Linda Bendikson

Dr. Linda Bendikson has been involved in educational leadership in New Zealand her whole career, as a principal of a two-teacher school serving a rural Māori community, as an adviser to rural schools, as a deputy principal and then as a principal of a provincial city school in the 1990s. She went on to become a regional manager in the Ministry of Education of New Zealand for ten years whilst completing a PhD on “The Effects of Principal Instructional Leadership on Secondary School Performance” under the supervision of Professors Viviane Robinson and John Hattie at the University of Auckland. She then worked for the University of Auckland, spending eight years leading the Centre for Educational Leadership before heading into private consultancy work in 2019. Her schooling improvement and leadership development programs (Leading Teams and Leading Improvement) are delivered online to New Zealand and Australian schools. Her programs support teams of leaders to do the real work of improvement. She guides leadership teams through the process of implementing improvement cycles and effectively leading change. She has been actively involved in researching school improvement and leadership since completing her PhD, frequently publishing with Dr Frauke Meyer. Linda is a pragmatist who draws on her practical experience and her academic interests in goal theory and improvement science to support school leaders to carry out their roles more strategically and effectively. As someone who never had the benefit of leadership training until very late in her career, her mission is to improve learners’ outcomes by increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of leaders in schools and schooling systems.