Ina Auliya, Sujarwanto, Erny Roesminingsih
Dialogic leadership has increasingly emerged as a strategic approach to improving educational quality in complex and competitive school environments, particularly in private Islamic schools that face institutional, resource, and governance challenges. However, limited studies have examined how dialogic leadership contributes to educational quality enhancement through collaborative and decentralized practices within the madrasa context. This study aims to explore the dynamics of dialogic leadership in enhancing educational quality at Madrasah Aliyah Darul Ulum Waru, an Indonesian private Islamic school, through four interconnected dimensions: learning quality, graduate quality, human resource quality, and educational infrastructure. Employing a descriptive qualitative case study design, the research involved the madrasa principal, vice principals, teachers, students, and educational staff selected purposively based on their direct experiences with institutional leadership practices. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis and analyzed using the interactive model of Miles, Huberman, and Saldana, including data condensation, display, and conclusion drawing. The findings reveal that dialogic leadership is implemented through continuous dialogue, collaborative governance, and participatory decision-making that integrate transformational and participatory leadership approaches. Educational quality improvement was found to occur systemically through the interrelationship among learning quality, graduate quality, human resource quality, and educational infrastructure. The study also identifies practical challenges associated with dialogic leadership, particularly tensions between participatory governance and institutional responsiveness within competitive educational environments. These findings contribute theoretically to the growing discourse on dialogic leadership in faith-based educational institutions and practically offer insights into sustainable leadership strategies for improving educational quality in private Islamic schools. Copyright (c) 2026 The Authors This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Faculty of Education, Universitas Negeri Surabaya, Indonesia
