The relevance of school leadership for schools, the actors acting in them, and school development is undisputed in international school leadership and school development research (e.g., Håkansson & Pettersson, 2019; Prasse, 2012; Sheninger, 2014). In the context of school development, school leaders face a variety of challenges. One current example, which has once again been brought into sharper focus by the Corona pandemic, is the ongoing digitalization of and in schools. In this context, school leaders are important key players in school development processes (Eickelmann, 2010), which goes hand in hand with corresponding tasks and requirements. The demands placed on school leaders are diverse and and vary in nature spanning from organizational, instructional, personnel, collaborative, to technological development (Eickelmann & Gerick, 2018; Schiefner-Rohs, 2019).  However, not only school development tasks are cross-sectionally affected by digitalization, but also the daily work of school leaders, e.g., school administration or cooperation with non-school actors, is increasingly affected by digital transformation processes (ibid.). Nevertheless, little research has been done on “how digital technologies impact on the working lives of school leaders themselves, or how their effects might be mitigated” (Heffernan & Selwyn, 2021, p.2). In this context, Tulowitzki and Gerick (2020) emphasize that research to date has focused either on the role of school leaders in implementing digital media in schools at the instructional level or on the use of digital media to organize schools, i.e. the management and design of schools by school leaders with the help of digital media (cf. p. 326). The relevant literature thus points to an increased (international) need for holistic research on school leaders and their everyday professional life in light of digitalization (e.g., Håkansson & Pettersson, 2019; Tulowitzki & Gerick, 2020).

The present contribution starts at this point by providing initial insights into the work of school leaders under the perspective of digitalization. The focus is on the questions of what impact digitalization has on the work of school leaders and how digital transformation processes manifest themselves here.

To examine these questions, an ethnographic approach was chosen using shadowing. Shadowing is a multi-method approach (Nothaft, 2011; Tulowitzki, 2019) that includes participant observation as well as recording of conversations, anecdotes, and episodes as a central element (Mintzberg, 1973). As part of a comparative case study (Yin, 2018), two school leaders from secondary schools in Germany were each accompanied for three weeks in their everyday work. During the accompaniment, additional reflective interviews were conducted with them, which were recorded and subsequently transcribed. Furthermore, methods of virtual ethnography (Hine, 2001) were used to also capture the school leaders' actions in the digital space. The data obtained will be analyzed multimethodally (e.g., using qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz, 2018) and phenomenological analysis (HItzler, 2010)) and triangulated to examine the impact of digitalization on school leaders' actions from multiple perspectives. For this purpose, an analysis of the two individual cases (within-case analysis) is first conducted before a case contrast of the two sample schools by means of a cross-case data analysis (cf. Borchardt & Göthlich, 2007, p. 48). With reference to existing findings on the tasks and actions of school leaders, the aim is to explore how digitalization affects school leadership.

Initial findings indicate that digitalization has become a transcending moment in the everyday work of school leaders. On the one hand, existing activities are increasingly transformed by the use of technologies and the opportunities they offer. For example, communication and consultation are predominantly digital (e.g., via e-mail or learning management platforms), as is the organization of schools and collaboration with internal and external stakeholders. This transformation is also driven by external requirements and framework conditions (reporting requirements through appropriate software; conversion of personnel administration by the school board to a purely portal-based process). On the other hand, aspects of digitalization are emerging as content in the work of school leaders, which also leads to new tasks. Likewise, there are a variety of challenges, such as the increasing parallelism and diversity of tasks that arise as a result of digitalization in schools. Overall, the results so far suggest a variety of implications for school leadership research, as well as for the professionalization of school leaders, which will be explored in more depth through the following further analyses. For the further analyses, we expect comprehensive and robust results by ECER 2022.

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