“Didaktik” and Curriculum can be viewed as historically evolved forms of reflection within distinct social systems (Hopmann, 2015) and so are based on different understandings and images of schooling. Closely related to the discourse on “Didaktik and Curriculum” (Hopmann, Klafki, Krapp & Riquarts, 1995; Gundem & Hopmann, 1998) is the idea of school leadership as gap management. In the curriculum tradition school leaders were directly addressed as curriculum makers. Up to the seventies and eighties, the idea that curriculum was publicly funded and locally decided was dominant in most of the Anglo-Saxon world (this becomes obvious, for example, in Tyler’s Principles, 1949). Since the late seventies, however, this tradition has been challenged not least as a consequence of reforms like “A Nation at Risk” or the implementation of new core curricula (Common Core Standards). This mixing of transformations turns local leadership away from curriculum leadership in the traditional comprehensive sense. In state-based systems, like in German-speaking countries, however the locally applied curriculum is a matter for the individual teachers and not the school. The bridging element here is Didaktik as a tool for teachers to define their work within the national framework. Leadership in this context had nothing to do with Didaktik on behalf of the teachers, but became administrative. This type of “gap management” led to the situation that leadership issues never played a significant role in the most prominent theories of Didaktik. International developments like PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS, but also the related recommendations of supranational policy organisations like the OECD, have led to pressure concerning assessment. In Austria for example, this is the basis of argumentation for reforms like the implementation of national testing, standardised school graduation examinations or competence-based instruction. So what we observe is, that this new way of thinking about schooling also affects school leadership since reforms and changes in the context of implementing an accountability system often discuss school leadership as a key to school effectiveness, but also can raise new challenges, which were actually not part of the respective traditional activity set. This also leads to the empirical question, what happens to gap management in this context? With the example of Austrian school leaders we investigate how school leaders in a state-based system deal with these new challenges. The paper will address conceptual issues as well as empirical findings illustrating this question based on a government-funded research project in Lower Austria.

Gundem, B. & Hopmann, S. (1998). (Eds.). Didaktik and/or Curriculum. An International Dialogue. Second Printing. New York: Peter Lang. Hopmann, S. (2015). “Didaktik meets Curriculum” revisited: historical encounters, systematic experiences, empirical limits. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, No.1, pp. 14-21.