadership teams need to build the practical skills of communication, accountability, and shared purpose that translate research ideas into how the school actually functions day to day, Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, listeners in 150+ countries), works with schools globally. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

For more on secondary school leadership globally, check out my blog post '50 Essential Thought Leaders in Secondary Education' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-secondary-education.

How This List Was Compiled

Each person on this list was selected on the basis of documented contribution to school leadership in an Asian context in 2024, 2025, or 2026; a published body of work, professional credential, or active practitioner record in the field; and an accessible professional profile. The list spans researchers, system leaders, association executives, international school practitioners, and principal developers. It is not a ranking. It is a directory built to surface the people genuinely shaping how schools are led across one of the world's most educationally diverse regions.

Foundational Researchers Who Defined the Field

The people in this category built the evidence base that every subsequent researcher in Asian school leadership stands on. Their frameworks, instruments, and systematic reviews are the starting points for researchers and the reference points for policymakers across the region.

1. Philip Hallinger

Philip Hallinger occupies a position in this field that is without parallel. Based at the College of Management at Mahidol University in Thailand, where he holds the Global Talent Chair Professorship in Leadership and is also Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg, he has spent more than 25 years working in Asia while producing the most comprehensive body of research on school leadership in Asian contexts of any scholar in the world. His Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale is the most widely used survey instrument globally for measuring instructional leadership, translated into 39 languages and validated in 13 countries.

His 2025 systematic review in Educational Sciences, co-authored with Shengnan Liu, Pwint Nee Aung, and Mengmeng Yan, analysed 349 Asian instructional leadership studies from 1987 to 2024 and confirmed how dramatically the research base has grown in the region while also identifying persistent gaps in methodological rigour and theoretical development. His parallel 2025 meta-analytic review, with Liu and Xu Niu, examined how cultural contexts shape the relationship between instructional leadership and teacher efficacy, using 66 quantitative studies from Asian systems. These two studies together represent the state of the art in understanding what we know and what we do not know about how school leadership works in Asia.

2. Allan Walker

The Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change at The Education University of Hong Kong is the institutional home of Asian school leadership research, and Allan Walker is its architect. Now Adjunct Research Chair Professor of International Educational Leadership and Co-Director of the Centre, he has published more than 300 books, book chapters, and journal articles, with a particular focus on school leadership in Chinese and other Asian societies. His comparative work across systems and his role in training the next generation of researchers at EdUHK make him the most cited and most practically influential figure in the field. He received the Edwin M. Bridges Award from the University Council of Educational Administration in 2015 for his contribution to school leader preparation globally.

His recent research has focused on expanding knowledge of school leadership in Chinese and other Asian societies and disseminating that knowledge internationally. He has acted as consultant and advisor on large-scale research and development activities in more than 25 countries, spanning Australia, Canada, Chile, Finland, Germany, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, the UK, the US, and Vietnam. His work on the relationship between culture and school leadership provides the conceptual architecture that researchers working in Asian contexts draw on more than any other single body of scholarship.

3. Pak Tee Ng

Pak Tee Ng is Associate Professor at the Policy and Curriculum Leadership Academic Group of the National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His role overseeing the milestone executive programmes for principals and heads of department in Singapore schools means he has had direct influence on the professional formation of the people leading Singapore's schools for decades. His book Learning from Singapore: The Power of Paradoxes, published by Routledge in 2017, is the most widely read account of how Singapore's education system achieves its results while navigating the tensions between performance and wellbeing, conformity and creativity.

He has delivered keynotes at the Google Global Education Symposium, the International Baccalaureate Global Conference, and the Scottish Learning Festival, and is a member of Scotland's International Council of Education Advisers and a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. He co-edits the Routledge Leading Change book series. His 2025 and 2026 LinkedIn posts address how Singapore is navigating the AI question in schools and what the paradoxes in Singapore's educational success mean for system leaders trying to borrow elements of the model. He is the most internationally visible Singaporean voice on what the Singapore school system is actually doing and why.

4. Manabu Sato

Manabu Sato is Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo and Research Professor at Gakushuin University in Japan. His concept of School as a Learning Community, developed from the 1990s, has influenced more than 4,000 schools in Japan and spread to China, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia, where it has become a model for school reform that builds teacher professional learning through collaborative lesson observation. The LSLC (Lesson Study for Learning Community) approach he developed has reshaped how teachers in Asia learn from each other and how school leaders facilitate that learning.

His books, translated into Chinese and Korean as well as English, remain central references for practitioners working on school culture reform across the region. His National Academy of Education profile confirms his research interests in action research in school reform, curriculum research, and use of new technology in teacher education, and his comparative studies of school reform in Japan and the United States. The 8th International Conference of School as Learning Community, held in 2021, drew participants from Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, and beyond, documenting the scale of his influence across the region. As the foundational figure in one of the most widely adopted school reform models in Asia, Sato's contribution to school leadership thinking cannot be overstated.

5. Cheng Yin Cheong

Cheng Yin Cheong is Emeritus Professor and Advisor at The Education University of Hong Kong, where he previously served as Research Chair Professor of Leadership and Change and Vice President for Research and Development. He was the immediate past President of the World Education Research Association and President of the Asia-Pacific Educational Research Association from 2004 to 2008, making him one of the most institutionally connected figures in education research across the entire region for more than three decades. His research on school effectiveness, school-based management, and the contextualisation of educational reform for Asian systems provided the conceptual scaffolding on which much of the contemporary school leadership literature in Hong Kong and Greater China rests.

His influence on policy conversations in Hong Kong, mainland China, and across the region continues through the researchers and policymakers he has mentored over decades of EdUHK leadership. His work on what school-based management means in systems where government oversight and Confucian authority norms coexist has been particularly influential in helping researchers understand why reform models that work in Anglo-American contexts encounter resistance in Chinese school systems, and what adaptations are needed to make school improvement genuinely sustainable.

6. Viviane Robinson

Viviane Robinson is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and Academic Director of its Centre for Educational Leadership. Her research identifying the impact of different types of leadership on student outcomes has been used to shape leadership policy and practice in Singapore, Scandinavia, England, Chile, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Her five-dimension framework from Student-Centred Leadership, published by Jossey-Bass in 2011, identifies the leadership practices with the largest effect sizes on student outcomes and is among the most-used research tools in principal development programmes across the Asia-Pacific region.

Her work on Open-to-Learning conversations provides a practical framework for the difficult conversations between principals and teachers that drive school improvement, and her influence on Singapore's leadership development architecture makes her a genuine contributor to the Asian conversation despite her New Zealand base. She received the Mason Durie Medal from the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2016 for her international contributions to educational leadership research and practice. Her 2025 LinkedIn posts engage with new research on equity in school leadership across Scotland and South Australia, extending her framework to questions of how leadership for equity differs from leadership for average performance improvement.

The EdUHK Cluster: Hong Kong's Research Powerhouse

The Education University of Hong Kong's Department of Education Policy and Leadership houses one of the most concentrated clusters of school leadership researchers in the world, ranked third globally in education and educational research by the 2025-2026 US News and World Report. The people in this category are the current generation driving that research output.

