This paper is focusing on the relationship between school leadership practices and collective learning among staff, that is the collective level of teachers and school.

Educational leadership research has for many years focused on the role of school managers in improvement of teaching and learning. Not all types of school leadership however seem productive (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012). Robinson (2006, 2011) argues that theories of educational leadership should be grounded in best evidence about effective teaching on student level. This study is as mentioned on the school and teacher level, not on student outcome.

A practice perspective is important in Robinsons meta-study of classroom, school and policy conditions that enable and inhibit effective teaching (2006). In the generic literature on leadership a practice perspective is promoted by Mintzberg (2009) and Tengblad (2012, s.338).

In a study of management groups in different Norwegian Upper Secondary Vocational Schools we searched for leadership practices with collective consequences. A “practice” was broadly defined as an organisational answer or responsible reflection from formal leaders or managers to a “challenge” or a request from outside one’s own school. They were labelled “themes”. Many themes were identified, and in this paper 9 are presented. The themes are 1) recruiting teachers to an educational action programme 2) relationship to the broader school system 3) relationship to higher education, 4) beliefs in further education for teachers, 5) perceptions of knowledge transfer, 6) definitions of competence development, 7) perceptions of learning arenas, 8) perceived learning units and 9) perspectives on collective leadership. 

Three different leadership categories were identified across themes, and their relationship to collective learning activities were analysed. The three categories were «Daily Operations», «Plan and System» and «Systemic Leadership» (Sekkingstad and Glosvik, 2022).  Daily Operations» dominated as leadership practice, but all three were found to exist parallel in all five schools. The analysis so far does not point at obvious driving forces behind one or the other.  One hypothesis could be school size. Individual experience among managers, another.    

The categories, themes, and theoretical discussion in this paper ought to be of interest to a wider circle of educational researchers, as the role of school leadership for many years has been on the international and European agenda for educational improvement and development.

The paper reports from a qualitative study with data from focus group interviews. School managers in five Upper Secondary Vocational Schools in a Norwegian county (Vestland) were interviewed in groups twice, in 2018 and 2019. In this paper the material is however analysed as one qualitative corpus. The schools were strategically selected, based on having teachers participating in the national programme “Professional development in vocational education and training”. The 22 informants in the five groups were all in formal management positions. The principals recruited and coordinated the focus groups, and participation in the interviews were hence also based on local, pragmatic considerations. From two to seven individuals participated in sessions varying in length from 40 to 70 minutes. These were recorded and transcribed. Two researchers made the interviews. One of the authors of this paper was one of them. A semi-structured thematic guide was used, and the sessions were adjusted according to response and interest (Thaagard, 2018, s. 91). The participants commented and challenged each other, and these exchanges of views and experiences created a rich and varied material). Agreement among participants was not asked for, but collective viewpoints emerged All references to empirical information are assigned to the group level and hence interpreted as representing part of a collective discourse among the members of the management team. A qualitative, inductive/deductive analysis was implemented in three steps. The first step was coding the material closely related to the empirical material (Tjora, 2017, s. 196-198). This condensed the data and gave seven main themes. In a second step the notion of parallel practices was used as a tool in a search for patterns across the themes and the three categories, named «Daily Operations», «Plan and System» and «Systemic Leadership» emerged. In a third step these three categories were used to re-read the original seven themes, and this time the nine «practice themes» mentioned were identified and reported in this paper. The study is conducted according to Guidelines for Research Ethics in the Social Sciences, Humanities, Law and Theology in Norway. The interviews and data material were collected and managed according to permit from NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data. The same empirical data material has been used as basis for other publications (Sekkingstad & Syse, 2019, Sekkingstad & Glosvik, 2022).

The findings are presented as a table of 27 practices, using the three leadership categories «Daily Operations», «Plan and System» and «Systemic Leadership» as an organising frame. The findings are then discussed with help of a perspective on organisational learning introduced by Pedler, Boydell, & Burgoyne (1996, 2019), what they call “stances in the learning company”. The concepts developed by these authors points towards collective learning activites on all tre stances, however focusing on different themes and as such might promote different levels of collective learning. A concluding hypothesis is that «Systemic Leadership practice» seemes to reach deepest into the core of the studied educational organisations.

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