Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

Doing qualitative research: a practical handbook, by David Silverman, Los Angeles, Sage, 2010, 456 pp., AU$65.00, ISBN 978-1-84860-033-1, ISBN 978-1-94960-034-8. Available in Australia and New Zeal...

Doing qualitative research: a practical handbook

International evidence suggests that educational reform’s progress
depends on teachers’ individual and collective capacity and its link with schoolwide
capacity for promoting pupils’ learning. Building capacity is therefore
critical. Capacity is a complex blend of motivation, skill, positive learning,
organisational conditions and culture, and infrastructure of support. Put together,
it gives individuals, groups, whole school communities and school systems the
power to get involved in and sustain learning over time. Developing professional
learning communities appears to hold considerable promise for capacity building
for sustainable improvement. As such, it has become a ‘hot topic’ in many
countries.

Professional Learning Communities: A Review of the Literature

This article argues for a reconceptualization of leadership. Possible substitutes for leadership are reviewed along with a number of existing dualisms. These are rejected in favour of the claim that the leadership of organizations is most appropriately understood as a distributed, rather thanas a focused, phenomenon. Various attributes, dimensions and applications of distribution are then considered, and a revised approach to action and influence in organizations centred on conjointly performed activities is thenproposed. For this new formulation a summary is provided of the core concepts of, and recent developments in, activity theory. It is shown that two particular advantages of this approach include the helpful model it provides for contextual analysis—an aspect sorely neglected by the field of leadership—and its focus on the evolving division of labour in organizations, the prime mover for tracking emerging patterns of distributed leadership.

Distributed Properties A New Architecture for Leadership

This article considers the relationship between distributed leadership and school improvement. Drawing upon empirical evidence from two contemporary studies of successful school leadership and recent studies of school improvement, it explores the extent to which distributed forms of leadership can contribute to school improvement. The article argues that the distributed perspective offers a new and important theoretical lens through which leadership practice in school can be reconfigured and reconceptualized. It concludes by suggesting that, while evidence would suggest that distributed forms of leadership can assist capacity building within schools which contributes to school improvement, further research is needed to confirm a relationship between distributed forms of leadership and improved student learning outcomes.

Distributed Leadership and School Improvement: Leading or Misleading?.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1741143216663993

Collegiality and professional learning communities

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1741143209345570

Assessing Teacher Performance

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1741143219877629

Turnaround leadership in education: A restatement of heroic leadership or a flawed concept:

Respondents to Aberdeen's Human Capital Management Trends 2013 study indicate that the ability to identify gaps between current workforce skills and anticipated future business demand is the most important strategy to enable organizational success in the coming year (cited by 47% of respondents). But the current level of readiness, indicated by respondents, is just two thirds of the leaders required by the business in the coming three to five years will be available. To overcome this, organizations are looking to speed up the process of developing future leaders, and help close the gap between workforce supply and business demand. This Brief based on data collected from 117 organizations in November and December 2012 looks at the critical strategies organizations put in place to improve their readiness by accelerating leadership development.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1741143209357370

Accelerating Leadership Development

In seeking to improve student outcomes, governments may choose to exercise direct control over schools, as in many centralised systems, or to provide frameworks for intermediate bodies to engage in improvement activities. One such body is the National College for School Leadership (NCSL), now the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) in England. The Department of Education of the South African province of Gauteng (GDE) has also chosen to implement its school improvement programmes partly through two specialist units, the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre, which focuses on maths, science and technology (MST), and the Matthew Goniwe School of Leadership and Governance (MGSLG), which specialises in school leadership, management, governance and teacher development. The purpose of this article is to report on an evaluation of the work of these two bodies, commissioned by the GDE as part of its 20th anniversary commemorations, through an analysis of relevant documents and interviews with 11 key actors in the operation of these specialist bodies. The article adopts loose coupling as its theoretical framework.

/pdf/school-improvement-through-government-agencies-loose-or-2a0ejzj534.pdf

Tony Bush

Papers

Collegiality and professional learning communities

Assessing Teacher Performance

Turnaround leadership in education: A restatement of heroic leadership or a flawed concept:

Accelerating Leadership Development

School improvement through government agencies: Loose or tight coupling?: