Session Information
26 SES 06 B, Teacher Leadership Development in the Educational Context (Part 1)
Paper Session to be continued in 26 SES 13 B
Contribution
Our paper is related to a theoretical and empirical research about Educational Leadership. Being a part of an Erasmus plus Strategic Partnership during 2019 and 2021, we had the opportunities to achieve some goals about this important issue for Education Systems worldwide.
ENABLES (European Arts-Based Development of Distributed Leadership and Innovation in Schools) Project aims to strengthen collaborative leadership of innovation in schools by developing and disseminating innovative methods of arts-based and embodied collaborative leadership development. As part of the ENABLES project, a total of five European countries (UK, Finland, Latvia, Romania and Austria) have been working together since November 2019 to develop, test and reflect on the use of new approaches in the field of art-based and bodily methods to promote distributive leadership. All five institutional partners developed an Action Research Trial under the coordination of UK Leadership Institute of Hertfordshire University.
The objectives of the project were to strengthen distributed leadership in schools, including both teacher leadership and student leadership, and to promote democratic practice that enables teachers, senior leaders and other stakeholders in schools to lead innovation collaboratively.
Our project has done this by enhancing the practice and understanding of innovative forms of leadership development that apply arts-based approaches to such development which facilitate self-learning through critical exploration of the creative and affective dimensions of leadership and leadership development.
Like a common starting point, all the institutional partners contributed to a Literature review starting from the main ideas and key words about Leadership in Education field. For the empirical part, the project had a specific framework based on the following applicative ideas (same for all partners): to enhance understanding and application of the value of arts-based approaches in the development of distributed leadership, including teacher and student leadership, in schools; to help policy-makers, student teachers from universities and practitioners concerned with such leadership development to gain confidence in the use of arts-based approaches; to generate research-based examples of a range of effective arts-based approaches; to examine commonalities and differences in differing national and cultural contexts in Europe, and the potential for arts-based approaches to facilitate transnational leadership development; to create an online resource for arts-based development of distributed leadership and teacher leadership in schools; to engage with national and European policy and practitioner networks to disseminate the online resource.
Mainstream leadership development often focuses only on leaders themselves and existing models that purport to help these individuals become better at leading. However, this sort of leader development (as opposed to leadership development) is questionable with regard to efficiency and effectiveness. We argue here that this may be due to a lack of acknowledgement of leaders’ (and followers’) implicit leadership theories in the context of leader and leadership development.
We start our work in this project and our Trial design from the main Leadership models which are connected with the Educational practice, thinking that leadership has an essentialist orientation that characterizes the leader behavior, leader communication or follower dependency.
We intended to apply, test and evaluate narrative-based and embodied learning approaches to developing Distributed Leadership Capability.
The goal of our work is to present the design and some of the results of our Action Research Trial - Romanian Narrative Research Trial, which included three practical workshops conducted with teachers - a range of school-based leaders (including MA students) between November 2020 – March 2021.
Method
Under the framework of Distributive Leadership, and using the ideas of democratic leadership, the Trials aim was to apply, test and evaluate innovative arts-based and embodied learning approaches to developing distributed leadership in schools. Action research Romanian Trial had some specific objectives under the frame of the utility of the Narrative Methodology on the Personal and Professional Development processes; our Trial aims to evaluate the impact of the Narrative Approach Methods to developing the distributed leadership (individual and group/organisational level). The Design included three training workshops, on a virtual meetings sesions (being on a COVID pandemic time) from November 2020 to March 2021; the Reflective Evaluation Meeting was in April 2021. Between the training sesions and the Definitional Ceremony for celebrating what we had learned, we collect participants works – reflective writting, individual and teams journals, we made some interviews with 4-5 participants for each workshop. Participants: 76 persons - school teachers, school principals, school inspectors, school psychologists, MA students in Policy and Management in Education We decided to use the following Narrative Methods: Tree of Professional Life (adaptation of the Tree of Life); Something Meritorious; Caring for those who care; A Magical Day and the Definitional Ceremony (the last one, which was used like a reflective/narrative formative evaluation technique. Were used literary art instruments: creative writing and artistic expression – drawing and, for the post-training workshops we used the reflective journals and vignettes techniques. There were several challenges due to the move of workshop activities from the on-site environment to the online environment. The classes were held in the evening, after the participants finished their jobs. They were tired still everyone got involved in the activities. The activities in pairs (the exercise “Something of Merit”) was carried out in the virtual room, still, the face-to-face communication could have brought more details about the participants' feelings, the connection among them would have been deeper. The participants who were not able to share their reflections (even they want very much to share!!!) had the possibility to send their thoughts via email. Methods have been adjusted for online facilitation - brief presentations with Power point support. The reflective exposure times of the participants was substantially reduced; thus, appeared the need to receive reflections, follow-up topics, via email a few days after the workshop. Learning became visible and participants make knowledge explicit, explore its applicability to other contexts and transform it into a shared resource.
Expected Outcomes
Our narrative methods constructed collaborative spaces where constraints of hierarchy are minimized and agency, reflexivity and development of personal and collaborative intentions by participants are facilitated. We used two levels of data interpretation: a. Participant assessment of learning: Reflective journals and Three input essay; an assessment instrument completed individually and collectively, before and after the trial, to assess the attitudes, knowledge and capacity in relation to the practice of distributed leadership. b. Participant assessment of the experience: Three input essay: their experience of narrative approaches and their confidence in using such methods in future leadership development activities with others. To assess the experience, challenges and progress we had two moments of evaluation: during the workshops and on a final meeting. We were interested to see if there are increasing values on achieving new knowledge, awareness and embodied learning that strengthen capacity for distributed leadership. Our approach was more discursively oriented: we used aesthetic narrative positivism connected with the training methods, which undertook utilitarian as well as critical method for search leadership capabilities. We examined participants on both status – leader and follower, using implicit narratives of their lived experiences of leadership in their organizational settings and their own perspectives about their abilities to lead. Almost all participants identified positive affect. Evaluation instruments were informed by King’s (2014) professional development and Frost and Durrant’s (2002) teacher-led impact evaluation frameworks, with particular attention to ‘experience’, ‘learning’ and ‘degree and quality of change’, and generate quantitative and qualitative multi-media data (visual, digital, textual) and experiential vignettes (Ammann, 2018). Based on the results, we critically reflect upon implications for leadership learning (and development) and argue that implicit leadership theories in connection with Narrative Approach can provide a valuable starting point for leadership development and an important resource for teacher training activities.
References
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