7. Junjun Chen

Junjun Chen is Professor and Dean of the Graduate School at The Education University of Hong Kong, where she also serves as Associate Dean for Research and Postgraduate Studies in the Faculty of Education and Human Development. She was invited as an Expert Group Member of the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report for the 2024 theme of Leadership in Education, contributing to the country profiles for mainland China and Hong Kong. Her research focuses on principal development, principal well-being, resilience, and professional flow, and she has developed four conceptual models and eight validated instruments that are used by researchers globally to study principal psychology.

Her current funded projects include a 2026-2027 General Research Fund project on principal system leadership that addresses how school principals develop their capacity to lead across school boundaries, connecting individual school improvement to district and system-level improvement. Her ranking by Stanford University among the top 2 percent of the world's most-cited scientists in 2020, 2021, and 2022 confirms the reach of her research influence. Her approach to principal well-being as a professional and organisational matter rather than simply a personal responsibility provides a framework that is practically useful for anyone designing principal support systems in Asian education contexts.

8. Jiafang Lu

Jiafang Lu is Associate Professor and Acting Head of the Department of Education Policy and Leadership at The Education University of Hong Kong, and Associate Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change. She delivered a keynote at the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement in January 2025, where she presented her research on school leadership teams as dynamic systems shaped by both organisational structure and individual psychology. Her doctoral degree from the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences grounds her in both leadership and organisational behaviour, which distinguishes her approach from scholars trained primarily in educational administration.

She is currently directing a 51-month school leadership development programme funded by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust and co-designed with Stanford Graduate School of Education, which provides Hong Kong principals with exposure to global trends, mainland foresight, and adaptive leadership skills. Between 2020 and 2025, she contributed to training programmes that reached over 7,000 teacher leaders in Hong Kong. Her work on leadership distribution and conflict dynamics in school leadership teams addresses questions about shared leadership that are directly relevant to any principal who has tried to build an effective senior team in a hierarchical cultural context.

9. Haiyan Qian

Haiyan Qian is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Administration and Policy at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change at EdUHK, where she leads collaborative research linking the Greater Bay Area schools with Hong Kong's leadership development agenda. Her primary research focus is school leadership in China and the influence of social and cultural context on schooling across Chinese societies. Her 2025 study in Educational Management Administration and Leadership, co-authored with Shengnan Liu and Chao Ding, reviewed 236 articles on educational leadership in mainland China published between 1991 and 2024, providing the most comprehensive bibliometric and content analysis of China's school leadership research landscape to date.

Her work on boundary-spanning practices of system leaders in China, published in Educational Management Administration and Leadership in 2025, addresses how Chinese school leaders who take on system-level responsibilities navigate the inherent tensions between their school's interests and the broader system's needs. This is one of the most practically relevant questions in Chinese school reform right now, as the government has actively promoted system leadership as a vehicle for sharing best practice across schools in the same geographic cluster. Her research connects that policy agenda to the actual lived experience of the leaders implementing it.

10. Darren Bryant

Darren Bryant is Professor in the School of Education at Curtin University in Australia and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Education Policy and Leadership at The Education University of Hong Kong, where he previously served as Head of Department and Associate Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change. His research focuses on leader development, middle leadership, and school leaders in international school contexts across the Asia-Pacific. He has directed research projects commissioned by the International Baccalaureate on middle leadership in IB continuum schools in Northeast Asia, producing one of the few systematic studies of how the people leading faculties and year groups in international schools in China, Japan, and Korea experience their roles.

His 2023 paper in Multicultural Education Review, co-authored with Allan Walker and Miron Bhowmik, developed a reconceptualised model of inclusive leadership for addressing diversity in Asian schools that draws on both business management research and educational leadership literature. His LinkedIn activity in 2025 and 2026 addresses strategic decision-making, sense-making under complexity, and the implications of AI for how school leaders should think about their own professional development. His combination of Australia-based experience, EdUHK affiliation, and international school research expertise makes him one of the most globally connected figures in Asia-Pacific school leadership.

11. Ewan Wright

Ewan Wright is Associate Professor at the Department of Education Policy and Leadership at The Education University of Hong Kong, where he serves as Associate Head for Research and is a Fellow of the Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change and the Centre for Higher Education Leadership and Policy Studies. He previously led the Executive Master of Arts in International Educational Leadership and Change programme for six years, giving him direct experience of the professional development needs of school leaders pursuing graduate-level leadership preparation while working in international school contexts across Asia.

His research on leadership learning for internationally mobile school leaders provides a framework for thinking about professional development that is particularly relevant in Asia, where international school principal populations move frequently between countries. He co-directed the EdUHK Australia Study Tour in 2025, which examined what Australian and Hong Kong school leaders can learn from each other's system contexts, producing comparative insights about how different systems develop and sustain school leadership quality. His work connecting international school leadership research to the broader Asia-Pacific educational leadership literature bridges two communities that have historically not spoken to each other.

12. Miron Bhowmik

Miron Bhowmik is Assistant Professor in the Department of Education Policy and Leadership at The Education University of Hong Kong, where his research addresses inclusive leadership and how schools in Asian contexts can build leadership cultures that respond to the ethnic, linguistic, and ability diversity of their student populations. His 2023 paper in Multicultural Education Review, co-authored with Allan Walker and Darren Bryant, developed a reconceptualised model of inclusive leadership for Asian schools that draws on both business management research and the educational leadership literature on equity and social justice.

His work brings an equity lens to a school leadership research tradition that has been predominantly focused on effectiveness and performance outcomes, and his 2025 and 2026 posts address how Asian school leaders can move from compliance-oriented approaches to diversity toward genuinely inclusive practice that changes how students experience school. His particular focus on how South Asian, Southeast Asian, and East Asian school contexts navigate diversity provides a perspective that is essential given the enormous range of cultural and linguistic diversity across the region's school systems.

13. James Ko

James Ko is Associate Professor at The Education University of Hong Kong, where his research addresses school leadership and school improvement, with particular attention to how leadership practices in Hong Kong and mainland Chinese schools affect teaching quality and student learning. His collaborations with Allan Walker and Jiafang Lu on the EdUHK school leadership development programmes connect his research directly to the design of leadership preparation and in-service development programmes for Hong Kong school leaders. His work on how principals in Chinese school systems balance external accountability demands with internal improvement processes provides practical insights for anyone working on principal development in Confucian heritage educational contexts.

His 2025 and 2026 work extends the EdUHK cluster's analysis of school leadership to questions about how individual leadership practices aggregate into organisational improvement at the whole-school level, addressing the persistent gap between research on what effective leaders do and research on how entire school organisations improve. This system-level perspective is essential for policymakers and principal developers who need to understand not just what great leaders do but how to build organisations that sustain improvement beyond the tenure of any single principal.

Singapore: The System Everyone Studies

Singapore's school system is the most studied education system in the world because it consistently produces results at scale. The researchers and practitioners in this category are the ones building and transmitting knowledge of how Singapore does what it does, and what the limits of that knowledge are as a model for other systems.

14. Salleh Hairon

Salleh Hairon is Associate Professor at the Policy and Curriculum Leadership Academic Group at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and serves as Assistant Dean for Higher Degrees by Coursework. His research focus is school leadership for teacher collective learning, covering distributed leadership, teacher leadership, professional learning communities, action research, and professional development in Singapore school contexts. His 2012 study on professional learning communities in Singapore's hierarchical school system, co-authored with Clive Dimmock, remains one of the most cited analyses of how collaborative teacher learning is actually practised within a high-accountability, top-down national system.

