This study explores how Norwegian school leaders develop their capacity for instructional leadership, a leadership style that is strongly related to school effectiveness and school improvement across a range of national school systems. The concept captures important aspects of Norwegian school leaders’ task preferences. To gain further insight into the process of developing the capacity for instructional leadership, this study links instructional leadership to school leaders’ core practices. The multidimensional concept of core practices views school leaders as goal oriented and actively involved in teachers’ collaboration and professional development, observation, and supervision. Moreover, the concept covers school leaders’ efforts to redesign and improve their schools’ instructional programs. In this study, school leaders assessed instructional leadership related to three distinctive core practices: observation and supervision, collaborative learning engagement, and time allocation for data use. Multiple regression analyses were conducted, and overall, the regression model, with all the predictors included as a set, was significant. 28.5% of the variance in school leader's capacity for instructional leadership is explained by the three distinct factors. The results indicate that when school leaders adapt core practices of leadership to their work context, their capacity as instructional leaders increases. The findings and implications will be discussed.

The current study provides an in-depth investigation of critical factors of successful inter- organisational collaboration involving upper secondary schools, vocational communities situated at department levels, and labour market partners in the school’s local environment. The research question that has guided the study is: What are the organisational characteristics of schools and subject departments which are well-performing in terms of a high degree of student completion in vocational education and training? The concept of ‘organisational characteristic’ refers to structures, roles and institutionalised patterns of collaboration involving school teachers, school leaders and labour market partners. The study is designed as a single case study encompassing two units of analysis, embracing school and department levels in their interactions with partners in the labour market. The findings of the study highlight the importance of collaborative learning through the creation and development of specific organisational routines directed towards the core practices of vocational didactics. Moreover, the findings underscore the process of local adaptation activated at the subject- department level and directed towards corresponding businesses and relevant parts of the public sector. Implications for further research and practice are discussed.

Increased attention has been paid to school superintendents and their role in school reforms. Still, there are few studies on dialogue meetings between actors at different levels in the school hierarchy. The current paper investigates how a superintendent balances between trust and control while supporting school development through dialogue meetings. Drawing on interviews, reflection notes, and longitudinal observational data from dialogue meetings, comprising a superintendent, subordinated school leaders, and team leaders, this action research study provides insight into requirements for productive dialogue meetings. We argue that superintendent leadership through regular dialogue meetings can foster trust-building, empowerment, and professional commitment.

This chapter analyzes dominant discourses of European school leadership over the timespan of the last three decades and across the school systems participating in this research project. A large body of literature has portrayed a transition of ideas about school principalship toward the image of the school principal as a relatively autonomous and clearly result-accountable manager. In a similar vein, inherent and longstanding interdependencies between municipalities and schools, on the one hand, and political parties, teacher unions, and interest groups in the local civic society, on the other, have been downplayed in the reform rhetoric and governing principles central to the New Public Management (NPM) doctrines. As a result, an image of the school organization as a local and autonomous service-providing "firm" led by a relatively "sovereign" school principal has evolved in recent decades. These partial changes in the cultural–cognitive and normative basis of the larger school institution, in Scott's terminology, have played out differently in the five systems analyzed in this book, and this chapter will analyze similarities and dissimilarities across the system cases. More specifically, this chapter will inspect how ideas of contemporary school leadership have manifested in school leadership education and training programs across the countries.

The volume is, as was mentioned in the introduction, the product of a symposium, with keynotes and Masterclasses on the basis of individual abstracts brought together under the same theme: ‘Fundamental but often forgotten perspectives on/in school and leadership’. In our title we claim that we are recentring critical potentials in Nordic Leadership research. Now is the time for us to pull things together and reflect on the following: What did we find? Do we reveal critical perspectives in the research?

