(Un)Critical times? Situating distributed leadership in the field

It is time to situate distributed leadership as a critical conceptualisation of school leadership; its popularisation has generally preceded conceptual and empirical development. Over the last 10 years distributed leadership has often been presented as a new construct of school leadership, though critique against education policy reforms and conceptual and historical links to the wider leadership field have generally been underemphasised. The theorisation and research of distributed leadership is currently situated at a critical point in its development; it is at the ‘crossroads’ of where it could dominantly be situated in the field of school leadership. A review of the literature and research suggests that distributed leadership is tending towards an uncritical position that is decoupled from critique of past and present education reforms and predominantly silent on how power relations at the local school level shape leadership activity.     

Transcending systems thinking in education reform: implications for policy-makers and school leaders

Education policy-makers in the UK have repeatedly stated their central aim as transforming British education into a ‘world-class system’. Over the last 20 years, several large-scale education reforms have brought radical changes to the school curriculum, teacher professionalism and educational leadership. Explicit in these reforms, is the deployment of measurable standards of pupil attainment as a lever for achieving school improvement. However, despite this proliferation of policies, the claims to educational improvement made by policy-makers have been contested. Concerns about the unpredicted and damaging long-term effects of these policies can be linked to the limitations of systems thinking which underpins much of this education reform. A significant flaw of systems thinking is the level of simplification at which policy-makers operate on abstract categories such as standards, as if they were reality. Based on case study research conducted in two primary schools, this paper suggests that the systemic approach adopted by policy-makers may be contributing to an erosion of educational quality and placing potentially damaging expectations on children.     

Conceptualizing educational leadership: does exploring macro-level facets matters?

The present review attempts to examine the present status of educational leadership highlighting the role of macro-level facets in Asian Pacific context. The conceptualization of educational leadership among researchers so far had been found to vary according to different contexts and situations. Theoretical perspectives associated with educational leadership have either approached the concept from dimensions working outside the school or from dimensions reflecting the personality trait of the principal. There is an urgent need to shift the focus of attention toward understanding educational leadership through an interactive collaboration of these dimensions. Specifically, in school contexts, the phenomenon of educational leadership was explored and theorized from one perspective only, giving less space to have multidisciplinary view, which need to be revived in terms of contexts and associated metaphors of educational leadership. Although the importance of educational leadership has been widely acknowledged, its role still remains unheeded in various sections of education. The purpose of the review, thus, is to gain macro-level insight into this concept which can hopefully answer many aspects of education which are otherwise left unanswered, thereby helping in formulating better educational reforms.     

Making sense of teacher leadership in early childhood education in China

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to offer a theoretical discussion on teacher leadership in early childhood education (ECE) in Chinese contexts. Since 2010, the Chinese government has initiated a comprehensive education reform in ECE, with strategies for developing teacher leadership and promoting education quality. However, at the school level there is a lack of leadership preparation and development, along with a gap between policy initiative and its implementation. How to narrow this gap between policy and practice in teacher leadership has become a critical issue for ECE in China. This paper suggests that ‘formal role or informal role’ and ‘role or practice’ are important dimensions of teacher leadership in a Chinese, policy-driven context. In this regard, it is worth exploring how teacher leadership is conceptualized and enacted in the process of quality improvement and related contextual factors. In doing so, an agenda could be identified for future research, contributing to theories on the development of teacher leadership in the global discourse.     

Education reform in New York City (2002–2013)

In 2002 Michael Bloomberg took office as Mayor of New York City and, over the next 12 years of his administration, oversaw a series of sweeping reforms in order to ‘fix’ the broken education system which he believed he had inherited. This paper details the key policy reforms in New York City’s public school system during this period, assessing the extent to which the reforms were successful and what can be learnt from a policy perspective for other urban education systems. It outlines the radical programme of school closure, structural reform, and the introduction of new measures of accountability and autonomy, concluding that reform in New York City can be grouped into four categories: leadership; structure and schools; accountability; and teachers. While a lack of targeted evaluation means that it is not possible to prove causation, it nonetheless shows that there is a correlation between this set of reforms and the fact that by 2013 New York City’s performance on national tests placed it amongst the best urban school districts in America when compared with other cities serving similar populations.     

Policy Making at the School Level: Some Issues for the 90's

Abstract

In this article we discuss how central governments can promote the development of policy at school level which will lead to quality improvement. The development of school level policy does not mean abandoning the role of central government as a driving force in school improvement, which would clearly be unacceptable in many countries. Instead, it may mean a change in the relationship between policy making at different levels. The main question is: under which conditions can schools develop their own policy that permits them to coordinate and act in unity, but which also fits in the framework of central government policies. This question may be examined from the perspective of central government policy makers, or from that of professional educators working within schools. In this article we choose the latter perspective. We will examine the factors that confront school level policy makers and the ways in which they can deal with them. Our intention is to provide a framework for policy action at the school level, within the assumption that there is a national government policy direction.     