He is co-editor of the book School Leadership and Educational Change in Singapore, published by Springer in 2019, which provides the most accessible overview of how Singapore's school leaders navigate policy implementation, curriculum change, and professional development within the system's distinctive tight-coupling structure. His subsequent research has refined the professional learning community analysis across multiple school types, examining what distributed leadership looks like when principals have significant formal authority and teachers have limited institutional power to drive change from below. This analysis is directly relevant to school leaders in China, Korea, and other hierarchical Asian systems who are being asked to implement distributed leadership models designed for flatter organisational cultures.

15. Christine Lee

Christine Lee is the pioneer of Lesson Study in Singapore. Her two Research and Development programmes at the National Institute of Education, Communities of Practice in Cooperative Learning and Lesson Study as a Teacher-Directed Form of Instructional Improvement, led to Lesson Study being implemented in over 50 percent of Singapore schools, making Singapore one of the most deeply embedded lesson study systems outside Japan. She served as President of the World Association of Lesson Studies from 2011 to 2016 and continues to serve as Honorary Treasurer. Her work connecting the Japanese model of lesson study to Singapore's school culture is one of the most important cases of successful cross-cultural transfer of a school improvement approach in the Asian education literature.

For school leaders, her work demonstrates how lesson study functions not just as a professional development technique but as a vehicle for shifting school culture toward shared responsibility for teaching quality. She has been lead editor of the WALS-Routledge Lesson Study Series. Her contribution to how Singapore's school leaders think about and facilitate teacher professional learning is foundational to understanding why Singapore is able to sustain quality improvements across a large proportion of its schools rather than concentrating improvement in a few high-profile institutions.

16. Wing On Lee

Wing On Lee is an internationally recognised scholar and practitioner in educational leadership and adult learning whose career has spanned leadership roles in Hong Kong and Singapore institutions. He served as Professor and Executive Director of the Institute for Adult Learning in Singapore, where UNESCO commissioned him as an expert reviewer for its Education for Sustainable Development forum and invited him to deliver keynote and plenary speeches on educational strategic development and monitoring mechanisms for lifelong learning. His advisory roles across the Education Commission, Quality Education Fund, Curriculum Development Council, and Hong Kong's Central Policy Unit give him a policy connection that bridges academic research and governmental decision-making.

His work on civic education curriculum and school leader development, and his memberships on educational strategy committees across Hong Kong and Singapore, make him one of the most broadly connected figures in the institutional leadership of education across both systems. His 2014 appointment as Vice President of the Open University of Hong Kong, where he drove curriculum changes that strengthened the university's financial stability and student employability outcomes, demonstrates how his leadership thinking operates across both secondary and tertiary educational contexts.

17. Clive Dimmock

Clive Dimmock is Emeritus Professor at the University of Glasgow and one of the founding scholars of comparative educational leadership in Asia. His co-authored work with Allan Walker on connecting school leadership with teaching, learning, and parenting in diverse cultural contexts, published in the Second International Handbook of Educational Leadership and Administration in 2002, set the terms for how researchers have thought about the relationship between cultural context and leadership practice in Asian schools. His research on Singapore specifically, covering leadership tight-coupling, sustainability, scalability, and succession, provides the most systematic account of how Singapore maintains system coherence while developing individual school leadership.

His 2012 study with Salleh Hairon on professional learning communities in Singapore's hierarchical school system remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how collaborative teacher learning is shaped by national system structures. His broader comparative work, examining what Anglo-American educational leadership ideas do and do not transfer to Chinese, Singaporean, and other Asian school contexts, established one of the most important methodological questions in the field: not whether Asian systems are different, but how they are different and why that matters for research, policy, and practice.

18. Shengnan Liu

Shengnan Liu is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Administration in the Faculty of Education at East China Normal University in Shanghai. Her research focuses on educational leadership, principal leadership effects, and teacher learning in Chinese school contexts. She is a frequent and productive collaborator with Philip Hallinger, co-authoring the 2025 systematic review in Educational Sciences on Asian instructional leadership studies and the 2025 meta-analytic review in Educational Management Administration and Leadership on cultural context, principal instructional leadership, and teacher efficacy. Her co-authored 2025 review of the state of educational leadership research in mainland China, published with Haiyan Qian and Chao Ding, is the most rigorous analysis of that literature available in English.

Her work bridges the Chinese and international literature on school leadership in ways that make both bodies of knowledge more accessible to researchers and practitioners on both sides of the language divide. Her focus on how cultural contexts moderate the relationship between leadership and teacher outcomes addresses one of the most important methodological challenges in cross-cultural school leadership research: the same leadership behaviour can have different effects in different cultural contexts, and understanding why is essential for designing leadership development programmes that actually work.

19. Ching Sing Chai

Ching Sing Chai is Associate Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and a former National Institute of Education faculty member in Singapore, where he produced foundational research on how schools and school leaders integrate technology into educational practice. His work on technological pedagogical content knowledge and its application in Singapore and broader Asian school contexts has been widely adopted as a conceptual framework for understanding how school leaders should think about digital transformation. His research connects teacher professional development, school leadership, and technology integration in ways that are particularly relevant for Asian school systems navigating the rapid adoption of AI tools in 2025 and 2026.

His chapter on ICT leadership in the book School Leadership and Educational Change in Singapore, co-authored with Catherine Chua, provides one of the most accessible accounts of what technology integration actually looks like in a high-performing national school system. For school leaders trying to move from ad hoc technology adoption to a coherent school-wide approach to digital learning, his research provides both the conceptual framework and the empirical grounding needed to make that shift in a deliberate and evidence-informed way.

China, Japan, and Korea: East Asia's Distinct Voices

The school leadership conversations in China, Japan, and South Korea have historically developed with limited connection to the international English-language literature. The people in this category are the ones building those connections and contributing East Asian perspectives that genuinely enrich the global conversation on what school leadership is and how it works.

20. Yulian Zheng

Yulian Zheng is Professor at Guizhou Education University in China and leads a national funding project on Chinese innovation in principals' knowledge governance in school networks. Her research addresses principal succession, principal rotation systems, and the Master Principal Studio model, a uniquely Chinese professional development structure in which outstanding principals are selected to establish studios that serve as development hubs for junior principals. Her 2024 study in Educational Management Administration and Leadership on network leadership practices in Master Principal Studio hosts, co-authored with Haiyan Qian, Jingyan Song, and Shuangye Chen, provides one of the few detailed English-language accounts of how China's principal development system operates at the practitioner level.

Her 2025 co-authored study in the same journal on principal succession leadership, co-authored with Jianjing Tang, Haiyan Qian, Jiafang Lu, and Xiu Chen Cravens, developed and validated a 14-item, four-factor model of succession leadership for Chinese school principals. This addresses a question of growing urgency as China's school systems navigate the challenge of leadership continuity in a context where principal rotation is policy-mandated. Her combination of China-based research expertise and engagement with the international literature makes her one of the most important contributors to closing the gap between what Chinese school leadership researchers know and what the international community can access.

21. Hongbiao Yin

Hongbiao Yin is Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research examines teacher professional development, teacher emotions, and school leadership in Chinese school contexts, with particular attention to how the emotional dimensions of teaching and leading are shaped by Chinese cultural values and institutional structures. His work on teacher professional identity, emotional wellbeing in teaching, and how school leadership creates the conditions for teachers to sustain motivation over a career provides an important counterpoint to frameworks developed in Western contexts.

