A distributed leadership perspective on the Finnish curriculum reform 2014

ABSTRACT

Bridging curriculum research with educational leadership, we examined the 2014 Finnish curriculum reform compilation and enactment process through the lens of distributed leadership.

As a tool for the examination, we used the resource–agency duality model of distributed leadership. It explicates how organizational members create resources and enact agency to achieve organizational and individual goals. This mixed-methods study had three phases. First, we conducted document analysis to position the 2014 curriculum in a series of curriculum reforms. Second, we analyzed how distributed leadership was interpreted and incorporated in the goals and instructions of the 2014 national core curriculum document. Finally, we surveyed 21 key actors for their insights of distributed leadership in the curriculum compilation and enactment process.

The findings revealed a trend of deepening and expanding distributed leadership in curriculum work over the past decades. This trend mirrored the general societal development in Finland. The 2014 curriculum explicated goals and instructions to use distributed leadership for inclusion, multidisciplinary learning, student-centred assessment and operational culture. The key actors regarded the leadership for the 2014 curriculum work as distributive which enabled resource creation and agentic participation on both national and local levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum reform
• Finland
• distributed leadership
• resource and agency duality model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Meng Tian

Dr Meng Tian is a researcher at the Department of Educational Management, Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China. She also works as a senior researcher at the Institute for the Management and Economics of Education, University of Teacher Education Zug, Switzerland. Her research interests fall on comparing distributed leadership practices in different sociocultural contexts. Her recent research also concentrates on connecting leadership theory with curriculum studies, such as investigating the compilation and enactment process of the 2014 Finnish national core curriculum reform through the lens of distributed leadership.

Mika Risku

Mr Mika Risku is the Head of the Institute of Educational Leadership at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His main research interest is on educational leadership as a scope to the changing world. His recent studies have been focusing on educational policy and governance. For this article, he could make use of his 15-year experience as a secondary education principal and the last 10-year practice as a researcher and educator assisting educational leaders on all levels to design and lead educational reforms.