Project context

The research project is part of the content cluster School Development & Leadership of the project School makes you strong (German: Schule macht stark) (SchuMaS). SchuMaS is an interdisciplinary joint project that accompanies 200 schools in socially challenging situations in Germany. The overall goal of the project is to improve educational opportunities for socially disadvantaged pupils.

Theoretical framework

School leaders[1] are particularly important for school development processes because of their significant influence on the school (both on the school as an organisation and on its members) (Lichtinger & Rigger, 2022, p. 152). As so-called gatekeepers, they decide, for example, whether innovations find their way into the individual school (Bermann & McLaughlin, 1975; Rolff, 2012, p. 15). In particular, a resource- and strength-oriented (positive) leadership approach, which focuses on potentials and strengths instead of weaknesses of employees, represents added value for all involved, both for the employees and for the leaders themselves (e.g. Lichtinger & Rigger, 2022, p. 158). Connections between personality factors and positive leadership havealready been proven (e.g. Lichtinger & Rigger, 2022, p. 156).

The key role that school leaders play in relation to school development processes shows the importance of research on the person of the school leader.

Research interest

The research project is to deal with the (professional) biographies of school leaders and to find out how access to the position of school leaders (especially at schools in disadvantaged locations) takes place.

• Where do the school leaders come from? What statements can be made about the habitus of origin of the school leaders?
• What orientations do they have with regard to their own school years? Which (former) student habitus is possibly still recognisable?
• How did they get into their professional position?
• Can (professional) school leader habitus be generated from the data?

Closely linked to this, the leadership style of the school leaders and, in connection with this, their self-image in school development processes are to be surveyed:

• What ideas do school leaders have about what schools must be like?
• What does school development mean to them? What experiences have they had with it?
• Where do they see needs (in relation to the school's internal development process), where hurdles and implementation problems?
• What tasks, goals and visions do they pursue at their school?

The results could be used to generate hypotheses on whether, for example, a certain leadership style is related to certain orientations (e.g. resource-orientation or deficit-orientation) or whether certain orientations can be explained by one's own biographical or professional biographical experiences.

[1] This refers primarily to school principals, but also to other school members with leadership functions.

The biographies will be collected with the help of narrative-based interviews (Schütze, 1983). Methodologically, the research project can be located in the field of qualitative-reconstructive social research. The analysis of the interviews is implemented by means of the documentary method of data interpretation according to Ralf Bohnsack (e. g. Bohnsack, 1989). The documentary method identifies tacit knowledge via the generation of self-running narratives and descriptions. The aim of the method is the reconstruction of orientation patterns. To generalise empirical results, they are formulated as types.

The presentation will provide an opportunity to discuss the design of the research project and initial findings from the interviews.

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