His publications in leading journals address how concepts such as trust, face, and collective identity shape the relational dynamics that effective school leadership depends on in Chinese schools. For school leaders working in mainland Chinese, Hong Kong, or Chinese diaspora school contexts, his research provides the cultural intelligence needed to understand why Western management techniques that appear straightforward often encounter unexpected resistance, and how to adapt leadership approaches to fit the relational reality of Chinese schools. His 2025 and 2026 work continues to develop the intersection of teacher wellbeing and school leadership quality.

22. Woo Jung Son

Woo Jung Son is Director of the Korean Institute of Learning Community in South Korea, where she leads the institutional work of supporting innovative schools based on the School as Learning Community model developed by Manabu Sato. Having completed her PhD at the University of Tokyo under Sato's supervision, she has been instrumental in introducing the LSLC model to Korean schools, contributing to more than 300 innovative schools built on the SLC framework in South Korea since 2011. Her internet-based lectures on creating learning communities for Korean teachers represent one of the most sustained and accessible teacher development initiatives in the Korean school system.

Her work translating the Japanese pedagogical model into Korean school culture, while adapting it to the distinctive pressures of South Korea's examination-dominated system, is an important contribution to the cross-cultural diffusion of school leadership ideas across East Asia. Her engagement with how school leaders can create genuine learning cultures within systems that simultaneously demand high examination performance represents one of the most significant practical challenges in school leadership across the region, and her work provides some of the most honest and practically tested answers available.

23. Xiu Chen Cravens

Xiu Chen Cravens is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, where her research focuses on school leadership in China and cross-cultural comparative leadership. Her extensive collaboration with EdUHK researchers, including Yulian Zheng, Haiyan Qian, and Jiafang Lu, on principal succession, principal development, and the professional learning of school leaders in Chinese contexts has produced several significant studies that bridge the Chinese and international research traditions. Her 2025 study in Educational Management Administration and Leadership on principal succession leadership, co-developed with Chinese colleagues, addresses the design of leadership development that is explicitly calibrated to the challenges of transition moments.

Her US-based position gives her a vantage point for articulating what Chinese school leadership research offers to the global conversation, and her work on developing validated measurement tools for Chinese school leadership contexts addresses a persistent gap in a field that has relied heavily on instruments developed for Anglo-American school systems. Her contribution to making the Chinese-language research tradition more accessible to English-language readers is particularly valuable as Chinese researchers produce an increasing share of the world's school leadership research.

24. Thomas Hatch

Thomas Hatch is a professor and researcher at Teachers College Columbia University in New York who, in 2024 and 2025, conducted extensive fieldwork in schools and universities in Beijing, Ningbo, Dongguan, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Suzhou, exploring how China's school system is creating what he calls "niches of possibility" where more student-centred and innovative learning is taking root alongside the dominant examination culture. His blog writing and academic publications on those visits provide one of the most accessible English-language accounts of how school leadership in China is navigating the tension between traditional academic pressure and the government's growing emphasis on creativity, wellbeing, and whole-child development.

His 2025 and 2026 writing connects the specific reality of Chinese schools to the broader global conversation about what education is for and what principals are for. His analysis of how national policy changes, including the 2025 pre-school law that prohibits introducing elementary school curriculum into kindergartens, are creating space for different approaches to learning provides context that is essential for international observers trying to understand China's educational direction. For school leaders working in or with Chinese school contexts, his field-based documentation provides a level of on-the-ground specificity that purely academic research rarely achieves.

25. Eisuke Saito

Eisuke Saito is one of the key figures in translating and disseminating the Lesson Study for Learning Community model developed by Manabu Sato into international school contexts. He co-authored the definitive English-language guide to the LSLC approach, Lesson Study for Learning Community: A Guide to Sustainable School Reform, published by Routledge in 2014, with Masatsugu Murase, Atsushi Tsukui, and John Yeo. His research and practice work spans Japan and Southeast Asia, where he has worked with schools in Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia on implementing collaborative learning community models. His work on how school leaders facilitate open lessons and professional dialogue between teachers provides one of the most concrete accounts of what distributed instructional leadership looks like when embedded in everyday school practice.

For school leaders seeking to build professional learning cultures in their schools without relying on expensive external professional development programmes, his documentation of how teacher learning can be sustained through structured observation and dialogue provides a practical roadmap. His Southeast Asia fieldwork is particularly valuable because it documents how the LSLC model performs when transplanted into school cultures that differ significantly from the Japanese context in which it was developed, providing evidence about both the model's adaptability and its limits.

Southeast Asia: A Region Finding Its Voice

Southeast Asia is the most educationally diverse sub-region in Asia, spanning systems as different as Singapore's world-ranked national system, Indonesia's 55-million-student public sector, and the education systems still rebuilding in parts of Myanmar and Cambodia. The researchers and practitioners in this category are building the evidence base for school leadership in this region's specific contexts.

26. Lei Mee Thien

Lei Mee Thien is Professor at the School of Educational Studies at Universiti Sains Malaysia and one of the leading researchers on school leadership in Malaysia and Southeast Asia. She is co-editor, with Peng Liu, of Educational Leadership and Asian Culture: Culturally Sensitive Leadership Practice, published by Routledge in 2024, the most comprehensive recent edited volume on educational leadership from an Asian cultural perspective. She also co-edited Turnaround Leadership in Southeast Asian Countries, published by Springer in 2025, a volume addressing school leadership for improvement in low-performing schools across 11 countries in the region.

Her research addresses how educational leadership is linked to national culture in Malaysia and across the region, providing an empirically grounded alternative to frameworks that treat Asian school leadership as a homogeneous category. Her 2025 edited volume on turnaround leadership is particularly valuable because it is one of the few resources to examine what school improvement leadership looks like not in high-performing systems but in the majority of Southeast Asian schools that face resource scarcity, teacher shortages, and significant student disadvantage. For policymakers and practitioners working on school improvement across the region, her work provides a more realistic point of departure.

27. Donnie Adams

Donnie Adams is Lecturer in Educational Leadership at the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne, having previously served as Director of the Centre for Research in International and Comparative Education at Universiti Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. His focus on inclusive school leadership and the school-wide reformation of the inclusive education agenda in Malaysia has generated both published research and direct policy influence, including research projects commissioned by the Ministries of Education in Malaysia and the Maldives, the Department of Education in the Philippines, the British Council, ETH Zurich, UNICEF, and Teach for Malaysia. He was awarded the Emerald Young Researcher Award in 2021.

His LinkedIn presence is substantive and regularly features posts on inclusive leadership in Southeast Asian school contexts, comparative education policy, and the conditions required for school-wide inclusion to take root in systems that have historically treated students with disabilities as a separate population. His 2025 work on shaping leadership and inclusive education, drawing on research from Cambodia, Myanmar, and Vietnam, published in the International Journal of Developmental Disabilities, extends his inclusive leadership analysis across the most resource-constrained parts of Southeast Asia where the gap between policy and practice is widest.

