Whereas a few years ago the focus of research of leadership for learning was on the performance of students and, in relation to this, the actions of teachers and school principals, today research is looking much more closely at the question of the professionalization of the various actors in the education system. Nevertheless, professionalization - understood as a science-based professional development of the various actors - ultimately always refers to learning in a pedagogical understanding (Göhlich, Wulf & Zirfas 2007).

In the research project presented (Agostini & Anderegg 2021), ‘vignettes’ (Schratz, Schwarz & Westfall-Greiter 2012; Bauer & Peterlini 2016), previously used as a phenomenologically oriented research tool, are newly applied as a way of professionalizing educators. Vignettes take possible learning experiences and make them visible and thus experienceable by means of conciseness as another form of precision (Gabriel 2010). They broaden the view of what is happening at school and thus enable a differentiated examination of learning and the actions of those involved.

If vignettes are used as an instrument for the professionalization of teachers, this means that teachers observe lessons and present their co-experience of the possible learning experiences of students in vignettes in a linguistically condensed way and look at them with colleagues from different perspectives in the sense of a reading - an interpretation [deuten] that goes into an openness (Gadamer 1967). An essential feature of this is the training of perception, which in the sense of phenomenology is directed towards how something shows itself as something to the observer.

Professionalization from an organizational pedagogical perspective (Schöpf 2018: Fahrenwald 2018) goes beyond the individual person and asks how it is possible to anchor professionalization efforts within the organization. In the research project, this is where the concept of teacher leadership (Katzenmeyer & Moller 1996; York-Barr & Duke 2002; Strauss & Anderegg 2020) comes in. Based on their profession, teachers and other school staff assume leadership and responsibility for individual aspects of the whole organization. In this project, we are interested in how individual teachers who are trained in writing and reading vignettes influence their colleagues within their organization and how they succeed in establishing vignettes as a form of professionalization as a common practice to improve learning.

Vignette research (Bauer & Schratz 2015) is oriented towards phenomenology, especially the body phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (1966). It is part of the phenomenological methodology (Brinkmann 2015) and examines learning as experience (Meyer-Drawe 2012). In relation to learning in organizations or leadership, vignettes are partly combined by means of the network theory approach of Harrison C. White (Anderegg 2021). The data collection in the research project is done by means of group discussions and vignettes. The group discussions, initiated by the researchers, take place between the different teacher leaders and educators during the training modules and revolve around the question of how they succeed in using and establishing vignettes as an instrument of professionalization in their own organization. During the individual support at the schools themselves, the researchers will write vignettes. The data will be analyzed using grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin 1996). The guiding research question is how the teacher leaders succeed in introducing vignettes as an instrument for professionalization at their own school and institutionalize them as a common practice. According to our hypothesis, different aspects such as the question of the person of the teacher leader and his/her position within the organization, the structure and culture of the organization and school improvement capacity- both generally and specifically for the area of leadership - as well as the acceptance of vignettes and the experiences made with them will be decisive. The evaluation by means of grounded theory supports the openness of the research project and the avoidance of entities. We hope to gain deeper insights into the question of professionalization from an organizational pedagogical perspective and to better understand the work of teacher leaders in the context of distributed leadership (Spillane 2006).

At the moment, research results are not yet avaliable. However, we will certainly be able to present and discuss initial results at the ECER, as the data collection and evaluation will take place in spring/summer.

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