Search results for "Educational Leadership"
showing 10 items of 39 documents
Latvia: School Principals and Leadership Research in Latvia
2016
This article is aimed at researchers in international education and leadership in education as well as others interested in comparative education policies and the situation in Latvia as a postcommunist country. The first years after gaining independence characterized by crucial changes in all spheres in education and life in general cannot boast with important research results as it was necessary to cope with the complexity of the situation and the endless challenges education was facing. First of all, it was necessary to evaluate experiences in the previous authoritarian education management. Secondly, rich expertise of democratic education in Western countries, including various forms of …
Local Decisions Under Central Watch: A Nordic Quality Assurance System
2013
Quality assurance or accountability, as we use the term, refers to when an actor, in virtue of contractual obligations, has the right to hold another actor responsible to a set of standards, to judge whether the standards have been met and to impose sanctions if the standards are deemed unfulfilled. In this chapter, we compare how (and if) these rights have been distributed and enacted in educational administration in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. By specifying contractual obligations, we wish to separate accountability from other kinds of asymmetric power relations, such as those between parent and child, and focus on acts of delegation and control.
Agency-centred coupling — a better way to manage an educational organization?
2014
Teachers at the present time face continuous changes in their work and organizational practices. However, we lack empirical evidence as to what this implies for teachers and their work. This paper describes how two Finnish educational organizations restrict or enable teachers’ professional agency, in terms of how the teachers influence the conditions and contents of their work. The paper further addresses how agency is related to: (i) organizational and educational transformations, (ii) teachers’ professional development and identity negotiations and (iii) teachers’ commitment to the educational organization and well-being at work. This paper provides the comparative research evidence on bo…
Control and Trust in Local School Governance
2014
External school inspection and state supervision represent key instruments in many European countries for improving the quality of education. Although some countries, such as England, France, and the Netherlands, have a long tradition of school inspectorates, other countries such as Sweden only recently reintroduced a school inspection system (Johansson O, Holmgren M, Nihlfors E, Moos L, Skedsmo G, Paulsen JM, Risku M, Local Decisions under Central Watch – a new Nordic quality assurance system. In: Moos L (ed) Transnational influences on values and practices in Nordic educational leadership – is there a Nordic model? Springer, Dordrecht, 2013). In Denmark, the relationship between the state…
Democracy in complex networks:political leaders and administrative professionals
2015
The core assumption in this chapter is that political actors and civil servants on the municipal level share in the common societal responsibility for the education and upbringing of the next generation. Using a filter of five core public-governance logics in the analysis of our data – the marketplace logic, the managerial, the public, the professional and the ethical –we find both similarities and differences between politicians and civil servants. We analyse how politicians and administrators are positioned in the system and how they develop their commitment to, and their competencies to take part in furthering, both a democratic education and an efficient and effective governance system,…
Realisation of strategic leadership in leadership teams' work as experienced by the leadership team members of basic education schools
2013
This article introduces a quantitative research into how the leadership team members of 49 basic education schools in the city of Vantaa, Finland, experienced the realisation of strategic leadership in their leadership teams' work. The data were collected by a survey of 24 statements, rated on a five-point Likert scale, and analysed with the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The only variant explaining the differences in experiencing the realisation of strategic leadership in the leadership teams' work statistically, almost significantly, was the leadership team membership.
Partnership for training. Parents, teachers and leaders: the educating community
2021
Family and school are the educational agencies that play a primary role in the child development. Therefore, an educational partnership based on values and responsibilities sharing and on the mutual respect of competences is necessary. This idea is reflected in Bronfenbrenner (1979; 2001), Epstein (2018), Eccles and Harold (2013) theoretical/methodological models and in the Pati (2019) pedagogical-epistemic reflection. Starting from this theoretical framework, it is considered necessary to investigate the point of view of teachers, parents and managers in order to provide a clear vision of the practices of educational co-responsibility in reference to the Italian school context. We predicte…
Three orientations for understanding educational autonomy: school principals’ voices from Australia, Finland, and Jamaica
2021
This paper reports on the findings from a multi-site case study conducted in Australia, Finland and Jamaica which explored the conditions that enabled and constrained the autonomy of school principals. Systematic data collection was carried out in the form of interviews of school principals and the data was analysed using a qualitative approach. The analysis indicates that: (1) school principals’ practices are prefigured by the peculiarities of historical trajectories and ideological traditions enmeshed in schooling sites; (2) these prefiguring arrangements in turn influence varying realisations of autonomous decision making practices across national sites; and (3) even in the expression of…
The Cultural and Social Foundations of Ethical Educational Leadership in Finland
2021
This chapter provides the Finnish scope on cultural and social foundations of ethical educational leadership. Finland is often seen as an outlier. Predominant transnational trends are recognized but they tend to reach Finland with a delay and manifest themselves somewhat differently from the mainstream. There are contextual reasons for the deviance. We will present these focusing on how cultural and social aspects have been evolving in Finland. Furthermore, we will analyse the constituents, organisation and responsibilities embedded in the Finnish education system. This analysis makes use of contemporary education policy documents including legislation and other regulations, curricula, and …