28. Sumintono Bambang

Sumintono Bambang is an Indonesian educational researcher whose work on principal leadership resilience, school quality measurement, and the conditions that sustain school improvement in Indonesia provides essential context for understanding school leadership in the world's fourth most populous country. His 2025 book chapter in Resilient and Sustainable Education Futures, published by Springer, addresses how Indonesian school principals navigated the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic in a system characterised by significant resource inequality and geographic dispersion across more than 17,000 islands. The specific challenges of leading schools in Indonesia, from managing multi-grade classrooms to implementing national curriculum reforms with limited support, make his work essential reading for anyone interested in school leadership beyond high-income system contexts.

His work on Rasch modelling and its application to school quality measurement in Indonesian contexts provides a methodological contribution that is relevant across Southeast Asian school systems facing large-scale quality improvement challenges. His research documents what leadership resilience actually looks like when it is tested not by abstract challenge but by genuine systemic pressure, providing a grounded account of principal leadership that complements the more aspirational frameworks dominant in the international literature.

29. Edward Greene

Edward Greene is Executive Director of the East Asia Regional Council of Schools, the professional organisation that connects and supports international schools across East Asia, a region that accounts for more than half of all international schools globally. His role as convener, standard-setter, and professional development organiser for EARCOS member schools gives him direct influence over the professional learning of principals and heads of school across the fastest-growing region for international education. The 55th Annual EARCOS Leadership Conference in Bangkok in October 2025, under the theme "Future Visible," brought together approximately 1,200 delegates and addressed AI integration, leadership development, school safety, and operational resilience.

ISC Research reports over 15,075 English medium international schools globally in 2026, educating approximately 7.7 million students and generating $69.3 billion USD in annual fee income, with more than half of those schools located in Asia (CONFIRMED RESULT). As the person who shapes the professional development agenda for the principals leading many of those schools, Greene's influence on international school leadership in Asia is structural rather than individual: he determines what questions get asked at the conferences where school leaders learn from each other. His 2026 EARCOS Leadership Conference, themed "Schools of Hope" and scheduled for October in Bangkok, continues that agenda-setting function.

30. Samantha Gayfer

Samantha Gayfer is a leadership development specialist and coach who has trained and coached international school boards and leaders across Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, China, South Korea, Singapore, and the United States. She presented at the EARCOS Annual Heads' Institute in April 2025 in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where she introduced a Context-Based Leadership Framework designed to help international school leaders adapt their approach to their specific school environment rather than applying generic leadership models. Her framework addresses how school leaders can align their leadership style with their school's core values while navigating contemporary challenges including AI integration, diversity and equity, and social-emotional learning.

Her coaching work across multiple Asian contexts gives her a practitioner's insight into the gap between what leadership research recommends and what school leaders in internationally mobile roles are actually able to implement in their specific cultural and institutional settings. For international school leaders who find that leadership development programmes designed for Anglo-American school contexts do not translate cleanly to their Asian school environment, her context-sensitive approach provides a more directly applicable alternative.

India and South Asia: Scale and Equity

India's school system is among the largest in the world, with over 1.4 million schools according to the Ministry of Education's 2025 data. The leadership challenges facing Indian school principals, from resource scarcity to multi-grade classrooms to the implementation of the 2020 National Education Policy, are among the most complex in global education. The people in this category are building the evidence base and the leadership capacity needed to address them.

31. Gowri Ishwaran

Gowri Ishwaran is one of India's most respected school educators and the recipient of the Padma Shri, awarded by the Indian government in 2004 for her contributions to education. She is Vice Chairperson of The Global Education and Leadership Foundation (tGELF), the organisation she previously led as CEO, which connects with one million students through 7,000 master trainers across 1,000 schools and NGOs in 12 countries. She is the Founder Principal of Sanskriti School in New Delhi, which became one of India's leading schools within a decade of its establishment. Her advisory role with the Shiv Nadar Foundation and her membership on the boards of multiple Indian educational institutions extend her influence across the country's private school sector.

Her mission through tGELF, to mentor and nurture young people into ethical leaders, represents the most sustained and scaled leadership development initiative in the Indian school sector. With a postgraduate background in English Literature and more than 30 years of school leadership experience, she brings a practitioner depth to the conversation about what school leadership means in India that purely academic researchers rarely achieve. Her profile in the international education community through roles with Junior Achievement Worldwide and other global bodies makes her the most internationally connected Indian school leader in this directory.

32. N. Mythili

N. Mythili is Assistant Professor at the National Centre for School Leadership at the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA) in New Delhi, one of the premier national bodies for educational policy research and training in India. She served as Principal Investigator for the CBSE's Pedagogical Leadership Handbook for principals, a nationally distributed resource published through the Central Board of Secondary Education that has reached principals across India's vast national school network. Her work on pedagogical leadership in the Indian context, bridging the gap between international school leadership research and the specific conditions of Indian public school systems, is among the most directly policy-relevant contributions to the school leadership conversation in South Asia.

Her work through NIEPA places her at the intersection of research and national policy in a system where the distance between academic knowledge and classroom practice is often enormous. The CBSE Pedagogical Leadership Handbook she led addresses a genuine gap: Indian principals have historically been prepared for administrative management rather than instructional leadership, and the transition to pedagogical leadership models requires not just training but a cultural shift in how the principal role is understood. Her contribution to that shift is both scholarly and directly practical.

33. Nilufar Rakhimova

Nilufar Rakhimova is a Senior Education Specialist at the World Bank whose work addresses primary education reform across Central Asia and beyond, with a focus on early grade reading, teacher professional development, and the systemic conditions that allow school quality to improve at scale in under-resourced contexts. Her 2025 and 2026 LinkedIn posts address early literacy interventions in low- and middle-income countries, primary teacher education reform in Central Asian systems, and what the evidence says about effective school leadership in diverse national contexts. Her experience across Central Asian, South Asian, and African primary education systems gives her a comparative perspective that is essential for understanding school leadership in Asia's lower-income school systems.

For school leaders and policymakers in the parts of Asia where the conditions assumed by most English-language leadership research, including stable funding, trained staff, and functioning curriculum systems, are simply not present, Rakhimova's work provides one of the most practically grounded perspectives on what works. Her World Bank position means her insights inform the funding and technical assistance strategies of one of the world's largest education development organisations, giving her work an influence that extends well beyond academic publication.

34. David Gurr

David Gurr is Associate Professor at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne and a Research Fellow of the Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change at EdUHK, where he also serves on the advisory board for the International Executive Master of Arts in International Educational Leadership and Change. He has received multiple honours from the Australian Council for Educational Leadership, including the Hedley Beare Educator of the Year Award in 2012 and the Gold Medal in 2014. He previously served as senior associate editor of the Journal of Educational Administration and co-editor of the IAP book series International Research on School Leadership.

His work on successful school leadership and its connection to student learning, produced in collaboration with EdUHK colleagues over many years, provides one of the most sustained Australian contributions to the Asia-Pacific school leadership research conversation. His consultancy work with Victorian schools and his involvement in evaluating leadership programmes in Australian contexts means his research is grounded in both system-level and school-level practice. His fellowship at the Asia Pacific Centre and his involvement in the EdUHK programme advisory board connect him directly to the Hong Kong and regional leadership development infrastructure.

35. James McLaughlin

James McLaughlin holds a Doctor of Business Administration and in 2026 published research in the International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science on the role of leadership in cultivating school cultures focused on social and emotional learning in international education across Asia. His qualitative analysis draws on literature from EARCOS, the International Baccalaureate, the Journal of Research in International Education, and Asia Pacific Journal of Education from 2021 to 2024, identifying four themes in how visionary school leadership positions SEL as a strategic institutional priority in international schools across the region.

