Process leaders – a sustainable strategy for school development?

Year: 2016

Author: Nehez, Jaana

Type of paper: Abstract refereed

Abstract:
In this study we examine an example of educational leadership in transition in a municipal initiative, in which middle leadership positions, so called process leaders, were created in order to enhance learning and teaching practices. Three years ago around 60 teachers and preschool teachers (every 8th pedagogue) were appointed by their principals to become process leaders in a school district in the municipality. This was a commonly agreed strategy in the leadership group to meet demands on locally organized forms for school development and teacher professional learning related to national requirements. A course was set up by the development leaders (also being doctoral students at the time) in the municipality, on knowledge about change processes, leadership and action learning. Now, three years later, we want to study what happened with this initiative and especially explore how the process leaders and the school practices where they work have evolved through this initial period of time.Two years ago a survey was conducted on all schools/preschools in the municipality with process leaders to map their self-efficacy. This has been followed up by new surveys to find out where there has been a change in this sense and also where this seems to be connected to the presence of process leaders. Two schools/preschools where there has been a positive change and two schools where there has been a negative change are chosen for further investigations. In those schools interviews will be conducted with groups of teachers, process leaders and also principals. Following the theoretical outline in the over-all abstract of the symposia, questions will be asked to explore if the process leaders have had the role as some kind of “translators”, and in that case translators of what and in what ways. Through a study where we already know something about changes (in self-efficacy), and the voices of many actors in the practices are taken into account, we aim at not only being able to say something about translation processes from an individual or group- perspective, but also about the impact this may have on the practices where the translation is taking place.

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