Abstract
In view of the ever-increasing responsibilities of school leaders for ensuring the quality of schools, school leadership development has recently become one of the central concerns of educational policy. Based on data from an international study of school leadership development, an overview of international efforts to develop school leadership is given and international trends in school leadership preparation are identified and discussed, e.g. central quality assurance and decentralised provision; new forms of cooperation and partnership, preparatory qualification; extensive and comprehensive programs; multi-phase designs and modularisation; the communicative and cooperative shift; from administration and maintenance to leadership, change and continuous improvement; qualifying teams and developing the leadership capacity of schools; needs, experience and application orientation; new ways of learning; adjusting the program to explicit aims and objectives; new paradigms of leadership; orientation towards the school’s core purpose. In addition, this gives a conclusion and provides recommendations for designing and conducting training and development programmes.
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Notes
- 1.
Even more extensive are approaches to make orientation elements for leadership part of initial teacher training in order to identify and foster potential for leadership at the earliest possible stage. This has been done recently by the Australian State of Victoria. In Sweden, there is a project that offers enrolment in a school management course during initial teacher training, and in Canada, too, long-term promotion is intended by a portfolio system.
- 2.
It has not been taken into account whether the offers are made to teachers aspiring to leadership or to school leaders newly appointed and in position. Besides, the different emphasis could be viewed in reference to the total amount or length of training available, since offering experiential learning opportunities inevitably means expanding the programme accordingly.
- 3.
Macro-didactic considerations are about defining the target group(s), the timing, the nature of participation, the professional validity, but also the pattern with the total number of training and development days, the time span, the scheduling, etc. Micro-didactic considerations are about the curriculum, the content, the teaching strategies, learning methods used, etc.
References
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Huber, S.G. (2010). Preparing School Leaders – International Approaches in Leadership Development. In: Huber, S. (eds) School Leadership - International Perspectives. Studies in Educational Leadership, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3501-1_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3501-1_12
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