'Educational Leadership' in School Leaders' Texts. A study of texts produced in the Swedish Principals’ Education Programme

Author(s):

Anita Nordzell(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2013

Network:

26. Educational Leadership

Format:

Paper

Session Information

26 SES 01 B, Principal Development

Paper Session

Time:

2013-09-10

13:15-14:45

Room:

D-307

Chair:

Helen Wildy

Contribution

In research on school development, much reliance is put on school principals as the front figures or those influencing schools in order to achieve better, get better results and make changes in underperforming schools (Day 2007; Davis et al 2005; Harris & Chapman 2002; Youngs & King 2002). In Sweden the National Agency for Education (Skolverket) uses the concept of ’pedagogical leadership’ (sw. pedagogiskt ledarskap) to focus on the principals´ responsibility to work with teacher training and teacher involvement in the pupils’ goal attainment in school. In this study, I will use the concept of educational leadership, though I am well aware of the different possible meanings it may have. An analysis of the concept could well be a separate study. I use educational leadership in a more narrow sense, as formulated by the Agency.

Educational leadership is the focus in one of the Agency’s courses in the National School LeadershipTraining Programme for school principals. Some Swedish universities have been commissioned to run the course since 2011; it comprises 7. 5 credits completed within a school year (in Swedish called ’Rektorslyftet’). In this course school principals with ‘ work experience as a principal’ who have also gone through a previous education programme for principals are welcome. The Agency’s definition of educational leadership can be understood as the purpose of the university course (Skolverket 2011, p 1): to ”help school principals to gain knowledge and skills that will improve their conditions for exercising educational leadership in relation to the teachers’ teaching and the pupils’/students’ possibilities to attain national targets.” (my translation.)

The concept of ‘educational leadership’ (pedagogiskt ledarskap) has been used for some decades in Sweden primarily as political rhetoric not based on research (cf Nestor 1993), but during the past few years it has been used more concretely in the Agency’s texts.

Bearing this in mind, I find it interesting to study how school principals understand educational leadership in relation to their everyday work.

Method

As one of the teachers in the Agency’s course ‘Rektorslyftet’, I have access to the principals’ examination texts. Permission has been obtained from the principals to use the texts for research purposes. The material, produced in 2011-2012, consists of about 150 texts written and processed in several steps by the principals under the supervision of the teachers/researchers. The texts should reflect upon the principals’ aims with ‘educational leadership’ and what they perceived as obstacles and support for working on the basis of these aims. Another task was to formulate an action plan. The course had three leading themes: school governance, leading and developing school learning environments, and communicative and dialogical leadership. The principals’ texts are interesting as they are formulated by the principals themselves, but it is necessary to take into account that they had themes to consider in their writing, including compulsory literature to read, and that the texts were examined. This makes the material rather complicated to deal with and may be the basis for a question in a session, EERA, Istanbul.

Expected Outcomes

Identity construction is understood as a discursive resource for doing something in the context in which the statements are made. Categorizing is a fundamental principle for human beings to organize the world in a comprehensive way. A great deal of our knowledge about the world can be understood in the categories we use in our language. The results from the analysis will be compared with previous research on school leadership. Previous research on school leaders’ talk in interaction in meetings shows how principals use different discursive methods for categorizing themselves as problem solvers, for example, and ’the others’ as problem makers (Nordzell, 2007). Similar data have been presented in research on leaders in other activities (Crevani 2011). The expected insights into how school principals relate to the concept of ’educational leadership’ in texts concerning their everyday working life can make an important contribution to the research on school leaders’ working life and situation, to be used in, for example, the training of school principals. It could also make a contribution to discussions concerning further such training as well as helping politicians to consider school policies in general.

References

Antaki, Charles & Widdicombe, Sue (eds) (1998). Identities in Talk. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Benwell, B. & Stokoe, E. (2006). Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd. Bowker, Geoffrey & Star, Susan Leigh (1999). Sorting things out. London: The MIT Press. Crevani, Lucia (2011). Clearing for Action. Leadership as a Relational Phenomenon. Stockholm: The Royal Institute of Thechnology, KTH, Department of Industrial Economics and Management. Diss. Davis, Stephen; Darling-Hammond, Linda; LaPointe, Michelle & Meyerson, Debra (2005). Developing Successful Principals. School Leadership Study. Review of Research. Stanford Education Leadership Institute. Day, Christopher (2007). What Being a Successful Principal Really Means. An International Perspective. Educational Leadership and Administration. Vol 19, Fall. Edwards, Derek (1991). Categories are for talking. On the Cognitive and Discursive Bases of Categorization. Theory & Psychology, 1(4), 515-542. Harris, Alma & Chapman, Christopher (2002). Effective Leadership in Schools. Facing Challenging Circumstances. National College for School Leadership. Housley, William & Fitzgerald, Richard (2002). The reconsidered model of membership categorization analysis. Qualitative Research, Vol 2(1): 59-83. Nordzell, A. (2007). Samtalat skolledarskap. Kategoriserings- och identitetsarbete i interaktion. (Doing school leadership. Categorization and identity work in interaction). Linköping Studies in Education and Psychology, no 112. Linköping: LiU Tryck. Diss Leithwood, Kenneth; Harris, Alma & Hopkins, David (2008). Formerly School Organisation. School Leadership & Management. Vol 28:1, pp 27-42. Nestor, B. 1993: Pedagogiskt ledarskap och pedagogisk ledning: två svårfångade begrepp. In B. Stålhammar (red): Skolledare i en föränderlig omvärld. Göteborg: Gothia. Skolverket (2011-04-18). Mål för Rektorslyftet. Bilaga 1. Skolverket, Kompetensutveckling, Kristina Englund. Stokoe, Elizabeth (2012). Moving forward with membership categorization analysis: Methods for systematic analysis. Discourse Studies, Vol 14(3) 277-303. Youngs, Peter & King, M. Bruce (2002). Principal Leadership for Professional Development to Build School Capacity. Educational Administration Quarterly. Vol 38(5), 643-670.

Author Information

Anita Nordzell (presenting / submitting)

Stockholm University

Department of Education

Stockholm

Search the ECER Programme

Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
Search for authors and in the respective field.
For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.