This chapter will provide an overview of how the Norwegian school institution has evolved from the early 1980s and up to the current situation. During nearly four decades, partly as a result of economic globalization and free markets, economic norms and values have gained greater influence over school philosophy and public sector governance. Since the first PISA study in 2001 placed Norway just at the mean of the participating OECD countries, national media and politicians have focused on how to raise student achievement in basic subjects such as literacy, mathematics, and science, through curriculum reforms and a national quality assurance system. As noted in policy reviews, this development has resulted in a technocratic curriculum regime based on management-by-objectives and ranking of schools and municipalities based on student achievements. In a similar vein, a shift has been observed from the traditional model of public sector governing, in which standardization and equality have been prominent values, toward a service-providing model, where people are mainly seen as consumers or clients. In this institutional context, leadership roles at different levels of the school system have been redefined, and this chapter discusses this development in the light of new institutional theory.

Nordic governments often use phrases like this in education policy discussions. They are vague and serve as fluid signifiers that everybody can interpret and understand in their own way. These phrases are useful when building political consensus or affirmation. The example quoted above is the first of three aims from the 2013 Danish School Reform.

Many phrases used in education policy discussions are very vague.They are fluid signifiers that everybody can interpret and understand in their own way.They are useful when building political consensus or affirmation.

This case study was designed to explore the strategies and actions that high performing schools with sustainable results employ at the district level in a rural part of Norway. The district subjected to the study is characterised by small municipalities and a scattered population, with a few small school administrative units, which might be a challenging context for sustainability and improvement. In response, the districts developed collaborative structures to increase collective learning capacity. The research design involved a collective case study, and it draws on data from interviews with school leaders at the municipal level and local school policy documents. The findings suggest that Norwegian school district actors can facilitate school improvement by shaping collaborating cultures, inter-organisational learning processes and educational infrastructures. Furthermore, the findings highlight the schools’ ability to recognise and value new knowledge from external sources, such as academic institutions and partner schools, assimilate novelties across boundaries and, eventually, utilise these for strategic or operational ends to enhance an organisation’s absorptive capacity. Finally, the findings indicate that superintendents can play important roles through boundary-spanning and gatekeeping activities.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how school principals' leadership competence is enhanced by participation in municipal school district leader teams in the Norwegian context. Design/methodology/approach The study investigated a field sample of 854 school principals working in 252 municipal school leader teams. Hypotheses were developed and tested by using multiple regressions and structural equation modeling; whereas individual- and group-level effects were tested using a hierarchical linear modeling approach. Moderator analyses where undertaken. Findings The results indicate that a supportive group climate in school leader teams is the strongest predictor of the principals' learning outcomes. Moreover, trust to the superintendent and having a competent municipal school owner apparatus also predicted this form of professional development. Moderator analysis provides supplementary insights by showing that the positive effect of a trusting relationship to superintendents is contingent of a competent school owner. Originality/value The study provides empirical evidence regarding the complex dynamics involved in the professional development of school principals in district leadership teams.

Purpose A number of empirical studies and evaluations in Norway and Sweden shows variabilities in the degree to which the municipalities succeed in their endeavors to support school principals' instructional leadership practices. In response to this situation, the Norwegian and Swedish directorates of education have developed a joint collaborative design for practice learning of instructional leadership. Based on findings from two separate studies, the purpose of this paper is to contribute to theory development and improved practice for school district administrators and their subordinated school leaders. Design/methodology/approach The study draws on the data from participants who completed the program in June 2015, June 2016 and June 2017, respectively. The data are based on individual reflection documents from students on their learning and new leadership practices 4 months, 16 months and 28 months after the end of the program. Findings The project subjected to this study, labeled "Benchlearning," involved learning from experiences of others, observational learning, dialogic group learning and in the final round translating what is learnt into the social and cultural context in which the individual school principal's school is situated. When participating school principals experience observation-based learning together with trusted colleagues, followed by vicarious learning from these experiences in their schools, the authors see some facilitating factors to be of particular importance: learning infrastructure, digital tools, compulsory tasks associated with preparation and subsequent experiments with their teachers. Emerging from the analysis was a systematic balancing act of autonomy and structure running through the various learning activities. Finally, a strong evidence was found that developing core competence in digital learning and formative assessment among teaching staff required enhanced distributed leadership across the whole school organization. By sharing leadership tasks on instructional issues with teachers and other non-leaders, principals succeeded in leveling up instructional leadership significantly. Research limitations/implications - The implications of the study can be summed up in the following four principles. First, policy makers should take into accounts the fact that principals' motivation and willingness to initiate change processes can be created in a synergy between structured school visits and engagement in learning groups based on a sound theoretical foundation. Second, within a socially contracted practice in a well-designed learning group, it is possible to raise principals' level of self-efficacy. Third, a systematic reflection process on authentic practice is an example of how principals can develop their metacognitive capacity and how knowledge can be transformed into new practice. Finally, educators should be trained to be process leaders in order to create a balance between demand and support in promoting principals' learning of new instructional leadership practices. Practical implications School district administrators should take into accounts the fact that changing practices will be supported by sense-making processes involving discussions about how new instructional practices are justified. Specifically, shifts in talk and actions will also involve shifts in the ways people relate to each other and how they relate to their internal context. Further, leadership programs should include trying out new practices as the focal learning mode, accompanied by individual and collective reflective activities. Originality/value The findings of the study underscore the mutual interdependence of distributed leadership and student-centered focus accompanied with the school's learning capacity as enabling conditions for principals' practice learning in the field of instructional leadership.