On the issues of digital competence in educational contexts – a review of literature

In this review focus is on how digital competence in educational contexts has been addressed in international research over the last 10 years in terms of policy, organizational infrastructures, strategic leadership as well as teachers and their teaching practices. The analysis shows that although research on digital competence in educational contexts has increased, knowledge on digital competence related to organizational infrastructures and strategic leadership are sparse. The analysis indicated that most research focuses on the specific competence needed by teachers and therefore tends to neglect the influence of broader contextual conditions in the wider school setting. Based on the review, three suggestions for further research can be provided. Firstly, to address research on organizational infrastructures and digital competent leadership. Secondly, to elaborate on theoretical frameworks that can close the gap between research on policy, organizational infrastructures, strategic leadership as well as teachers and their teaching practices. A third suggestion is for researchers to become involved in the development of new approaches that can enhance digital competence in educational contexts. It can be concluded that digital competence might not benefit from being regarded as an isolated phenomena on the level of single actors. Rather, it can be regarded as an organizational task, influenced and driven by several contextual factors embedded within and across a wider school organization.     

School leadership and intercultural understanding: school foyers as situated spaces for doing diversity

Internationally, Intercultural Understanding (ICU) is increasingly prevalent in the field of education. The recent evidence base includes a growing academic literature and examples of specified education policy and curricula. In regards to leveraging ICU, research suggests a multi-level and longitudinal approach is needed to ensure effective and sustainable school change. Significant gaps exist in the literature about the contextual factors across all school levels that facilitate or impede the development of ICU. These gaps include research and action pertaining to school leadership. This paper draws from interviews and visual data generated in a large Australian study and focuses on the centrality of a single architectural feature of the school, the school foyer, and how principals grapple with the (re)design of these spaces to assert themselves as interculturally capable schools. Discourses of educational leadership have historically relied on well-worn leadership models of operational practices rather than explicitly framing an understanding of diversity to support intercultural capabilities. During a period of mandated Australian curriculum reform and assessment, this paper offers another way of ‘Doing Diversity’ of interest to policy makers and school leadership keen to embed ICU in their schools while highlighting the significant role school leaders have in progressing ICU.     

促进教师发展的校长领导力研究——以两所初中学校校长为个案

以素质教育为核心的教育改革对学校管理带来了冲击与挑战。它要求教师转变传统的教学观,学习新的知识和教学方法。校长是学校管理的关键人物,其领导实践对于帮助教师发展具有重要作用。本研究采用质性研究方法,尝试揭示两位校长在真实情境中帮助教师发展的领导实践全貌与过程。研究发现,促进教师发展的校长领导力主要具有以下三方面的特征:(1)以提升教师专业知识与技能的工具取向为主;(2)以转变教师认知、情感与态度的文化取向为辅;(3)在规范教师教学行为与激发教师改革动机之间寻求平衡。     

School Leadership and System Leadership

School effectiveness and improvement research shows that leadership plays a key role in ensuring the vitality and growth of schools. Yet, there is growing appreciation (Elmore 2000, 2) that “public schools and school systems as presently constituted are simply not led in ways that enable them to respond to the increasing demands they face under standards-based reforms.” For Elmore (2000, 2) and others, the way out of this problem is “through the large scale improvement of instruction, something public education has been unable to do to date, but which is possible with dramatic changes in the way public schools define and practice leadership.”     

Reform of teacher education in China: a survey of policies for systemic change

ABSTRACT

This paper adopts an inductive analytical approach to reviewing the major state policies to reform teacher education in China. Based on the perceived impact on teachers and teacher education, 21 policy documents have been selected for this review. Five themes emerge in the analysis, which include: Expansion of teacher education by institutional diversification; structural changes through upgrading, merging and eliminating institutions and school; innovations on modes of teacher preparation, curricula and teaching practicum; certification and examinations; and strengthening teacher supply for the rural schools. The paper also analyses the contextual and systemic factors that affect the formulation and implementation of reform policies in teacher education and critically reflect the effect of these policies on Chinese teacher education.     

New public management as a global education policy: its adoption and re-contextualization in a Southern European setting

In the education sector, new public management (NPM) has crystallized in policies such as school autonomy, professionalization of school principals, standardized evaluation and teachers’ accountability, and it has been widely disseminated by international organizations, such as the OECD, which enjoy a great prestige when it comes to frame education reforms in European countries.

