This paper deals with the relevance of anecdotes as research data for analysing and discussing experiences which occurred to principals in organisational change processes in schools. Switzerland, Germany and Austria have different policies in fostering school improvement, particularly concerning the roles and responsibilities principals have. As a consequence, experiences have high potential for understanding change processes from a leadership perspective. This paper presents the findings from a joint project on recalled experiences of principals, Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Focusing on the mesosystem of the school as organisation, we present selected anecdotes gained from semi-structured conversations with 24 principals in Austria and 5 conversations with principals of schools which had won the German School Award in the past few years and one conversation with a principal of a school which won the Swiss School Award. The main research question focuses on the experiences of the principals in organisational transition processes in their schools. Principals as leaders of their schools are confronted with different challenges during change: they are faced with expected and unexpected legal, institutional and cultural interventions coming from the macro- and microsystems. They act as initiators, implementers, enablers, promotors, preventers and so on of these processes on the mesosystem of the school. Understanding learning from a phenomenological perspective means that these experiences are learning experiences (Meyer-Drawe 2008, 2010) occurring as happenstance to the principals and are therefore important for understanding processes of transition in the school as organisation. On the one hand experiences happening to the principal as a person can be seen as an individual process of learning and on the other hand the authors argue in this paper that an experience can also happen to the organisation itself and can therefore foster an organisational learning process helping to understand the school as a learning organisation (Senge 1994).

Meyer-Drawe, K. (2008). Diskurse des Lernens. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Meyer-Drawe, K. (2010). Zur Erfahrung des Lernens. Eine phänomenologische Skizze. Santalka Filosofija, 18(3), 6–16. Senge, P. (1994). The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York, NY: Currency Doubleday.