Session Information
26 SES 01 B, School Improvement and Development Through the Lens of Educational Leadership
Paper Session
Contribution
The concept of quality in education is an important framing for both policy and practice, spanning through international, national and local levels of policymaking and school leadership (Kauko et al., 2018). In a European context, there has been a move towards more output-control of schools in many countries (e.g. Sweden and Ireland), often combined with decentralised governing systems where school districts and schools are given extended autonomy, and in turn opening up for more diverse schooling. In these systems, quality control focus on the end “product” of schooling through for instance standardized testing or examinations rather than on processes, giving school leaders the possibility to take local context into account when making decisions on quality development (Wermke & Salokangas, 2021). However, quality imperatives defined externally might in some cases differ from professional standards, ethics or beliefs held by the diversity of professionals working within education. This means that school leaders face and are expected to make decisions based on at times contesting ideas of what constitutes quality and how to assess and work towards this, both in long term strategic work and in day-to-day decisions (Brauckmann et al., 2023).
The aim of this study is thus to gain more knowledge about which and how different elements might inform educational leaders’ decision-making processes on an institutional level by focusing on the opening and closing of decision-making related to quality assessment and quality development. While granted extended autonomy, school leaders’ scope of action is nevertheless regulated by many different elements like policy events, administrative systems, and negotiations between different groupings and levels both within and outside of schools. As an example, an explicit expectation from local policymakers to increase interdisciplinarity and collaboration across subjects with the aim to enhance the quality of schooling might collide with some teachers’ professional stance against the idea of interdisciplinarity and collaboration revealing different professional understandings of what constitutes quality in education. While research on autonomy in education has increased the last decades, there is still a need for more empirical research on leadership autonomy that considers the dynamic and multidimensional character of the phenomenon (e.g., Wermke et al., 2023). Taking a particular interest in the distribution of autonomy between local schools and county municipalities, the exploration in this paper is guided by the following research questions:
Which elements inform or regulate decision-making processes related to quality assessment and -development in local education leadership, and further How is leadership autonomy distributed and negotiated between schools and county municipalities?
The study is framed by a conceptual understanding of autonomy in schools as a multidimensional and context dependent phenomenon made up of several levels and domains (Gobby et al., 2022; Salokangas & Wermke, 2020). Understanding policy as enacted and organising normative discourse (Ball et al., 2012; Levinson et al., 2020) this paper zooms in on leadership autonomy on an institutional level (i.e. schools and county municipalities) (Cribb & Gewirtz, 2007) and focus on the domains of development and administration (Salokangas & Wermke, 2020). While exploring the phenomenon of leadership autonomy in a Norwegian context, the regulation of school leaders’ decision-making by many different elements is not unique to Norway. This indicates that findings from this study is important far beyond the Norwegian context, particularly to countries with decentralised governance systems where local autonomy plays a central role in achieving high quality education. The study also contributes to deepening our understanding of the development of school leadership as a profession in its own right.
Method
Taking an abductive approach to the topic, the study is designed as a small-scale ethnographic exploration of the everyday work of 17 school leaders in two upper secondary schools and one county municipality in Norway (Erickson, 1986; Sandler & Thedvall, 2017). During a time span of one schoolyear, nearly 100 hours of meeting observations and field conversations, as well as documents like meeting agendas and minutes, local and national policy documents actively used by the leaders were collected and analysed. Data material from the local education authority include semi-structured interviews, as well as documents. Inspired by the “zooming in” and “zooming out” of micro-process studies (Little, 2012), observations were guided by questions on leaders’ situated and enacted collective decision-making in matters concerning quality assessment and quality development, who or what informed or impacted decisions as well as what documents or artefacts were important in the process. The two schools participating in this study were chosen through convenience sampling. As a result of a research- and development collaboration between the university and these schools, the author was invited to follow the leader-groups of the two schools over a full schoolyear. School 1 (Ibsen) is a large upper secondary school primarily offering university-preparatory programmes while school 2 (Haaland) is a smaller upper secondary school primarily offering vocational education programmes. During the school year in question, Ibsen was focusing particularly on a project of restructuring their study programmes on offer, whereas Haaland had chosen adapted education as a particular area for quality enhancement. While the two schools are located in two different (but neighbouring) municipalities, they are administered by the same school owner, which in the case of public upper secondary schools in Norway is the county municipality. This local education authority particularly stressed enhancement of professional learning communities in local schools through their policy documents. All data material was transcribed and organised in NVivo and analysed using thematic analysis in order to identify areas of decision-making as well as the diversity of actors, ideas and artefacts informing these decisions (Ball et al., 2012; Braun & Clarke, 2006).
