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Professional Development in Education, Exploring school leaders’ dilemmas…
Professional Development in Education
Backgrounds
Why was this study undertaken?
The aim of this study was to provide insight into the role school leaders see for themselves and
others in response to teachers’ agency tensions.
What issues do the authors outline as important?
(1) Which dilemmas do school leaders perceive in situations that include agency tensions for
teachers?
(2) Which leadership instruments and responsible actors do school leaders select in response to
different situations with agency tensions?
Aim
In my own words: What are the aims of this article?
The author want to provide other perspective of how the school leaders response in the development of teachers and the big role they play in making it better or worse.
How do I understand these aims in the context of the background given by the authors?
In general, these scholars emphasise
that:
(a) learning should be a focus for all actors in the school (students, teachers, leaders, organisational
(b) leaders can create capacity for teachers to develop through fostering a favourable
organisational climate for learning, and
(c) shared or school-wide leadership is emphasised which means that everyone in the school is a potential leader and teachers can take the lead in developing the school.
Method
using a projective research strategy in the form of a qualitative vignette questionnaire, which uses case descriptions of tense situations to elicit school leaders’ action considerations (Donoghue 2000).
Research design
=> Questionnaire or interview are insufficient Therefore, we chose a projective research strategy
(Donoghue 2000) that asks participants indirect about their actions as opposed to directly.
=> For this study, we took this principle as a starting point, but we focused on the
qualitative part as we realised that pre-structured response options would make it difficult to undstand why certain variables would elicit what kind of decision-making (Barter and Renold 2000).
Participants
For this study, we chose to include both team managers and principals because we expected agency tensions mainly related to the primary process of teaching. We approached 147 school leaders from our networks of three universities both verbally and through email and asked them to fill out our online questionnaire. The vignette questionnaire was eventually filled out by 50 Dutch school leaders (34% response rate with 23 incomplete questionnaires).
Vignette questionnaire
==> consists of short, narrative case descriptions of hypothetical though
recognisable situations designed to elicit participants’ judgements of these situations.
==> The vignettes in our study contained agency tensions, which are teachers’ feeling of friction between what is afforded and their personal features (Schaap et al. 2019).
Results
even though school leaders perceive different dilemmas in similar situations (vignettes), there appears to be a dominant dilemma for a couple of vignettes (see Table 4).
School leaders described dilemmas in all vignettes related to the school management, which was often related to the vision of the school, the school’s culture or with (un)clear communication of expectations.
Also, school leaders’ interpretations of the dilemmas seem to impact the selected leadership instruments due to the framing of the situation, i.e. prognostic or diagnostic (Coburn 2006).
From our findings it becomes clear that school leaders can take up many possible roles in responding to tense situations, e.g. making expectations explicit, exploring mutual expectations for professional development, formulating a vision collaboratively with teachers, showing trust to teachers, and taking away resistance or anxiety experienced by teachers.
School leaders’ perspectives on teacher agency are thus not limited to ‘simply’ providing teachers with enough development resources but rely heavily on their social interactions with colleagues and teachers.
Significance
My own evaluation
Results
Dilemmas in the vignettes
(1) related to the school organisation
(2) related to teachers’
attitudes or behaviour.
Exploring school leaders’ dilemmas in response to
tensions related to teacher professional agency