School governing in the Nordic countries has for decades been structured in a three-level government system of state, local authorities and schools. Although there are variations across the countries, this common pattern runs through the Nordic systems. Moreover, in all Nordic countries, a relatively autonomous municipality sector constitutes the intermediate level of school governing. Empirical research on the Nordic systems points to a visible shift of modus from government to governance in Rhodes' (1997) terminology. This development, with the exception of Finland, has been co-existing with the state's up-scaling of quality assurance systems for the purpose of strengthening the schools' accountability for student achievements. The current chapter analyses the shift from government to governance in three distinct areas of governance based on recent research. The first case is the formation of professional networks through which municipal system leaders interact with a range of stakeholders involved in public schooling. The second case refers to the interplay of public schools, municipalities and universities in common efforts to improve schools within a school district. Finally, in the third case the interplay of consulting-companies and public bodies in training programmes for school leaders is analysed. A common thread running through the illustrative cases is the tendency to decouple new governance forms from the political sphere of local authorities. Implications for local policy making, leadership and governance are discussed in the light of the cases.

Core values inherent in the Finnish comprehensive education system can in many respects be interpreted to cluster and cohere around a Bildung discourse, which is paradoxically seen against the backdrop of the system’s stable high rank in PISA, the hallmark of an outcome discourse. Yet the point is that within the frames of a Bildung discourse, the themes in focus for curricula go beyond basic skills with a similarly strong focus on societal values and culture. At the process level, Finland is more deeply and strongly infused with a policy culture that is more compatible with the Bildung tradition than the Anglo-Saxon outcome discourse—with its core values of organizing and leading for relations and teaching. As noted by Finnish scholars, such cultural traits of the Finnish system are viable and can be interpreted as associated with institutional path dependency, anchored in longstanding agrarian and social-democratic values. The current paper interprets these cultural traits also as manifest at the local level around a school strategy model close to the one characterized as a professional commitment strategy in the early 1990s by the American scholars Susan Rosenholtz and Brian Rowan. The purpose of the paper, however, is to advance this theoretical understanding a step further towards a conceptual model of commitment-based school strategy. This paper is, thus, a pure conceptual piece. To elaborate the early insights from the 1990s further, a case drawn from Helsinki primary school is used as an empirical illustration.

The case study subjected in this paper was designed to illuminate how school leadership strategies and interventions mediate external demands, in the form of the academic press, for raised outcomes, imposed from the policy environment on a school with a heterogeneous pupil population. The Norwegian research site is situated in a demographic environment of low pupil socioeconomic status, a group of factors that in other systems predicts 60%—70% of academic achievement. More specifically, the intake environment in which the school is situated is characterized by high ethnic heterogeneity and, for some parts, low scores on parents’ social welfare indicators. Data was collected from a school characterized as low performing, defined by pupil achievement on national tests, yet these outcomes had been progressing over time. Find-ings are based on observations as well as interviews with school leaders, teachers, the superintendent in the municipality, and pupils, together with a pupil survey. The paper analyzes various leadership strategies and interventions as mediating functions between the external academic press from the school district level and the internal cultural context of the school. Specifically, the findings suggest that building a core culture of inclusive ethos for all pupils, paired with pedagogical collaboration, and democratic and servant leadership, are important devices for mastering this form of diversity. The leadership practices and collaborative focus were furthermore anchored in a systemic and more integrative school organization that purposefully com-bined hierarchical structure with horizontal elements in a matrix-like design.