Expected Outcomes
Reflections on preliminary findings indicate that leaders’ decision-making in schools related to quality assessment and -development, while largely framed and initiated by local and national policy events and documents, is particularly challenged by aspects of teachers’ professional, social, and emotional needs. As an example, the initial idea of restructuring the study programmes at Ibsen to enhance interdisciplinary work was largely moderated due to a group of teachers arguing emotionally for the importance of collaborating closely with other teachers within the same subject area. Administrative structural elements like scheduling, and physical elements like school buildings also restricted the leaders’ decisions to a large extent. While possibly always precent in school leadership autonomy, findings also indicate that conflicting elements rise to the surface when larger changes to practice are required, i.e. when implementing new curricula reforms or reorganising institutions. At Haaland, the leaders’ attempts to develop formative assessment practices as a result of changes to the national curricula, was met with resistance particularly amongst maths-teachers. When several large development processes take place in parallel, communication between institutional leadership levels seem to be crystallised. This might generate more room to manoeuvre within the institutions as a result of reducing elements informing decision-making, but can at the same time cause a feeling of “being left to ourselves” (school leader, Haaland) and being more exposed to risk when external elements are not there to guide or restrict decision-making.
References
Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., & Braun, A. (2012). How Schools Do Policy: Policy Enactments in Secondary Schools. Routledge. Brauckmann, S., Pashiardis, P., & Ärlestig, H. (2023). Bringing context and educational leadership together: fostering the professional development of school principals. Professional Development in Education, 49(1), 4-15. Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101. Cribb, A., & Gewirtz, S. (2007). Unpacking autonomy and control in education: Some conceptual and normative groundwork for a comparative analysis. European educational research journal EERJ, 6(3), 203-213. Erickson, F. (1986). Qualitative Methods in Research on Teaching. In M. Wittrockk (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching (3rd ed., pp. 119-161). MacMillan. Gobby, B., Wilkinson, J., Keddie, A., Blackmore, J., Eacott, S., MacDonald, K., & Niesche, R. (2022). Managerial, professional and collective school autonomies: using material semiotics to examine the multiple realities of school autonomy. International journal of leadership in education (ahead-of-print), 1-17. Kauko, J., Takala, T., & Rinne, R. (2018). Comparing politics of quality in education. In J. Kauko, T. Takala, & R. Rinne (Eds.), Politics of Quality in Education: A Comparative Study of Brazil, China, and Russia (pp. 1-17). Routledge. Levinson, B. A., Winstead, T., & Sutton, M. (2020). An Anthropological Approach to Education Policy as a Practice of Power: Consepts and Methods. In G. Fan & T. S. Popkewitz (Eds.), Handbook of Education Policy Studies: Values, Governance, Globalization, and Methodology (Vol. 1, pp. 363-379). Springer. Little, J. W. (2012). Understanding Data Use Practice among Teachers: The Contribution of Micro-Process Studies. American journal of education, 118(2), 143-166. Salokangas, M., & Wermke, W. (2020). Unpacking autonomy for empirical comparative investigation. Oxford Review of Education, 46(5), 563-581. Sandler, J., & Thedvall, R. (2017). Introduction: Exploring the Boring. An Introduction to Meeting Ethnography. In J. Sandler & R. Thedvall (Eds.), Meeting Ethnography: Meetings as Key Technologies of Contemporary Governance, Development, and Resistance (pp. 1-23). Wermke, W., Nordholm, D., Anderson, A. I., & Kotavuopio-Olsson, R. (2023). Deconstructing autonomy: The case of principals in the North of Europe. European educational research journal EERJ, 147490412211386. Wermke, W., & Salokangas, M. (2021). The Autonomy Paradox: Teachers’ Perceptions of Self-Governance Across Europe. Springer, Cham.
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