This article analyses the way NPM has been constructed as a global education policy, and its adoption and re-contextualization into the Spanish education context. This article shows that the reasons for adopting NPM are not so different from those prevailing in other countries where these policies have been implemented before. Counter-intuitively, although NPM is a reform programme traditionally initiated by conservative governments, in the Spanish education field, as also happened in other Central and Northern European countries, it has been adopted and regulated with social democratic governments. In all these countries, social democrats have tended to embrace NPM as an attempt to address the legitimacy crisis of the welfare state and of public services in particular.

Nonetheless, in Spain, the NPM reforms have been re-contextualized and regulated in very uneven and paradoxical ways. For a combination of political, institutional and economic reasons, the final form adopted by the NPM approach is far from the model advocated by the international community and is deeply contradictory.

Our arguments are based on intensive fieldwork that include, on the one hand, interviews with key education policy-makers and stakeholders and, on the other, document analysis of policy briefings, press releases and legal documents.     

我国幼小衔接教育政策的演变与反思——基于对1949~2019年相关政策文本的分析

从新中国成立至今,我国就幼小衔接教育工作相继出台过一系列教育政策,经历了从幼儿园单向执行主体时期(1949~1988年)到幼儿园和小学双向执行主体时期(1989~2009年)再到多元利益相关者执行主体时期(2010年至今)的演变过程。本研究采用由政策工具和幼小衔接生态系统维度构成的分析框架对这些教育政策进行分析,结果发现其使用的政策工具趋于多元化,但各类政策工具的组合配置仍缺乏系统性;幼小衔接生态系统趋于综合化,但各子系统的具体内容仍不够全面;政策总体趋于科学化,但在幼小衔接关键问题上仍不够科学;中央政府与地方政府颁布的相关政策一致性较高,但在互补性上仍有待提高。政策工具的特性、政府的偏好、幼小衔接生态系统的复杂性及相关研究的滞后是影响我国幼小衔接教育政策的主要因素。未来在完善幼小衔接教育政策时,应注意中央政府与地方政府相关政策的衔接和互补;根据政策问题的性质选择恰当的政策工具,优化政策工具之间的组合配置;合理利用激励性工具和能力建设工具,提升幼小衔接教育政策的可行性;全面剖析幼小衔接生态系统中的各方利益诉求,统筹配置相关政策工具;加强幼小衔接关键问题研究和政策转化,促进幼小衔接教育政策科学发展。     

School leadership for the future: heroic or distributed? Translating international discourses in Norwegian policy documents

School leadership as a key for school reforms has become a dominant theme in education, as demonstrated by a growing body of research during the last 15 years. Still, little attention has been paid to how changing international discourses on school leadership are translated into national public policy documents during the last decade. As such, this study provides additional insight into this field by analysing how Norwegian policy documents translate international discourses and re-contextualise national constructs of school leadership. Inspired by a critical approach, the authors address this issue by identifying discursive shifts in ideas about school leadership roles and practices. Based on an examination of four recent white papers on Norwegian education and school leadership, the authors argue that the policy documents constructed a tension between an international ‘explicit’ principal and a national ‘docile’ principal in 2003–2004, while recent documents construct a consensus-oriented, distributed leadership role for principals through the term ‘facilitating school leaders’. This may lead to contested interpretations as to how to perform school leadership in practice.     

Managing managerialism in church school leadership: a practitioner inquiry in the theology of education

This paper is written from the perspective of an Anglican head teacher in the context of UK public educational policy in which managerialism is construed as the prevalent orthodoxy of reform. It seeks to bring the discipline of theology and the field of school leadership studies into closer dialogue around the theme of managerialism in a way that will benefit academic scholarship and practitioner researchers. Firstly, it explores The Way Ahead report as an impetus to critical theological reflection about Christian vocation and the distinctive role of church school head teachers. Secondly, it indicates how the site of managed reality is important for theology and how the theology of education might be pursued in defence of education. Against claims that doing theology tends to domesticate education, it is argued that theology can help provide an important countercultural perspective intended for the good of education. Thirdly, it outlines the background of public educational policy which makes countercultural theology an appropriate response in the service of a faith‐inspired professionalism. Fourthly, it suggests how a countercultural model of contextual theology can collaborate with important forms of research in the field of educational leadership, management and administration.     

