The Principal and School Improvement / Educational Leadership Theory (PDF)

Dr Amanda Heffernan is a lecturer in Leadership at the Faculty of Education at Monash University. She is a former school principal and previously worked as a principal coach and mentor in Australian public schools. Her research interests include the changing nature of principals' work, and the experiences of principals working with vulnerable populations of students and communities.
In 2018, Amanda was named the International Journal of Leadership in Education's Emerging Scholar, and her doctoral thesis was awarded an Honourable Mention by the American Educational Research Association's Division A (Administration, Organization, & Leadership). Amanda was named a 'New Voice Scholar' in the area of Educational Leadership Research by the Australian Council of Educational Leaders in 2016, and was one of the 2015 recipients of the Australian Association for Research in Education's Postgraduate Student Researcher Award for her paper exploring the way principals' practices have changed since the 2008 introduction of NAPLAN testing. This paper was later nominated as a finalist for Springer's Best Paper award for the Australian Educational Researcher journal.
Amanda works with aspiring principals, supervises doctoral students in the areas of leadership and policy, is an active member of the Australian Association for Research in Education, and serves on editorial boards for distinguished education and leadership journals.