Annual Report 2010, Helsinki

1. Report on the conference

For the years conference there were in network 26: Educational leadership 57 submissions, around 7 rejec-tions and 6 redirections to other networks. There were 21 sessions distributed on 13 paper sessions with 36 papers presented, 6 symposia with 25 presenters, one round table and one poster session: totally 63 pres-entations. There were unfortunately a number of last minutes cancellations. Most sessions were well visited with 20-30 persons attending.

2. The network

As the number of submissions had grown from 41 in 2009 to 57 in 2010 the reviewers Gerry Mac Ruairc, Helen Wildy and Simon Clarke had a huge job reviewing. Therefore we decided that more reviewers were needed, and Helen Wildy, Gerry Mac Ruairc, Lawrie Drysdale, David Gurr, Lars Frode Frederiksen, Simon Clarke were elected as reviewers and Kasper Kofod was elected as link convener.Olof Johansson will arrange a round table session for the Berlin conference 2011 on “current and emerging trends in Educational Administration” and Steve Jones will arrange a session on Urban Education. There was an invitation to make a symposium on Educational leadership trends.There was a prolonged discussion on variable quality of the presentations. Part of the discussion lingered on the possibility of separating the Ph.D.-presentations from the rest. The predominant view was that the Ph.D.-students should have the possibility to present under “natural” conditions in order to have positive and constructive criticism for their presentations.For this year’s conference Helen Wildy applied the Board for funding for school visits. the Board did not grant money for the visits but a group did never the less successful visits to a couple Finnish schools.

3. The presentations

Many of the presenters fail to brig copies of their presentations either in form of a proper paper or hands outs and that was regretted. Presenters ought to bring copies of their papers or hands outs with them to their presentations. There was not agreement on if whole papers shall be brought or if is sufficient with hands outs of power points.
There was agreement that there ought to be guidelines for writing papers. There was an agreement that most papers had too much focus on methodology.
There was also agreement that papers ought to be put on the website of network 26.Educational Leadership.
During the network meeting there was a discussion on the composition of the presentation slots. There was broad  agreement on that so far as possible the slots should be composed according to themes. That has also been the the guiding composition principle. It is however sometimes difficult to make all papers and presentations fit together according to this principle because there are some themes that are so scarcely represented that they cannot fill a slot alone.
Last year three was criticism that some of the slots had four presentations and the general opinion was that it is too many presentations for a slot og 1½ hours. Therefore there were only three presentations per slot. This is going to be the guiding principle for the planning for next year’s conference in Berlin.

Members of the network

The members of the network are the people that are presenting and discussing the subjets of the network as described in the network description. 15 members have been present at the network meeting in Helsinki.