Educational leadership is a subject of careful analyses and reflection in European Union. Effective school leadership is one of the most important factors influencing conditions of teaching and learning. European Council stresses that educational leadership demands high competencies and strong involvement. Educational leaders need to focus on improvement of teaching and learning, on securing equality, on cooperation and empowering co-workers.

It is believed that educational leadership development today should be designed in the way allowing to response to diverse and uncertain world. In the same time numerous voices stress the importance of professional standards addressing adequate values, behaviors, knowledge and skills. That leads to a controversy tied to the process of the decision-making and also source of power deciding about specific set of those needed values and skills.

Educational leaders in Europe should become expert practitioners whose professional practice is rooted in strong values and who should take responsibility for their personal professional development. This is why I will try, in this paper, to describe the understanding of the educational leadership by Polish school principals using competencies suitable for them.

Practitioners may define their vocation through discussing competencies needed during daily activities. I claim that understanding of the educational leadership might be visible in competencies selected as important for principals’ work and decides about this what leadership “is” and how leadership “looks like”.

Accepting social constructivism means agreeing for the assumption about social nature of the reality, which is constructed through human interaction, communication and cooperation. Reality does not exist as long as people do not agree that it exists. We need to name phenomena or issues in order to allow its existence. That kind of thinking about the process of constructing the world assigns mighty power to human actors.

Educational leadership became a central issue in schools, educational systems and whole societies development and improvement. Connection of those two issues: constructivist approach to reality and importance of the educational leadership leads inevitably to the question about nature of the awareness and types of the assumption present in the discourse focused on educational leadership. The main problem of the presented research is connected to the question about the picture of the leadership carried by school principals.

I tried to find out what kind of the competencies are the most popular among school principals and how are they understood. Three research questions, which were stated, concerned opinions of principals about impact of the leadership competencies on school operation (how important is this competency for school operation?), opinions about ability to use those competencies (strengths and weaknesses: how well I developed this competency), and understanding of the competencies (what does it mean to have that competency?). Additionally one of the research questions focused on values tied to educational leadership.

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