His finding that visionary leadership acts as a catalyst when SEL is positioned as a strategic institutional priority, rather than as a compliance exercise or an add-on to academic programmes, is directly actionable for international school leaders in Asia who are navigating the shift from academic performance-only metrics toward more holistic measures of student success. For the many international schools across Asia whose leadership teams are grappling with how to build genuine SEL culture alongside high academic expectations, his work provides one of the few systematic analyses of what that leadership actually requires.

36. Jessica Wei Huang

Jessica Wei Huang is an educator and school leader with more than 20 years of experience as a classroom teacher, school administrator, and leadership coach and facilitator across Asia. She has presented at EARCOS conferences and events and leads professional learning focused on building equitable school communities through inclusive practice, equity, diversity, and belonging. Her EARCOS workshop work on creating inclusive school communities addresses one of the most pressing challenges facing the region's rapidly growing international school sector as student populations become more locally rooted and less expatriate-dominated, creating school environments where cultural and linguistic diversity is genuinely complex.

Her expertise in how international school leaders in Asia can create genuinely welcoming school communities provides a practitioner's alternative to the more theoretical diversity and inclusion frameworks that dominate the professional development literature. Her work is particularly relevant for international school leaders in cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, and Singapore where the student body increasingly includes significant proportions of local students from very different educational backgrounds to those schools were originally designed to serve.

International School Leadership: Practitioners Reshaping the Sector

Asia is home to more than half of all international schools globally. The principals and leaders working in those schools face a distinctive set of challenges that neither national school leadership research nor generic international education research fully addresses. The people in this category are the practitioners and platform builders most actively shaping how those schools are led.

37. Sabbi Quidwai

Sabbi Quidwai is a former high school educator, author, and former Apple Education Executive who delivered a keynote at the 55th Annual EARCOS Leadership Conference in Bangkok in October 2025, where she challenged school leaders to shift their relationship with AI from treating it as a tool to partnering with it as a trusted collaborator. Her work at the intersection of AI, school culture, and educator identity addresses the question that is now at the top of every international school leader's agenda in Asia: what does AI mean for how we teach, assess, and lead? Her experience translating technology thinking into practical frameworks for educators makes her one of the most accessible voices on the AI-in-schools question for international school leaders who are not technologists.

Her keynote at EARCOS 2025 reached approximately 1,200 school leaders and education professionals from international schools across East Asia, making her one of the most broadly heard voices in that professional community during the year. Her framing of AI partnership rather than AI use addresses a psychological barrier that many school leaders face: the tendency to treat AI as a productivity tool while missing its potential to change how leaders think, plan, and make decisions about their schools. For school leaders wrestling with how to lead their faculties through AI adoption without pretending to have answers they do not have, her approach models a useful alternative.

38. David Hawley

David Hawley is a contributor to The International Educator, the primary professional publication for international school educators and leaders globally, where he has written on leadership topics including the APGAR Score framework for assessing school health, published in May 2026. His framework applies the clinical logic of the medical APGAR score to school leadership, proposing a rapid diagnostic tool that cuts through data overload to give school leaders a quick assessment of where their school sits across five dimensions of institutional health. The framework addresses a genuine challenge for international school leaders: the proliferation of data and metrics that is supposed to inform leadership decision-making but often produces paralysis rather than clarity.

His contributions to The International Educator in 2025 and 2026 address governance and board leadership, the specific challenges of leading in internationally mobile professional communities, and the culture and values dimensions of international school leadership that get less attention in the research literature than instructional leadership. For international school principals who find that academic research does not address the specific institutional and cultural complexity of their context, Hawley's practitioner writing provides a more directly applicable alternative.

39. Tony Low

Tony Low is the Principal of Singapore International School in Hong Kong, appointed in December 2025, having previously served as Zonal Director of Schools (East) at Singapore's Ministry of Education. His career also includes serving as Principal of Kuo Chuan Presbyterian Secondary School from 2005 to 2010 and Dunman High School from 2017 to 2021, and as Superintendent of Cluster Schools, Vice President of the Academy of Principals Singapore, and Board Member of the Singapore Health Promotion Board. His trajectory, from a senior system leadership role in Singapore to leading an international school in Hong Kong, makes him a rare figure who has operated at the highest levels of both the national and international school sectors within the same region.

His experience translating Singapore's evidence-informed system leadership approach into the governance and culture of an international school provides a live case study in what system leadership knowledge looks like when applied outside the system it was developed in. His master's degree in Management and Human Resource Development from the University of Sydney, completed on a Faculty International Merit Scholarship, provides the academic foundation for the practitioner experience he brings to Singapore International School in Hong Kong. For international school leaders who want to understand how Singapore's educational effectiveness translates to non-national school contexts, his career is a direct answer.

40. Maxwell Ho

Maxwell Ho won the Emerald Young Researcher Award, an award organised by Emerald Publishing for young researchers from East Asia and New Asian Tigers, recognising the originality and societal impact of his research. Working within the EdUHK school leadership cluster under the mentorship of Jiafang Lu, Allan Walker, and Darren Bryant, his research on school leadership development practices in Hong Kong provides empirically grounded insights into how individual schools are implementing the leadership improvement frameworks developed at the system level. He represents the next generation of the school leadership research tradition that Walker and colleagues have built at EdUHK.

His work on bringing research into practice in Hong Kong school leadership contexts addresses the persistent gap between the evidence base produced by EdUHK's research cluster and the daily leadership decisions of Hong Kong principals. His early-career publication record and his receipt of a competitive early-career award confirm that his contribution to the field is already substantive, and his mentoring relationship with the most senior figures in Asian school leadership research positions him well to carry that work forward. For researchers and practitioners interested in the next generation of school leadership knowledge from Hong Kong, his work is worth following.

41. Marla Berry

Marla Berry is associated with the Principals' Training Center, one of the most established organisations providing leadership development for international school principals and aspiring leaders in Asia. The PTC delivers intensive institutes in Bangkok and across the region, covering curriculum development, leadership, instructional supervision, coaching, and a range of school management topics directly relevant to the challenges of leading international schools in Asian contexts. Its Teacher and Teacher Leader Institutes offer two-day regional workshops in Bangkok and other Asian locations, and its school membership network provides ongoing professional learning for international schools across the region.

The professional development architecture that organisations like the PTC provide is essential infrastructure for the international school sector in Asia, where the principal pipeline depends on ongoing professional learning that national systems rarely provide for international school leaders. The PTC's emphasis on contextually grounded leadership preparation, including courses on leadership for international school contexts specifically, addresses the cultural and institutional complexity that distinguishes international school leadership from national system leadership. For international school leaders in Asia seeking professional qualifications and peer networks, the PTC represents one of the most accessible and regionally relevant options.

42. Jayson Richardson

Jayson Richardson is an academic researcher whose work at the intersection of technology, international education, and school leadership addresses how principals in international school contexts navigate digital transformation. His research on school leaders in Asia implementing technology-integrated approaches to learning provides one of the few systematic analyses of how international school principals in the region are actually making decisions about technology adoption, professional development, and the culture change that effective digital integration requires. His work on technology leadership in school settings provides a framework that sits between the overly optimistic technology adoption literature and the dismissively resistant responses that technology change often generates.

