Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Catholic district offices support school leaders’ instructional leadership practices at times of major reform.

The paper employs the theory of practice architectures as a lens through which to examine local site-based responses to system-wide reforms in two Australian Catholic secondary schools and their district offices. Data collection for these parallel case studies included semi-structured interviews, focus groups, teaching observations, classroom walkthroughs and coaching conversations.

Findings suggest that in the New South Wales case, arrangements of language and specialist discourses associated with a school improvement agenda were reinforced by district office imperatives. These imperatives made possible new kinds of know-how, ways of working and relating to district office, teachers and students when it came to instructional leading. In the Queensland case, the district office facilitated instructional leadership practices that actively sought and valued practitioners’ input and professional judgment.

The research focussed on two case studies of district offices supporting school leaders’ instructional leadership practices at times of major reform. The findings are not generalizable.

Practically, the studies suggest that for excellent pedagogical practice to be embedded and sustained over time, district offices need to work with principals to foster communicative spaces that promote explicit dialogue between teachers and leaders’ interpretive categories.

The paper contends that responding to the diversity of secondary school sites requires district office practices that reject a one size fits all formulas. Instead, district offices must foster site-based education development.

The paper adopts a practice theory approach to its study of district support for instructional leader’ practices. A practice approach rejects a one size fits all approach to educational change. Instead, it focusses on understanding how particular practices come to be in specific sites, and what kinds of conditions make their emergence possible. As such, it leads the authors to consider whether and how different practices such as district practices of educational reforming or principals’ instructional leading might be transformed, or conducted otherwise, under other conditions of possibility.

Middle leaders are educators whose practices of building relational trust are critical for generating the kind of strong and sustainable professional learning communities necessary for leading productive site-based education development in their school. This chapter specifically focuses how building an ethic of relational trust, experienced in five interrelated dimensions, aligns with establishing core foundational conditions for building community. Building trust and communities of professional learners are not mutually exclusive – in fact, each reciprocally facilitates, progresses, supports, and sustains the development of the other. The foundations for community building, described as cornerstones, form over time and progressively involve, and achieve, contextuality, commitment, communication, collaboration, criticality, and collegiality. Reflection questions are provided throughout; these are designed to directly focus the attention of middle leaders towards understanding and developing their own trust practices, that with time, create conditions for generating strong viable communities of professional practice.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the governance of educational reform, as an interpretive process – “interpretive governance” – through a case study of five superintendents living in a predominantly Swedish-speaking region in Finland.

To foreground superintendents’ perspectives on reforms as simultaneously reflective and constitutive of governance processes, the research applies and extends Rhodes’ (2012) notions of “network governance,” “meta-governance” and “interpretive governance.” Interpretive governance, an underresearched area, is construed as particularly important for developing better insights into how school reform is understood by key actors involved in its enactment.

The research identifies what are described as three “deliberative” dimensions of interpretive governance; these modes of governance are elaborated as “dialogic,” “directive” and “defensive” in nature.

The study reveals senior educators’ interpretations of governance as multifaceted, and argues that these complex modes of deliberation need to be taken into account to better understand how school development is understood and enacted in municipal and school settings.

Site‐based management depends on collaboration and teamwork among teachers, administrators, and parents. Collaborative decision making in educational systems is frequently characterized by conflict and disagreement, given differing perspectives and opinions among participants, and differing interests in the status quo. School principals, charged with facilitator roles in locally managed schools, are challenged to address resulting conflicts in ways that yield functional synergies and constructive outcomes which enable schools to respond to community needs. The purpose of this study is to develop a profile of preferred conflict management behaviors and strategies of a sample of principals in a large, urban school district who work in site‐based managed schools. Results reflect these principals’ preference for solution‐oriented conflict strategies. Findings are discussed in terms of the changing leadership responsibilities of principals in site‐based managed schools.

With the introduction in 1988 of a system of site‐based management in England and Wales, schools are now operating in a radically altered planning context in which responsibility for strategic planning has been delegated from local education authorities (LEAs) to individual schools. Although school development planning has been widely adopted by LEAs in the UK as a rational approach to site‐based planning, indicative research suggests that strategic planning in a sample of schools operating in the newly decentralized environment has been slower to develop in practice than originally anticipated. Evidence of a lack of a coherent planning process in schools casts doubt on their ability to operate successfully in the strategic vacuum likely to be created if the gradual demise of LEAs continues. Suggests that if schools are to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by site‐based management to plan and sustain their own long‐term improvement and development, a thorough review may be needed by central government of their existing laissez faireattitudes towards site‐based planning, if there is not to be considerable long‐term damage to the national education service as a whole.

The primary purpose is to present empirical measures of variables relating to practices engaged in by site‐based teams, and then to use these variables to test a model predicting significant outcomes of site‐based decision making. The practice variables of site‐based management (SBM) teams are essential in promoting research within a distributed leadership framework.

A path model is computed to test the relationships between factors relating to the support received by site‐based teams; site team communication and decision‐making practice, and perceived outcomes of SBM. Measures are based on survey data collected from 367 team members in 50 schools from fifteen school districts in a northeastern state in the US.

Results show that different factors relating to the support provided to site‐based teams and practices employed by these teams emerge as statistically significant predictors of various outcomes. Results suggest that the resources provided to support site teams, e.g. the devolution of decision‐making power, results in enhanced stakeholder influence, but whether this influence results in better decisions or improvement in teaching and learning depends on the communication and decision‐making practices site teams employ within a distributed leadership framework.

This study sought to identify site team decision making and communication processes that reflect how site teams conduct their work, defining how members of site teams perceive the “rules of the game.” In doing so, it offers a new and different perspective on how such processes impact outcomes associated with shared decision‐making processes, and thus a better understanding of the complex dynamics of school‐site decision making and the distribution of leadership in schools.

This paper examines the impact and effects of site‐based management on schools using a framework developed by Canadian researchers, Sackney and Dibski. It draws on research literature from the UK, New Zealand and Australia and includes results from three studies in which the author has been engaged. The Sackney and Dibski framework is used to lay seven “charges” against site‐based management – that site‐based management leads to greater decision‐making flexibility, changes the work role and increases the workload of principals, improves student learning outcomes, increases innovation, increases competition, results in reduced funding and affects the standing of the public education system. The analysis of the literature selected suggests that site‐based management is guilty of some and not of others.

During a site-based certification program in a large county school district in the southeastern United States, 14 educators took 7 graduate courses on teaching emergent bilinguals. These educators made a shift in their practices and perceived a corresponding shift in their teaching efficacy. Ten years after the onset of this program, researchers returned to the site and conducted a mixed-methods study. The first purpose of this study was to explore educators’ perceptions regarding instructional practices for teaching emergent bilinguals after a decade had passed. The second purpose was to identify course features perceived by educators as having been most instrumental in fostering a long-term transformation in their teaching practices. Data were collected from a survey and interviews with the 14 educators (13 teachers and a program specialist) who had completed this certification program. Results indicated changes in their teaching methods and interactions with parents as well as heightened confidence for taking on leadership roles. Study participants identified professional learning communities, cyclical reflective activities, and action research projects as the course features that had been instrumental in transforming their practices for working with emergent bilinguals. Findings suggest that this site-based certification program was a catalyst for generating individual change that continued beyond program completion. By exploring this decade-long transformation, the current study provides implications for designing and implementing graduate certification courses that prepare in-service teachers to work effectively with emergent bilinguals.