Horizontal dynamics in an inter-professional school improvement team

Abstract

This study focuses on leadership development as a collaborative practice in the context of a school improvement project aimed at increasing the students’ competence in approaching factual texts in and across disciplines. Although numerous studies from surveys and self-reported data have examined what types of leadership development school leaders participate in, little attention has been paid to studying leadership development as practice. Here, leadership development involves social interaction, often in informal and inter-professional settings over time. The present study seeks to capture leadership development as practice by expanding the unit of analysis from individual responses and reports to interactions in a project team who worked over a two-year period. The analytic focus is on interactions in the boundary zone among representatives from the local educational authority in the municipality, principals from three schools, and a university. Cultural-historical activity theory constitutes the theoretical framework for the analysis. The study demonstrates how the participants struggled to identify the purposes of the project, as well as how to reach them. Thus, coming to terms with ill-defined purposes of collaboration (objects) seems to be a prerequisite for leadership development on an interdisciplinary school improvement team.

Notes

1. A way of carrying out observations and giving observation notes back to those being observed.

2. The utterances are translated from Norwegian.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Jensen

Ruth Jensen is a doctoral student at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1099 Blindern, N-0317 Oslo, Norway. Email: [email protected]. Her PhD project focuses on leadership development of school leaders as practice. Her research interest is in the areas of workplace learning, knowledge building, and sociocultural and activity theoretical perspectives, leadership and learning.

Andreas Lund

Andreas Lund is a professor at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1099 Blindern, N-0317 Oslo, Norway. Email: [email protected]. His research interests are in the areas of teaching and learning ESL, collective cognition, human interactions in technology-rich environments, and sociocultural and activity theoretical perspectives on learning and didactics, language, speech communities, and communication change.