Combining Institutional and Distributed Frameworks in Studies of School Leadership

ABSTRACT

The premise of this article is that studies of distributed leadership could benefit from further incorporation of institutional approaches to better understand complex reform demands facing school leaders working for instructional improvement. We begin by articulating the core components of a distributed perspective on leadership and of an institutional perspective on organizational change. We next describe our methods for reviewing a purposeful sample of 28 highly cited empirical articles on distributed school leadership in K-12 settings. We argue that studies that fully integrate institutional and distributed perspectives can contribute important insights on how school leaders manage the pressures of complex policy environments and the role of collective structuration in defining and legitimating distributed leadership practice.     

Creativity and performativity policies in primary school cultures

Cultures of performativity in English primary schools refer to systems and relationships of: target‐setting; Ofsted inspections; school league tables constructed from pupil test scores; performance management; performance related pay; threshold assessment; and advanced skills teachers. Systems which demand that teachers ‘perform’ and in which individuals are made accountable. These policy measures, introduced to improve levels of achievement and increased international economic competitiveness, have, potentially, profound implications for the meaning and experience of primary teachers’ work; their identities; their commitment to teaching; and how they view their careers. At the same time as policies of performativity are being implemented there is now increasing advocacy for the adoption and advancement of ‘creativity’ policies within primary education. These major developments are being introduced in the context of a wide range of social/educational policies also aimed at the introduction of creativity initiatives into schools and teaching. This complex policy context has major implications for the implementation process and also primary teachers’ work and how they experience it. The ethnographic research reported in this article has been conducted over a school year in six English primary schools in order to analyse the effects of creativity and performativity policy initiatives at the implementation stage. The article concludes by arguing that in the schools of our research the drive to raise pupil test scores involves both performative and creative strategies and that this critical mediation goes beyond amelioration toward a more complex view of professional practice. Implementing creativity and performativity policies provided important contextual influencing factors on teacher commitment. These were: curriculum coverage and task completion; and providing psychic rewards of teaching.     

University–School Partnerships in English Pre-service Teacher Education: A Dialogic Inquiry into a Co-teaching Initiative

Evidence has been accumulating for some time about the impact of standards-based education reforms on schools and schooling, but there has been little research investigating the influence of these reforms on university-based initial teacher education (ITE). This article critically inquiries into the effects of these reforms on an ITE co-teaching project where a secondary English teacher in a school was seconded to work for a year as a teacher educator in an Australian university in a praxis-based partnership. Using Cavarero’s framing of ‘who’ and ‘what’ narratives, and Bakhtinian discourse theory, the authors present three autobiographical narratives exploring different perspectives on their experiences in the co-teaching partnership. The article affirms the value of school–university praxis partnerships for speaking back to standards-based reforms, but acknowledges that this speaking back involves complex relational and dialogic work in grappling with institutional and system-wide policies and practices.     

Teachers and teaching in China: a critical reflection

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critical review of the impact of policy-induced changes on school teachers in the Chinese Mainland where educational reform has been an ongoing project for four decades. It addresses three aspects of the current state of teaching and the teaching profession: the contextual factors that have influenced their development; the state policies that effected the teachers; and the lessons that can be drawn from the reform experiences of the teachers. By examining the changes that have occurred in curriculum and teaching, teacher preparation and training, and teacher professionalism and leadership, this paper argues for a more inclusive approach to policy formulation and implementation that can accommodate the needs of frontline teachers serving in the diverse educational settings of Chinese schooling.     

Reformation of the Macedonian teacher education programme, 1999 – 2001

Background: In the last decade, much research attention has been paid to notions of leadership and the professional identity of school. It is widely agreed that school principals play a very important role in school improvement; international reports point to ‘school leadership’ as a key factor in education quality, and recent studies suggest that the leadership identity of principals is critical for achieving effective leadership in schools worldwide.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to conduct a thematic exploration of the literature relating to school principals and leadership identity.

Design and methods: A scoping review was carried out. Two major databases were searched for papers published on this topic in the last decade. Once we had established an overview of research on this subject, we conducted a thematic analysis to identify the topical focus of research.

Results: We found that the literature reflected an increasing and intensified interest in the topic of school leadership as the decade progressed. Furthermore, a range of emerging subtopics was identified. These included the relationship between school culture and professional identity in school principals; the influence of ethical and personal factors on the professional development of principals; the dilemmas of balancing education policies and personal experiences; and the relationships between gender identity, racial identity, professional experience/career, training and leadership identity.

Conclusions: Several key issues emerged from the studies included in this review, such as the importance of external and internal influences in the construction of the professional identity of school principals. Some of the research suggested that school leaders felt the need to develop a new professional identity. Overall, the study indicates that school leadership and its relationship with school improvement should remain an important focus for educational research investigation.