In recent years, educational governances urge school leaders and management personnel in the educational sector to consider a large range of duties and tasks in the sphere of evidence-oriented quality development.  These requirements call for a high degree of professional reflective and proflective work in schools in order to enable high-quality, meaningful organisational development planning (Wiesner et al., 2016). High quality organizational development requires first and foremost the following two aspects of schools: Firstly, following Fend (1988), schools have to consider themselves as pedagogical stakeholders. Secondly, based on such an active self-concept, schools should take notice of and use empirical data and information for opening up their individual scopes of action and decision-making. The latter obviously includes a transformation of data to application knowledge. Different actors, as e.g. teachers, school leaders or school inspectors, on different levels of the school system are or should be working with empirical feedback coming from school assessment studies. Most evidence about activities supporting school quality comes from individual “best practice schools” (Schratz, Westfall-Greiter, & Schwarz, 2014). In contrast, correlations between the respective factors based on larger samples are often missing.

This symposium presents innovate approaches clarifying some of these connections. The different approaches come from different countries (Austria, Italy, Vietnam) and are thus based on different national datasets. However, core similarities between all studies may be deduced. Paper #1 underlines the importance of data based feedback and working with data based feedback. Paper #2 investigates Austrian school leaders’ attitudes towards working in a value-orientated way with empirical feedback on schools, while carving out factors stimulating and debilitating the reflection and proflection of data. Paper #3 widens the perspective in terms of the usage of empirical school feedback. Based on Italian data it is shown that this feedback also influences organizational management processes and the organizational school culture. Finally, with respect to the need of further training of school leaders, paper #4 introduces a value-oriented self-assessment instrument for framing school leadership competencies and personal mastery. This tool helps school leaders to reflect/proflect and refine their strengths, a personal development which is assumed to foster school development in general.  

Wiesner, C., Schreiner, C., Breit, S., Kemethofer, D., George, A. C. & Angerer, S. (2016). Die Bedeutsamkeit der professionellen Reflexion und Rückmeldekultur für eine evidenzorientierte Schulentwicklung durch Bildungsstandardüberprüfungen. Journal für Schulentwicklung, 20 (4), 18-26. Fend, H. (1988). Schulqualität. Die Wiederentdeckung der Schule als pädagogische Gestaltungsebene. Neue Sammlung 28 (1988) 4, S. 537-547 Schratz M., Westfall-Greiter, T., & Schwarz, J. (2014)