Case+I+(How+the+course+has+affected+me)

Case 1: Report from a small countryside school (N12 Coming to work at 7.30 in the morning I drop by the kindergarten, say good morning to a couple of early-bird teachers and hello to some students. Then settle down at my desk with an open office door to check the phone and email, primarily for sick leave messages. Substitute teachers have first priority in the morning, then availability. Leader availability is important to students and teachers. I try to drop by a few classrooms in the morning because I have to know what is going on. How else can I give teachers guidance, - without knowing what they're doing in the classrooms and how they communicate with the students? And besides, leadership is essentially about building relations, and then you just have to meet people, students as well as teachers.

 This is a slightly idealized (and radically abbreviated) description of early morning school leadership in practice by Eva, one of our students and a recently appointed head teacher at a small countryside elementary school. In her portfolio text "Searching for my leadership profile" she goes on to discuss some of the challenges her school is facing, before concluding with a six point summary of what she has gained from attending the school leadership program. We choose Eva's list as a framework for discussing the learning outcomes of the national school leadership program, as they have been described by the students themselves in portfolio texts and the course evaluation. Eva deals with points taken up by many of the other students, although her account is the most comprehensive.

 1. "My theoretical knowledge about leadership has been enhanced considerably". Like the great majority of her fellow students she finds the theoretical material that she has been exposed to during the course highly relevant to her job. As Dreyfus has pointed out, there is no expertise without theory //and// practical experience (Tiller 2006). Trained as a teacher, like most school heads in Norway, she has had very little leadership theory and training as part of her formal education. Leadership as a field of study still has low priority in Norwegian teacher training.

According to a recent report (GNIST) 70% of Norwegian school heads have taken some kind of formal leadership training, but this training does not necessarily address the particular challenges of leading schools. Less than half of the teachers asked agree that their school head is a competent manager of instruction and (pedagogical/professional) supervision of teachers. Norwegian school heads have traditionally been recruited among teachers. As such they have had considerable practical leadership experience on classroom level but very little, if any, formal training in supervising such activities.

 2. "I am more conscious of my own strengths and weaknesses as a leader." Considerable time was spent in the early phases of the course on Jung's Type Index, which made the students more aware not only of themselves as individuals with personal preferences, strengths, and weaknesses, but also of their fellow students and colleagues. Furthermore, at the very first assembly the students were asked to observe their fellow grup members in order to report back to them on three positive characteristics that they had noticed during the first three days of meeting with them. This personal feedback was highly appreciated by the students. At the end of the course we ran them through the similar, but more challenging "magical mirror" exercise, where group members left the group but remained within listening distance behind a screen while the rest of the group commented on their leadership strengths and weaknesses, as they saw them. Returning to the group they were encouraged to respond to what they had heard. Students found this a challenging but gratifying experience which enhanced their knowledge of themselves and their fellow group members. Through exercises like these we hope to strengthen their genuine relation building capacity, a core capacity in the exercise of any kind of leadership (ref.).

 3. "I have acquired a network of colleagues and experts." Many of our students come from very small countryside schools where they are the only person with leadership responsibilities. Furthermore, the schools in the municipality are few and far between and the capacity and competence to handle educational issues has been reduced during the past 10 - 15 years. One accumulated effect of these circumstances is a widespread feeling of loneliness among school heads. They have nowhere to go for support in handling the complex everyday challenges of school leadership. Consequently, they value the opportunity to get together for discussions with colleagues in similar circumstances, as well as experts from the universities and colleges involved in the program. The atmosphere in the group deliberations sometimes becomes quite intimate. One of the students put it like this: "I have taken up things with this group that I have not taken up with anybody else, ever."

4. "A better overview of the field of school leadership makes it easier to prioritize." Some schools suffer from the "Christmas tree syndrome" (Fullan), others from the related "kangaroo syndrome" (Tiller), the former indicating a tendency in some schools to take on too many "priorities" at the same time, the latter a lack of tenacity in staying with development projects long enough for them to have a significant effect. Neither strategies have proved to be particularly successful. It is one of the tough duties of a school head to prioritize between all the good intentions in top-down government initiated action programs and bottom-up colleague initiated good ideas for development. The idea is not to change as much as possible, at the same time (Fullan). Several of our students point out that the program has increased their awareness of the need to say "NO!", even to ideas which may be sound enough in themselves. Furthermore, they have developed a vocabulary and a knowledge base which enable them to define a common direction for the development of their school, to prioritize accordingly and argue for the choices they have made in a convincing way.

5. "The course has enhanced my reflective capacity." Through studies of theory and research, written assignments and group discussions the preconceptions of the students are challenged. In many cases they also find support for their own thinking about leadership and school development. Through reflection on action (Schøn) many of them find that they become more confident leaders.

6. "The course has strengthened my motivation for leadership." School leaders have a demanding job. Facing complex everyday challenges many of them receive little support from the municipality and their own staff. In the smallest and most remote municipalities they may in fact //be// the municipality. In 2009 one in four schools had no other leadership positions than the head, one in two had an inspector in addition to the head, one in four had an assistant head, and one in four had one or more head of department (Spørsmål til skole-Norge). Consequently, the feeling of loneliness and isolation that some school heads have may be well founded. It certainly challenges their motivation for the job, which they may not have gone very actively for in the first place. Throughout the course the students develop their understanding of the importance of the job they are doing, to the students, their colleagues and the community. The competence that they develop during the course corroborates this sense of significance to strengthen their motivation for leadership. At the end of the first course one of the students put it rather bluntly: "If it had not been for this course I would not have been a school head now."

Studies show that Norwegian teachers get very little feed-back from their leaders, who are rarely present in the classroom (TALIS; Vibe, Aamodt & Carlsten, 2009).

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