What’s your take on school leadership and digitalization? A systematic review of publications from the last 20 years

ABSTRACT

This review aims to provide a concise overview of the role of digitalization for school leadership and the research conducted in this field so far. For this purpose, this systematic review will focus on the underlying understandings of school leadership and digitalization in existing studies as well as on the content-related focal points of the studies and the selected research approaches. This will enable mapping the current state of research on the topic of school leadership from the perspective of digitalization and deriving implications for future research. The results of the review indicate that previous studies adopt various narrow perspectives, which can be seen in the understanding of school leadership and digitalization as well as in the content focus. The chosen research methods are also rather classical. There are hardly variations. The article concludes with a discussion of the results obtained and implications for future research.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Anna-Lena Hebel and Christian Scherner for their conscientious support in the literature research. Special thanks are also due to Carina Troxler for critical proofreading and Kesja Foshag for linguistic editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13603124.2023.2237939.

Notes

1. As the distinction between digitalization and digitality is less differentiated or hardly even made in international discourse, the term ‘digitalization’ is used in this article to remain connectable to current discourses while ‘digitality’ is included in the understanding.

2. The present review was based on a broad understanding of school leadership that defines school leadership both as a person/group of persons and a profession with corresponding functions and roles. This breadth was deliberately chosen in order to avoid exclusion in the later literature reception as far as possible due to the researcher’s presuppositions.

3. These databases were selected with regard to the good coverage of publications in the humanities and social sciences as well as the inclusion of altmetrics and metrics that consider subject-specific circumstances. Accordingly, additional databases, such as Web of Science, which tend to focus on other disciplines in terms of content, were not included. After an initial screening, Google Scholar was also not included, as search results here mostly referred to the databases already considered.

4. Well aware of the broad discourse on the use of digital data in schools and thus also by school leaders (e.g. Selwyn, 2016; Starkey & Eppel, 2019), these publications are not included in the text reception for three reasons: First, the publications focused on data as a research object and as an entity itself, Second, school leaders were mostly only highlighted as secondary actors instead of being in the foreground. Third, the discourse on data in schools is extremely complex (see Krein & Schiefner-Rohs, 2021) so that a description of this discourse, even with a focus on school leaders, would exceed the scope of this article.

5. Of course, it cannot be denied that the judgment of the content focus lies within the discretion of the researcher, however, by creating the codebook and following the systematic procedure, an attempt was made to reduce subjective bias as much as possible.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Ulrike Krein

Ulrike Krein, is a research associate at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau. Her research focuses on school leaders and their professionalization in the context of digitalization.