Early Career Teachers’ Experiences and Perceptions of Leadership Development

Author(s):

Joan Smith(presenting / submitting)David Pedder

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

01. Continuing Professional Development: Learning for Individuals, Leaders, and Organisations

Format:

Paper

Session Information

01 SES 08 C, Developing school leaders and teacher leaders

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-10

09:00-10:30

Room:

428.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Joan Smith

Contribution

This paper reports on a small-scale, qualitative investigation into early career teachers’ (ECTs’) experiences and perceptions of leadership development in the context of UK secondary schools. The study sought in-depth, contextualized accounts of the teachers’ experiences of leadership practice and development, in order to gain insights into how these experiences influenced their motivation, aspirations, dispositions and self-perceptions as actual and potential leaders. Consideration was given to the factors that influence ECTs’ leadership aspirations, including their perceptions of school leadership, their experiences of developmental opportunities, and their developing identities as teachers and leaders. The study has relevance Europe-wide, as the issue of recruitment to the most senior posts, especially headship, is a concern in many countries (Commission Staff Working Document, 2012). An appreciation of the perspectives of ECTs adds to our understandings of how we can better prepare the next generation of school leaders Europe-wide.

We sought to investigate, from the perspectives of ECTs:

the characteristics, key features and value for their leadership development of leadership practices initiated by the ECTs themselves, leadership practices of others, and leadership structures, processes, expectations and systems of support in schools.
whether and how the cultures and established practices of leadership and leadership development in schools influence the scope and opportunity for ECTs to enact leadership and develop leadership skills and dispositions.

The work was guided by the following research questions:

How do ECTs consider different leadership practices they enact contribute to their development as leaders?
How do ECTs construe leadership in relation to their own professional practice and identity?
From ECTs’ perspectives, how do different leadership practices enacted by others contribute to their development as leaders?
What is the impact of these perceptions on their leadership aspirations and self-perceptions as leaders?
What aspects of school life do ECTs consider important for their development as leaders?
What aspects of other experiences beyond or before school teaching do ECTs consider important in framing and developing their understanding of leadership and for their development as leaders in school?

We adopt a critical perspective in this study, drawing particularly on the work of Ball (2003) to make sense of ECTs’ accounts of the tensions, affordances and complexity of leadership development within a performative culture.

Method

During the first phase of the research, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 6 ECTs. From the transcripts individual vignettes were developed. The vignettes were sent out to participants ahead of the phase two interviews, in order that we might capture their change stories in the second round of interviews. In the second phase, participants were invited to take part in ‘walk-and-talk’ interviews. Participants were asked to identify a small number of areas around their places of work which had some meaning for them in terms of leadership, their own or that of others. They were then asked to lead researchers on a tour around the key places, providing a commentary on why the locations had meaning for them. The tour stops provided the basis for stimulated narratives to be elicited and a space for reflection as participants considered their own contextualized experiences of leadership and leadership development. Vignettes of participants were then further developed, and emergent themes within individual narratives and across the sample or sections of the sample were identified. Insights were gained into ECTs’ perspectives on aspects of school life they deemed important in terms of their development as leaders, and into the ways the ECTs construed leadership in relation to their own professional practice and identity. In the third phase ECTs were invited to take part in a workshop focusing on how schools can effectively support the development of ECTs as leaders, and on how ECTs can exert their agency and be strategic in taking responsibility for their own development as leaders. The workshop was followed up by individual interviews, and again, participants were asked to comment on the vignettes drawn from earlier interviews and to share their change stories. Findings from the first three phases of the research informed the fourth phase of the field work, in which senior leaders in schools were interviewed, in order to ascertain their understanding of and approach to leadership development of ECTs.

Expected Outcomes

The study sought in-depth understandings of individual ECTs’ contextualized experiences. However, there were some commonalities across the sample. Four factors were highlighted by all of the participants as highly important in enabling them to develop as leaders: -positive, proactive support from middle and senior leaders; -opportunities to take on meaningful areas of responsibility; -a sense of being trusted and listened to; -the scope to develop and realize new ideas and initiatives. The details varied according to individual and context. It became apparent though that the ECTs’ leadership dispositions and aspirations were formed within and in response to the perceived leadership cultures of their schools. Some participants gave sobering accounts of their negative experiences of working within strongly performative (Ball, 2003), high-accountability, data-driven cultures. Some constructed very positive pictures of their schools as characterized by caring, supportive, enabling cultures in which ECTs enjoyed formal and informal opportunities to take on leadership responsibilities. Others constructed their schools as liberal, easygoing environments in which leadership development for ECTS was more serendipitous than strategic. In these schools, accidental spaces might occur within which ECTS could enact their leadership. Here development as a leader depended to an extent on individual agency, but there were also indications that support was available from a range of sources. Participants appeared to respond to contextualized cultures of leadership and leadership development by positioning themselves in relation to the perceived school leadership culture at a range of points along what might be conceptualised as a continuum from resistance to compliance. These insights shed some light on some of the reasons why teachers might or might not aspire to senior leadership positions. Given the relative shortage of aspirants to headship in particular in the UK and Europe (Commission Staff Working Document, 2012), this is a current and future concern.

References

Ball, S. (2003) The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity Journal of Education Policy 18 (2): 215-228 Commission Staff Working Document (2012) Supporting the Teaching Professions for Better Learning Outcomes. Available at: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52012SC0374 (accessed 20 January 2015)

Author Information

Joan Smith (presenting / submitting)

University of Leicester

Education

Leicester

David Pedder

University of Leicester, United Kingdom

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