In most countries, the tasks and structures of schools and of the education system are changing. These change processes strongly influence the leadership of schools. Being a school leader, leading and exercising leadership means fulfilling diverse and complex tasks that are connected to professional and personal demands. In this context, it is the interplay between job characteristics and a person’s skills and attitudes and ability to learn that seems to matter.

As is known from research on person-job-fit (Caldwell & O’Reilly, 1990), training effects will not be successful if an individual’s motives, values and interests do not correspond with the requirements of the position he or she is going to hold. Kelly and Sanders (2010) confirm that the transition to school leadership is a process from anticipatory and organisational socialisation to the establishment of a job-related identity that builds upon previous personal and job experiences to represent a point of significant development in occupational identity. Robertson (2009) underlines how the leaders’ personal experiences of reciprocal learning relationships will influence their leadership practice and thus ultimately the school culture. 

One approach for developing personal competences for school leaders has its starting point in discussions of general basic competences, for example ‘the big five’: vision orientation (formulate, communicate and disseminate a vision), context awareness (take the school community and the institutional context into account), deployment of strategies that match new forms of leadership (transformational, inspiring, ethical and inquiry-based leadership), organisation awareness (structure/culture; instructional organisation/pedagogical climate; personnel; facilities) and higher order thinking (insight into the coherence between all factors) (Krüger, 2009). Another approach arises with the leader’s personal knowledge, experiences and feelings, which through discussions can be related to and explored within their own school context.

Coaching school leaders has become one way of supporting school leaders to understand and handle their particular jobs, not least the development and appropriate deployment of the big five competences. Indeed, coaching might be seen as a bridge between general theory-driven basic competences and the personal and situated practice in which the realities of leading and leadership are enacted. Inspired by the idea of professional learning communities (Stoll et al., 2006), communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) and coaching partnerships (Robertson, 2008), we investigate how a methodology of group coaching can contribute to professional development, more precisely the construction of leadership identity, which frames the following research question: How can group coaching of school leaders contribute to the construction of leadership identity?

In the paper we give a short overview of the concept of coaching, how the concept has been used in research on school leadership, the similarities and differences between individual and group coaching and Law and Passmore’s theoretical framework of coaching as one way of understanding the concept of group coaching. Next, we explain the group coaching methodology developed in the National Principal Programme at the University of Oslo and the research methods of the current study. Further on, we present and discuss the findings of the participants’ experiences with how the coaching has influenced their learning and construction of their leadership identity. Finally, we conclude with some implications of the study.

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