This symposium discusses cases of distributed leadership at several levels in schools in the light of changing political discourses and changing relations between the state and its institutions. We focus on relations, leadership influences and communication in the whole school and in classrooms and thus also discuss relations, influences and instruction in classrooms. We took a closer look at three Danish schools because we wanted to investigate how successful school principals functioned in order to develop successful schools. Modernization of the public sectors has come to a new and more radical phase where the logics behind political and administrative decision making is penetrating the public institutions much more than we were used to. That seems to give new opportunities and limitations for democracy in schools and for Democratic Bildung and for the room for manoeuvre, that is left to agents in school. Lejf Moos Forms of influences in schools In this paper I shall analyses and discuss diverse forms of influences that are applied on and in schools: At one level we see the emergence of national and local discourses of eg. schooling, learning and leading. Those are clusters of discourses that shape how we can think and talk about important issues in education and management. Some of those discourses are produced in the international and the national political fields and influence education and the agents around and inside schools. At this stage we see that the traditional, didactical way of talking about schools is being challenged by a new curriculum discourse that focuses on ‘effective schools’, ‘back to basis’ etc. At another level we see traditional social technologies being reshaped and new being formed and brought into schools and public sector management. Social technologies are technologies with a purpose (like a conversation being transformed into a staff interview). Contemporary social technologies in schools are eg. Contracts, national goals and tests and students’ plans. John Krejsler Governance and Self-Governance in School New forms of leadership enter Danish schools. Often they manifest themselves by means of on-going and intensive negotiations between the principal’s pastoral leadership and staff self-governance within the framework of a more or less explicit organisational concept. Often inspiration comes from concepts like the Learning Organisation, distributed leadership and so forth. To strike the right balance between the principal’s leadership and staff self-governance in order to optimise fully the academic, social and personal competences of all staff, an extensive network of communication structures is needed. Schools are increasingly split up into self-governing sections, which is counter-balanced by an array of meeting venues, where the school’s vision, objectives and values are propagated, debated and internalised. Klaus Kasper Kofod Sensemaking in Distributed Leadership With the modernisation of the public sector there decision powers has been decentralised from the municipalities to the school principal-ship. The school principal is expected to be a strong and decisive principal. At the same time the law of the Danish Folksskole says that the planning of the instruction must be diversified so that it corresponds to the individual student’s need and background. It is not possible to steer this individualisation and differentiation and at the same time run a centralised school. Therefore we are also witnessing an internal decentralisation in the schools to selfgovernig teams: the organisational couplings has in many respects been loosened between the principalship and the teams of teachers. In order to keep the school together the organisational couplings are in other aeras tightened.

Case stories, interviews and observations

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