For international school leaders in Asia who are navigating simultaneous pressure from parents, boards, and governments to integrate AI and digital tools while also protecting the conditions for genuine human learning, his research provides evidence about what principled, evidence-informed technology leadership looks like in practice. His work on the preparation of educational leaders for technology integration addresses one of the most significant gaps in international school principal preparation programmes, which have traditionally focused on curriculum and culture but rarely on the specific competencies needed to lead digital transformation.

Building the Field: System Leaders and Emerging Voices

The final category brings together the people building the institutional infrastructure for school leadership development across Asia: the programme designers, the professional association leaders, the system-level architects, and the emerging researchers who are working at the frontier of what the next generation of Asian school leadership knowledge will look like.

43. Jianjing Tang

Jianjing Tang is a researcher at Guizhou Normal University in China whose work on principal succession and leadership development in Chinese school contexts has produced several significant contributions to the English-language school leadership literature. Her 2025 co-authored study in Educational Management Administration and Leadership on principal succession leadership, developing and validating a 14-item, four-factor model of succession leadership for Chinese school principals, addresses a question of growing practical urgency as China's school systems navigate the challenge of leadership continuity and transition. The four factors she and her colleagues identified, institutionalisation, communication, innovation, and maintaining stability, provide a vocabulary for discussing what succession leadership requires that is grounded in Chinese school reality.

Her collaboration with Yulian Zheng, Haiyan Qian, Jiafang Lu, and Xiu Chen Cravens connects the Chinese-language and international research traditions on principal development in a way that is genuinely additive rather than merely translational. Her work on the specific leadership competencies required during principal transitions, a period that research consistently shows is high-risk for school improvement continuity, provides both a measurement framework and a conceptual model that are applicable across Asian school systems where principal rotation is common.

44. Sedat Gumuz

Sedat Gumuz received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany in 2025, while based at The Education University of Hong Kong, where his work on educational leadership and management has been recognised as making an outstanding international contribution. The Bessel Award specifically recognises researchers outside Germany whose work is expected to have a lasting impact on their field, making it one of the most significant international recognitions available to a mid-career educational leadership researcher. His research at EdUHK has extended the centre's comparative work into cross-cultural contexts that bridge Turkish, European, and Asian school leadership traditions.

His 2025 and 2026 work from the EdUHK base brings a genuinely international comparative perspective to the Asia-Pacific school leadership conversation, providing conceptual resources for researchers who want to understand what is specific to Asian school leadership contexts and what reflects broader patterns in how principals lead in high-accountability, hierarchical educational systems globally. For researchers building cross-cultural comparative studies that include Asian school systems, his work provides both methodological guidance and empirical findings that extend beyond any single national context.

45. Christine Goh

Christine Goh is a Singapore-based educator and researcher whose work connects language education, teacher professional development, and school leadership in the Singapore context. Her research on how school leaders build the professional learning conditions that allow teachers to develop their pedagogical expertise addresses a practical challenge that every principal in Singapore and other high-performing Asian systems faces: how do you sustain teacher quality after initial training is complete? Her work on oracy and language learning in Singapore schools has produced pedagogical frameworks that are now embedded in the professional development landscape for teachers and school leaders across the country.

Her contribution to the understanding of what instructional leadership for language learning requires in multilingual school contexts is particularly relevant across Asia, where most school systems operate in two or more languages and where the language dimension of school culture is rarely addressed in leadership research. For school leaders in Singapore and across Southeast Asia's multilingual school systems, her research provides frameworks for thinking about how linguistic diversity in the school community shapes what effective leadership of teaching and learning requires.

46. Peng Liu

Peng Liu is a researcher whose co-edited volume Educational Leadership and Asian Culture: Culturally Sensitive Leadership Practice, published by Routledge in 2024 with Lei Mee Thien, provides the most comprehensive recent examination of how educational leadership is linked to national culture across different Asian countries. The volume was reviewed in the Journal of Intercultural Studies in 2025 as a much-needed intervention in a field that has been dominated by Anglo-American frameworks. His work on how leadership measurement tools and frameworks developed in Western contexts require systematic cultural adaptation when applied across Asian school systems is a foundational contribution to research methodology in the field.

His 2025 co-editorship of Turnaround Leadership in Southeast Asian Countries with Lei Mee Thien extends this cultural sensitivity framework to the specific challenge of improving low-performing schools in Southeast Asian contexts, addressing what school leadership for improvement means in systems that are not already high-performing. For researchers and policymakers who recognise that most school improvement research is conducted in wealthy systems and want to understand what leadership for improvement requires in more constrained contexts, his co-edited volumes provide an essential starting point.

47. Helen Haste

Helen Haste is a psychologist and educator whose work on citizenship education, learning competencies, and the relationship between technology and learning has been influential across the Asia-Pacific region, including through her involvement with Asia Society's Asia Pacific regional education programmes. Her research on the competencies needed by young people in the 21st century, and what school leaders must do to create the conditions for those competencies to develop, connects the school leadership conversation to the broader question of what schooling is fundamentally for. Her work on narrative and agency in education, and on how young people develop civic identity through school experiences, provides a philosophical grounding for school leaders who want to move beyond metrics.

Her engagement with Asian education contexts through Harvard's programmes and through Asia Society's education initiatives brings a perspective that takes seriously both the specific cultural contexts of Asian schooling and the universal questions about learning, agency, and civic development that cut across all school systems. For school leaders in Asia who are trying to articulate why their school is more than a place that produces examination results, her work provides conceptual resources that sit alongside the more empirical effectiveness frameworks dominant in the school leadership literature.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

A number of additional researchers and practitioners were considered for this directory and deserve acknowledgement here. Qing Gu at UCL has done foundational work on teacher resilience and professional identity across Asian school contexts. Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves, whose names appear on many education lists globally, have both worked extensively in Asian system reform, though this list deliberately moved past the same handful of names that appear on every list to surface the voices closer to the Asian school leadership conversation specifically. Woo Jung Son's colleague researchers at the Korean Institute of Learning Community also deserve broader recognition. The depth of school leadership research at EdUHK that this directory documents means several more researchers at that institution could justifiably appear here.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Engaging With School Leadership Research From Asia

The most frequent error made by school leaders outside Asia who encounter research from this region is to read it as evidence that Asian methods should be imported wholesale. The Singapore school leadership literature is particularly vulnerable to this misreading. Pak Tee Ng's work on the power of paradoxes in Singapore's system is partly a warning against exactly this: Singapore's results emerge from a specific combination of cultural, institutional, policy, and professional conditions that cannot be disaggregated and transplanted. Philip Hallinger and Allan Walker have both written explicitly about the danger of lifting practices from one cultural context and applying them in another without understanding what makes them work in the context of origin.

A second common mistake is to assume that the English-language research on Asian school leadership represents the full scope of what Asian researchers know. The majority of educational leadership research published in China, Japan, South Korea, and many Southeast Asian countries is published in national languages and has not been translated or synthesised for international audiences. The English-language researchers in this directory are often working at the boundary of two knowledge traditions, translating and synthesising in both directions. The Chinese-language literature on school leadership is particularly extensive and particularly underrepresented in international discussions.