The modernization of governance and the marketization of the Danish public education sector since the 1980s, has resulted in changes both in the constitutive conditions and in the discursive understandings framing the purpose of the public education system for educational leaders, teachers, and social educators working in schools. We know less about how the neoliberal modernization processes affect the schools at a micro-processual sensemaking level and a relational power level. In this analytical perspective, there is a scientific need to understand how these organizing and sensemaking processes are conducted through the discursive construction of power relations in modernized, institutional settings, and how these processes affect the organizational understandings, professional identities and social relations of the members in a high-achieving Danish public school. I investigate leadership from a micro-analytical perspective, as interaction processes centered around the creation of common understanding and the enactment of policy, and mobilize a theoretical understanding of leadership processes as social sensemaking constructions that are constituted, framed and transformed in a given context of discursive and institutional power. I argue that the members of the organization holding both formal and informal leadership positions construct understandings through social power struggles in ambiguous and contradictory discursive orders. Further, these struggles create new power relations and democratic forms of leadership within a hidden power structure of a high-achieving Danish school owing to governance transitions in the Danish public education sector.

This paper analyses productive patterns through which school superintendents and subordinated principals collaborate at the local levels of implementation in the Nordic countries. The underlying theoretical premise is that the school governance systems in the Nordic countries, as a function of strengthened state steering and a variety of local political conditions, entail a series of loose couplings—described by the broken chain metaphor. The analysis is based on a review of findings from a comparative Nordic research project. The review reveals that school superintendents and principals to a large extent activate professional learning forums as integration mechanism—to make collective sense of ambiguous national reforms. Important learning conditions that emerge from the country reports, on which the reviewed research is based, seem to cluster and cohere around learning climate, interpersonal trust, leadership support and a shared knowledge base between the school leaders and the municipal apparatus. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

A sample of 166 individual participants in 47 school leadership teams was used to investigate the multilevel relationships between individual learning outcomes and two dimensions of individual mastery achievement goal orientationmastery approach goals (MAP), and an emotionally modified measure of mastery avoidance goals (MAV)and two group-level emergent beliefs, namely, team potency and team psychological safety. All variables were independently positively related to individual learning; however, team potency had no incremental effect above team psychological safety. MAP and team potency interacted negatively on individual learning, indicating that the emergence of high potency in teams may compensate for low average level of MAP in teams. When running the complete research model, MAV and team psychological safety remained positively related to individual learning, in contrast to team potency and MAP. The implications of the findings for leadership teams are discussed.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between school leadership practices and teacher empowerment in the Finnish policy culture. Specifically, moral leadership and distributed leadership enacted by school principals are tested in a simultaneous design as predictor to two distinct yet related aspects of teachers’ sense of empowerment, respectively, in their work domain and their classroom domain.Design/methodology/approach– The study investigated a field sample of 246 individual teachers from ten Finnish primary schools. Hypotheses were developed and tested by structural equation modeling.Findings– The results indicate that moral leadership exerted by school principals support teachers’ sense of empowerment both in work domain and classroom domain. Distributed leadership, in the meaning of sharing instructional leadership tasks with teachers, supported work domain empowerment but did not predict classroom domain teacher empowerment. Taken together, the model show the value of school principals facilitating teachers in decision-making processes paired with showing a strong moral basis in their relationship with teachers.Research limitations/implications– The study reinforces the importance of moral leadership and distributed leadership as conjoint drivers for teachers’ sense of empowerment. It would be highly valuable to replicate this study in various multi-level settings.Practical implications– The findings recommend school leaders to put emphasis on facilitative, ethical, and authentic practices in immediate relationships with their teachers.Originality/value– The study provides empirical evidence regarding the partial relationships between principal leadership practices and teacher empowerment.