The school is an institution where many actors need to cooperate in order to create an ethical and moral sustainable work environment, with high quality, where students are able to acquire good knowledge and skills. At the school level, teachers have the largest impact on student's learning, but school leaders are also important. The position as a school leader means power over the school's organization and gives a decisive influence over the school's physical and psychological work environment. The aims of the chapter are to raise awareness of the ethical dimensions that a school leader may face in their practice and to provide support to school leaders in handling the ethical dimensions and moral aspects of the assignment, both as an individual and as a leader. The question is, how can research support school leaders in acting in accordance with ethical dimensions and moral aspects so that these perspectives become central to all the school's actors? This question has resulted in a model providing school leaders with guidance in moral-leading actions. Giddens' structuration theory forms the theoretical framework for the chapter.

Principals have an important function in schools’ ability to create high-quality learning and teaching. As the expectations placed on principals are high, large resources are invested in school leadership training, thus necessitating research on the impact of such initiatives. In this article, we report on a longitudinal research study on the training programme for principals in Sweden. The aim was to examine the programme’s impacts on the principals’ leadership and school organisations. We did this by interviewing principals, teachers and students at four schools during the principals’ participation in the programme. Giddens’s theory of structuration was used to analyse the study. The results showed that leadership needs to be foregrounded throughout the training and that awareness of the function of principals in leading schools’ structuration processes (i.e., their creation of meaning making) should be clarified.

Välutbildade skolledare ses som en viktig faktor i utveckling av den lokala skolan. År 2010 blev därför Rektorsprogrammet en obligatorisk utbildning på avancerad akademisk nivå. I en undersökning följer vi en grupp rektorer under de tre år de deltar i programmet. I denna artikel presenteras resultatet av en delstudie i den mer omfattande undersökningen om rektorer i utbildning. Under utbildningen är deltagarna organiserade i ”lärgrupper” i vilka de förväntas arbeta och lära tillsammans. Intentionen är också att ge rektorerna erfarenheter av ett lärande i samspel med kollegor. Delstudiens syfte är att undersöka och förstå rektorernas beskrivningar av de aktiviteter som sker inom studiegruppen. Forskningsfrågor är: 1. Vilka drivkrafter är möjliga att identifiera i rektorers beskrivning av de aktiviteter som sker inom lärgrupperna? 2. Vad möjliggör och begränsar det gemensamma lärandet inom lärgrupperna? Materialet analyseras med hjälp av teorin om praktikarkitekturer.

This article deals with experiences from an action learning project against bullying and degrading treatment among nine Swedish preschools. Even though definitions of bullying and degrading treatment tend to lead to thoughts of school-age children rather than preschoolers, previous research shows that bullying occurs in preschool as well. Our data consist of documentation of improvement work carried out in the preschools that were analysed from both a peer culture perspective and a school improvement perspective. Our main results show that the preschools, by identifying challenges and actions anchored in the local context, hit the target' in their work against bullying and degrading treatment in the preschools. However, the children and their perspectives were rarely taken into account in the improvement work, which we consider as missing the point'. Didactic implications for further preschool action learning projects are discussed.

This book presents systematically six types of schools, with different improvement capacities. Different schools have different capacities for school improvement, depending on the school infrastructur

Six types of school organisations are presented, in which different drivers for improvement capacity can be identified. These are the idea-driven school, the plan-driven school, the model-driven school, the problem-driven school, the profession-driven school and the team-driven school. A short typological description of each type is given. There follows an illustration from a school in our study that represents each type, in which the school’s background is presented, as well as its infrastructure and improvement history. Improvement processes and roles are described. Every type ends with a section on how to understand the empirical example on the basis of the typological description and on possible ways in which this understanding could be transformed into actions that could strengthen the school’s improvement capacity. The relative lengthy descriptions are intended for school leaders and practising teachers. This is so as to increase the possibility for them to recognise themselves in the practice of their improvement capacity. For readers who are more interested in methodological concerns, we recommend them to read the overview at the opening of the chapter, continue with the typological descriptions and then move on to the concluding reflections in Chap. 5 .

Conclusions are summarised in relation to the three aims: to explore and describe the organisation of improvement capacity in local schools, to develop an understanding of this organisation as a practice and as a sensemaking process in local schools and to address support issues in relation to these results. We argue that the idea of drivers and the organisation of capacity develop historically through the practices of local schools and through the daily work of teachers, school leaders and students in a specific school. This history evolves through social life within the school organisation and materialises in teachers’ and school leaders’ relationships to each other, the organisation they have built, the capacity they embrace, the meaning they have given to it and the identities they have developed. Supporting advice on how to use the six school types in local improvement work is given. Finally, we suggest three guidelines for future school development: (1) a policy development from the basis of the local school history; (2) a balance between national governance and local autonomy and (3) state support for the development of school organisations.

The chapter builds on institutional theory and how it explains stability and change in organisations. Loose coupling is described as a common phenomenon to uphold a harmonious relationship between the demands of the external environment and the inner life of the organisation. Organisational development (OD) is presented as a framework to understand the work processes in school organisation when school leaders and teachers do improvement work. The concept of improvement capacity is defined in a socio-structural perspective, encompassing the infrastructure of the school organisation, the improvement processes, the improvement roles and the improvement history of the organisation. Finally, this is framed in a practice and sensemaking perspective. The organisational perspective is contrasted with the need to focus on the teaching situation. The concepts of means and goal-situated strategies are introduced, and four common means-situated strategies are described. We argue for the need for goal-situated strategies and underpin this with a social learning perspective.

Denna utvardering ger besked om insatser och arbetssatt som effektivt forebygger och atgardar mobbning. Utvarderingen ar unik genom att den omfattar stora mangder data, bade kvalitativa och kvantit ...