In Europa we can distinguish the increased autonomy and flexibility in curriculum development at the school level and it has raised he importance of empowering schools and educators to have a more active role in shaping curricula based on their specific contexts (Priestley 2021). Also Estonian schools have received more decision-making power to manage learning and teaching in recent decades (Kukemelk & Kitsing, 2020). Estonian schools compile their own curricula based on the National Curriculum. Each school has a different curriculum which serves as the basis for all learning related activities (Basic Schools and Upper Secondary Schools Act, 2010). The previous research has indicated that education policy pushes school principals toward innovative initiatives for school improvement (Eisenschmidt et al., 2021) and teachers are characterized by low curriculum ownership (Viirpalu et al., 2022). Curriculum development is essential in a school that strives to enhance teaching and learning and requires organizational routines to facilitate leadership for learning and ensure teacher collaboration.

School improvement goals defined in school improvement plans set the direction of improvement a school is taking and lead to more coherent organizational practices that result in more focused, specific, and consistent teaching practices in classrooms (Meyer, Bendikson, & Le Fevre, 2020). To enhance the teaching and learning, the curriculum leadership is crucial. According to Wai-Yan Wan & Leung (2022) the curriculum leadership has been decentralized and the focus on school principal has shifted to multitude forms of teacher collaboration and collective teacher decision making processes. Therefore, the interactions among school leaders and teachers need frame and structure that can be characterized by organizational routines as repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions, involving multiple actors (Feldman & Pentland, 2003, p. 95). Previous studies (eg Liljenberg et al 2017, Binkhorst et al 2015) about school improvement routines revealed the lack of well-designed routines for principals to implement a well-established idea of pedagogical leadership and to collaborate with teacher teams.

In this study, we explore how school improvement teams' perceptions of how curriculum leadership routines are shaping the pursuit of school improvement goals. The following research questions will be addressed:

●            In terms of curriculum development, what are the school's improvement goals?

●            What is the school improvement teams' understanding of how curriculum development contributes to school improvement?

●            What curriculum leadership routines are implemented in the schools?

In this paper, three pivotal theoretical perspectives will be employed to explore the curriculum leadership routines for school improvement goals. Curriculum Leadership (Wai-Yan Wan & Leung 2022) delves into the influence of leadership on the development, implementation, and evaluation of curricula. Organizational routines, recognizable patterns of actions within an institution, will be a key lens through which the paper examines interactions among teachers and school leaders (Feldman & Pentland, 2003, Liljenberg et al 2017). The perspective of school improvement goals will guide the investigation into specific objectives set by schools (Meyer, Bendikson, & Le Fevre, 2020).

The paper is based on the multiple case study in seven Estonian schools. We employed a case study approach to investigate the curriculum leadership routines, which are closely linked to school contexts. According to Yin (2003), a case study is appropriate when the context and phenomenon are complex and difficult to distinguish from their context. The cases were selected in the sample in multi-phase combined techniques. We used the dataset of Estonian school improvement plans created for the previous study by Vanari, Eisenschmidt (2022). In the dataset we grouped the schools according to their direction setting type and randomly chose 1-2 schools from each group. The schools in our sample are characterized by varied school type, size, location. Data on schools' curriculum leadership routines were collected through semi-structured interviews with school principals (8), focus group interviews with improvement teams (32), and documents such as school improvement plans (7) and school curricula (7). In collecting the data, we considered Bendikson et al.'s (2020) critique of previous studies that focused solely on the opinions of school leaders. Therefore, we used the snowball technique to recruit members of improvement teams. Data analysis was conducted with multi-stage content analysis combining within-case and cross-case techniques. We started by reading carefully and repeatedly the interview transcripts and comparing with theoretical concepts. In the second stage, a case-based analysis of the data was carried out by gathering relevant information from documents and interviews. The research questions were approached deductively and inductively, drawing on different curriculum functions (Bradley et al 2017) and curriculum leadership (Wai-Yan Wan ja Leung 2022) concepts. As a limitation of this paper, we examined the routines of curriculum leadership from an ostensive perspective as perceived by the school improvement team. Pentland & Feldman (2005) emphasize that the real action may not be in accordance with abstract idea about the routine. Therefore, it is imperative that longitudinal research continue in order to investigate the interrelationship between goal-setting and curriculum development as expressed through the performative aspect of the routine.

The findings reveal that school improvement goals are focusing on a vast scale on curriculum implementation, like changes in teaching methods, teacher activities, assessment of students, the content of subjects and arrangements of support services. The goals for curriculum writing or evaluation are underrepresented. It corresponds to the earlier findings by Grützmacher jt (2023), but the studied cases differ from Meyer, Patuawa (2022) and Viirpalu et al., (2014) as the goals are not aiming for higher academic results, improving the relations of students nor differentiation in subject areas. In Estonia school leaders perceive the function of curriculum contradictory. In some cases, the school leaders advocate the importance of the curriculum development. On the other side there are school leaders, who express confusion when trying to reflect the function. In their opinion the curriculum development needs to assure that the curriculum document is in accordance with the study organization in everyday actions. Similarly, the teachers perceive the curriculum as a bureaucratic tool copying the National Framework Curriculum (Erss et al., 2014; Mikser et al., 2016, 2023). We assume that the reasons refer to educational policy in Estonia, where the school principals are not conceptualized as leaders for learning or instructional leaders (Basic Schools and Upper Secondary Schools Act, 2010;). In all the schools there are curriculum leadership routines following mostly a hierarchical task-oriented model. It is remarkable that there were few or no routines for curriculum evaluation in the cases and also no goals for creating routines for curriculum evaluation was set. At the same time the schools should implement regular internal evaluation to analyse the teaching and learning in the school (Estonian Parliament, 2010). The internal evaluation possesses a potential to give input for the curriculum development, but it needs further research to explore how the schools are implementing it.

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