A third mistake is to treat "Asia" as a coherent region with a shared school leadership context. The distance between the Singapore school system, where every principal completes a nationally standardised leadership preparation programme before appointment, and a rural Indonesian school where the principal may have received no specific leadership preparation at all, is enormous. Research findings from one context do not transfer automatically to the other. Lei Mee Thien and Peng Liu's edited volumes are in part correctives to this flattening, arguing that culturally sensitive research must take seriously the specific national and institutional contexts that shape what leadership means and what it can accomplish.

How to Build Your School Leadership Reading Practice From This Directory

The most valuable first step is to identify which research tradition is most directly relevant to your school's specific context. If you lead a school in Hong Kong, Singapore, or mainland China, the EdUHK cluster and the NIE researchers are your closest intellectual neighbours. If you lead an international school anywhere in East Asia, the EARCOS community, the work of Darren Bryant and Ewan Wright on international school middle leadership, and the research on AI integration are most immediately applicable. If you lead a school in Southeast Asia, the work of Lei Mee Thien, Donnie Adams, and the turnaround leadership literature provides the most contextually appropriate starting points.

Following the LinkedIn profiles of the researchers in this directory who are active on that platform is the most efficient way to stay current without committing to reading full academic papers. Philip Hallinger, Darren Bryant, Donnie Adams, Pak Tee Ng, and Viviane Robinson maintain substantive LinkedIn presences in 2025 and 2026 where they share research summaries, commentary on new findings, and engagement with practitioners. Their LinkedIn content often provides more immediately actionable insights than their journal articles, where the methodological detail can obscure the practical implications.

For those with the capacity to engage with longer-form research, the Journal of Educational Administration, Educational Management Administration and Leadership, School Leadership and Management, and the Asia Pacific Journal of Education are the primary vehicles for the academic research in this field. The EdUHK repository at repository.eduhk.hk makes many of the centre's publications available in open access, reducing the paywall barrier that limits access to much of the academic literature.

For schools that want to move from reading about school leadership in Asia to building the team health, communication, and accountability foundations that make implementing research ideas possible, Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold) and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with school leadership teams globally. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect. Many schools find that flying Jonno in costs less than engaging high-profile local providers. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your school's specific needs.

For more on independent school leadership globally, check out my blog post '50 Essential Thought Leaders in Independent Schooling' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-independent-schooling.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the most cited school leadership researchers working in Asia right now?

Philip Hallinger at Mahidol University in Thailand is the most globally cited researcher specifically working in Asia on school leadership, with his PIMRS instrument validated in 13 countries and his systematic reviews drawing on hundreds of Asian studies. Allan Walker at EdUHK has published over 300 articles and books on Asian school leadership and is cited by virtually every subsequent researcher in the field. Junjun Chen at EdUHK was ranked by Stanford University among the top 2 percent of the world's most cited scientists across three consecutive years. Among Singapore-based researchers, Pak Tee Ng and Salleh Hairon are the most widely read voices internationally.

What is the most significant difference between school leadership in Asia and school leadership in Western contexts?

The most significant structural difference is the role of hierarchical authority in how schools are led. Most Asian school systems operate with a clearer principal hierarchy than most Western systems, with principals holding more formal authority over teachers but also more accountability to government. This means that leadership models built on flat organisational assumptions, including most versions of distributed leadership, require significant adaptation before they are applicable. Cultural factors including power distance, collectivist identity, and face-consciousness shape how principals communicate, delegate, give feedback, and navigate conflict in ways that Western models rarely account for.

How can school leaders outside Asia apply research from this region to their own context?

The most useful application is comparative rather than adoptive. Research from Singapore, Japan, and Hong Kong can sharpen your thinking about what is possible in school leadership when system conditions are aligned around teacher quality, principal preparation, and professional learning, even if those conditions cannot be replicated in your context. Philip Hallinger's work on instructional leadership provides frameworks that have been validated across cultures and are genuinely applicable across contexts, and Viviane Robinson's student-centred leadership dimensions have been tested in Singapore and multiple other Asian systems as well as Western ones. Use Asian research to interrogate your assumptions rather than to find a model to copy.

What are the most important school leadership developments happening in Asia in 2026?

Three developments stand out in 2026. First, the AI integration question is reshaping how principals in international schools and high-capacity national schools across East Asia are thinking about their instructional leadership responsibilities, with Sabbi Quidwai's EARCOS keynote framing that shift as a partnership model rather than a tool adoption model. Second, the EdUHK research cluster is producing a second generation of validated instruments for studying principal well-being, succession leadership, and system leadership in Chinese contexts, giving researchers and developers new tools for building principal support systems. Third, Southeast Asia is building a more autonomous school leadership research tradition through edited volumes like those by Lei Mee Thien and Donnie Adams, reducing dependence on frameworks imported wholesale from higher-income system contexts.

Final Thoughts

School leadership in Asia is a conversation that the rest of the world has been too slow to join. The researchers and practitioners in this directory have built an evidence base that is, in many respects, more contextually grounded, more methodologically sophisticated, and more practically relevant to the challenges facing Asian schools than the imported Western frameworks that often substitute for it in policy discussions.

The 47 voices in this directory represent a fraction of the active researchers and practitioners working on school leadership across a region that spans half the world's schools. Following their work is not a matter of professional courtesy to Asian researchers; it is a matter of intellectual honesty for anyone who claims to be working from the evidence on what school leadership is and how it works.

For school principals, system leaders, policymakers, and professional developers who want to build the team health, communication, and accountability cultures that allow research ideas to take root in actual schools, Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold), and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, listeners in 150+ countries), works with schools globally. Bring Jonno White in to facilitate your next leadership team offsite or keynote. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

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Hallinger, P., Liu, S., & Niu, X. (2025). Cultural context, principal instructional leadership, and teacher efficacy: A meta-analytic review, 1989-2024. Educational Management Administration and Leadership.

Liu, S., Qian, H., & Ding, C. (2025). The state of research on educational leadership in Mainland China: A systematic review of international literature. Educational Management Administration and Leadership.

Qian, H., Zheng, Y., Song, J., & Chen, S. (2024). Exploring the network leadership practices of Master Principal Studio hosts in China. Educational Management Administration and Leadership.

Zheng, Y., Tang, J., Qian, H., Lu, J., & Cravens, X.C. (2025). Principal succession in China: A scale development and validation study. Educational Management Administration and Leadership.

ISC Research. (2026). International school data 2026.

UNESCO GEM Report. (2025). East Asia regional edition: Lead for technology. UNESCO.

Liu, P., & Thien, L.M. (Eds.). (2024). Educational Leadership and Asian Culture: Culturally Sensitive Leadership Practice. Routledge.

Thien, L.M., & Liu, P. (Eds.). (2025). Turnaround Leadership in Southeast Asian Countries. Springer.

McLaughlin, J. (2026). Leadership's role in cultivating school cultures focused on social and emotional learning in international education across Asia. International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science.

Next Read

School leadership in Asia does not exist in isolation from the global conversations about what secondary and primary school leadership requires at every level. For a broader view of the thought leaders shaping secondary school leadership globally, including voices from Asia who appear in both this directory and the global secondary education landscape, the companion directory provides the wider context.

For more on secondary school leadership globally, check out my blog post '50 Essential Thought Leaders in Secondary Education (2026)' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-secondary-education. For more on independent school leadership globally, check out my blog post '50 Essential Thought Leaders in Independent Schooling' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-independent-schooling.