Communication is often mentioned as an important aspect of leaders work in leadership literature (Day & Leithwood, 2007; Hoy & Miskel, 2007) . Teachers as well as leaders verifies that the communications process affect the organizational outcomes. At the same time educational administration literature often treats communication superficially (Kowalski, Petersen, & Fusarelli, 2007). One reason can be that communication is intertwined in other processes. Recent research shows that principals tend to overrate their ability to communicate about teaching and learning (Ärlestig, 2008). In daily practice many meetings and conversations become matters of routine. Communication can be used as a tool to strengthen other activities and highlight important aspects as well as an analyze instrument to understand the organization and its members. An implicit or missing treatment of communication processes can contribute to that communication preserve or contradict the leaders intended aims. This is especially important in the work with school improvement and the work towards good student outcomes. This evokes the question how principals learn to communicate. Do they only gain knowledge about communication by being exposed to communication in their daily practice or is communication explicitly treated in principal training programs? In the national Swedish principal program that started 2002 communication is one of the three core words, the other two are democracy and learning. This implies that communication is considered as an important aspect of principals’ work and that communication issues is explicitly treated in the program. My interest is therefore to study what methods and content related to principals’ communication that are thought in the eight national principal programs currently running in Sweden.

By interviewing the director or experienced trainers in the 8 programs, my intention is to describe how and what aspects of communication is prevalent in the Swedish principal programs. By giving examples of intended outcomes and used theories and exercises, principals education to become more effective in their communication will be analyzed.

Preliminary results show a variation between the different programs in how communication is treated. Theories and different exercises gave different focus on communicating vision, handling conflicts and deliberative communication between the programs. Written communication is a topic that has become more and more important in all the programs. Overall many communication elements in the program were treated implicitly. One conclusion is that the principal training programs strengthen the principal’s practice and their communication ability without that the principal always become aware of how communication as a single process contributes to their practice.