Session Information
26 SES 16 A, School Leadership Success amidst Contemporary Complexities and Layers of Influence on Education (Part 2)
Symposium continued from 26 SES 14 A
Contribution
The purpose of the paper is to contribute with insights about successful principalship (Day & Gurr, 2018) from a Norwegian context. The study has a s multiple perspective and is building on the voices of principals, assistant principals, middle leaders, and students from four primary and secondary schools in Norway. It builds on in depth interviews and focus group interviews, as well as a teacher survey. Following the new ISSPP protocols, the data have been subjects to contents and discourse-inspired analysis. Complexity theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Haggis, 2008) serves as an analytic framework. A deeper understanding of success considers the interdependency between the different leadership levels in the school and that leadership is stretched over situations (Spillane, 2006). The aim has been to examine how successful principalship is perceived and experienced by multiple actors in the four cases. Moreover, the aims have been to identify the key enablers and constraints for achieving school ‘success’, as well as contextual features. Successful principalship is a matter of having common values and acknowledgement of the interdependency between principals, middle-leaders and teachers. The students’ wellbeing, learning and results is a prime focus in all the four cases. The analysis indicates differences in how leadership is distributed across situations (Spillane, 2006), and how principals engage in the core activities. While some principals are very close in following up the students, others lead through the middle leaders, from a distance. Involvement of multiple actors seem to be an enabling factor, as well as designing well-functioning structures while constraining factors seem to be related to lose couplings in the school community, especially in large upper secondary schools. Concerning context, we find a difference between upper secondary schools and primary and lower secondary schools in principal’s room for manoeuvre. There seems to be fewer policy demands from the regional educational authorities in the upper secondary schools, as long as they keep the budget, however, in the lower secondary and primary schools the local educational authorities are much more engaged in pedagogy.
References
Authors, 2021. Author, 2020a Author, 2020b Author (2018). Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard university press. Byrne, D., & Callaghan, G. (2013). Complexity theory and the social sciences: The state of the art. Routledge. Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2017). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage publications. Denzin, N. K. (2012). Triangulation 2.0. Journal of mixed methods research, 6(2), 80-88. Haggis, T. (2008). ‘Knowledge Must Be Contextual’: Some possible implications of complexity and dynamic systems theories for educational research. Educational philosophy and theory, 40(1), 158-176. Morrison, K. (2010). Complexity theory, school leadership and management: Questions for theory and practice. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 38(3), 374- 393. Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative research & evaluation methods. Sage. Spillane, J. P. (2006). Towards a theory of leadership practice: A distributed perspective. In Rethinking schooling (pp. 208-242). Routledge.
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