This paper asks about attitudes of school leaders towards working with feedback from empirical school assessment studies. According to empirical research (Steffens, Heinrich & Dobbelstein, 2016), the optimal way for schools to work with empirical data is a systematic and continuous process incorporating three phases (Helmke, 2004): First, receiving and examining the data (phase of reception). Second, understanding aspects and connections in the data and link them to the school’s situation (phase of reflection) and third, developing scopes of action to increase school quality (phase of action). Recently researchers (Scharmer, 2009; Schreiner & Wiesner, 2016) broadened that continuous process to a cyclic understanding in which implemented actions affect the school’s work and thus also the next empirical feedback data and the (new) reflection thereof – a way of proflection. However, there is a consensus in literature about the correlation of a school’s willingness for data application as basis of quality development and the school’s attendance of innovation (i.e. Schildkamp & Visscher, 2010). For obtaining insides of school quality development, we consider school leaders attitudes’ towards empirical feedback in general and towards the three specific phases of working with empirical data. This is to overcome a prevailing lack in knowledge (Brauckmann, 2017, p. 21) about the way school leaders work with empirical based information (phases of reception and reflection) and incorporate them into practically relevant modes of school regulation (phase of action). In addition, our data yields information about unexplored dimensions and attitudes of school leaders according to their way of reflecting empirical data, as well as stimulating and debilitating factors of that reflection (i.e. Hattie & Timperley, 2007). The data and information are used to build theoretically grounded models.

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