Search results for "educational leaders"
showing 10 items of 42 documents
A systematic narrative review of prosociality in educational leadership
2018
Organizational scholars have vigorously and long studied being prosocial in defining ‘prosociality’ as motivation, behavior, and impact to help or benefit others. This study attempts to provide an overview of previous studies that have approached the elements of being prosocial in educational leadership contexts. However, most of the prosocial elements in education are not explicitly defined as prosociality and have not yet been systematically studied. Thus, this study explored the research questions: (a) What elements could be involved in prosociality within educational leadership? (b) Who could be involved in the process of prosociality in educational leadership? The final corpus of this …
Work-related stress of elementary school principals in Finland: Coping strategies and support
2021
The present study aimed to investigate elementary school principals’ self-reported causes of work-related stress, their coping strategies to deal with stress and the support they need for their leadership. Seventy-six principals filled in the questionnaire, which included open-ended questions. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the data. The results showed that the main sources of stress were workload, interpersonal conflicts, a lack of resources and internal pressures. Moreover, principals used emotion-focused, problem-focused and social coping to deal with stress. Additionally, principals reported a need for problem-focused support and social support for their leadership. T…
Elementary school principals’ work from the ecological systems perspective: Evidence from Finland
2022
The present study aimed to investigate elementary school principals’ work from the ecological systems perspective and which elements of their work are experienced as demands or resources. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22 principals. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the data. The results show that the way principals experience their work is individual and influenced by several internal and external factors. Some of the most extensive demands appear to be related to interaction with different stakeholders in situations where principals have the role of mediator in solving conflicting situations. Challenges also seem to arise in dealing with elements or issues…
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…