Session Information
Contribution
Schools often demonstrate limited capabilities to use and develop the organization’s collective competency. That’s why many international studies have pointed to an increased focus on the benefit of support structures to aid the professional work in local institutions (Elmore, 2008; Stoll, Bolam, McMahon, Wallace, & Thomas, 2006, Stoll & Sammons 2007). In this paper special attention is paid to how a principal and her team collaborate with the teachers in order to create and sustain the conditions for knowledge building at the local work place, and as such, support the professional practice connected to the teachers’ work. The starting point for our inquiry is that educational leadership is ultimately concerned with learning, but learning-focused leadership is not limited to the domain of student learning. It also includes capacity building necessary for the professionals in the school. It represents a form of organizational learning that can feed the context for student learning (Knapp et al. 2003). The approach takes into account that leadership is not necessarily synonymous with a particular position; it may come from administrators, teachers, or others. The leadership concept is closely related to a family of terms like authority, influence, and power (Gronn 2002). It implies that leadership involves a careful interplay of knowledge and action, and it is conscious of conditions, relations and change.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Elmore, R.F. (2008). Leadership as the practice of improvement. In Pont, B., Nusche, D. & Hopkins, D. (eds), Improving School Leadership, Volume 2: Case studies on system leadership. OECD. (pp. 37-67). Gronn, P. (2002) Distributed leadership as a unit of analysis. The Leadership Quarterly, 13(4), 423-451. Knapp, M., Copland M. & Talbert, J. (2003). Leading for learning. Reflective tools for school and district leaders. Seattle, University of Washington, Center for the Study of Teacher and Policy. Stoll, L., Bolam, R., McMahon, A., Wallace, M., & Thomas, S. (2006). Professional learning communities: a review of the literature. Journal of Educational Change, 7, 221-258. Stoll, L., & Sammons, P. (2007). Growing together: School Effectiveness and School Improvement in the UK. In T. Townsend (Ed.), International Handbook of School Effectiveness and Improvement (pp. 207-222). Dordrecht: Springer.
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