Distributed pedagogical leadership in support of student transitions

Abstract

This article examines how, through uncovering collaborative leadership, the whole school staff is able to understand its common endeavours to support heterogeneous students' fluent learning paths. For this, a notion of distributed pedagogical leadership (DPL) is drawn upon. DPL concerns everyone in the school community, not only leaders and management. It means abandoning role, instrumental or process centricity and moving towards leadership that is characterized as the innermost qualities of a professional learning community. This kind of leadership is best described with 10 'keys' as 10 key attributes. To understand DPL in practice, quantitative data both from a nationwide Finnish survey and a case study school are analysed, with supporting qualitative data from interviews of the leadership team in this particular school. The article presents and compares leaders' and the staff's experiences of DPL with regard to transition practices in Finnish vocational education.

Analysis of leadership dynamics in educational settings during times of external and internal change

“…This combined interactional whole involves collective properties (Slappendel 1996) that serve as building blocks for the shared sense-making process. To identify these collective properties in the data for a grounded theory (GT) analysis, the experimental and pre-existing TenKeys® model of collaborative leadership (Figure 1) was utilised (Jäppinen 2012(Jäppinen , 2014Jäppinen and Ciussi 2016;Jäppinen, Leclerc, and Tubin 2016). The model involves 10 attributes, defined as collective properties for building up shared sense-making and enabling collaborative actions.…”

“…However, it represents a framework that may be applied in a range of educational settings where the combined endeavour of a group of people has been investigated (Jäppinen 2012(Jäppinen , 2014Jäppinen and Ciussi 2016;Jäppinen, Leclerc, and Tubin 2016). Figure 1 indicates how the 10 attributes (which are visualised as the 'petals' of the 'flower') have an impact both on each other and on the complex entity that they form.…”

“…To explain in detail how the model was originally created goes beyond the scope of this article (for further information, see Jäppinen 2012Jäppinen and Maunonen-Eskelinen 2012). In this paper, only the larger framework of the model is introduced.…”

“…Grint 2005;Gronn 2008;Hallinger and Heck 2011;Hargreaves and Fink 2006;Harris 2009;MacBeath 2005;Mehra et al 2006;Spillane 2006). The second source comprised of the results of two large-scale (country) vocational organisation studies (Jäppinen 2012;Jäppinen and Maunonen-Eskelinen 2012). The attributes were categorised into 10 main groups by means of qualitative content analysis (Denzin and Lincoln 2011).…”

Collaborative Educational Leadership: The Emergence of Human Interactional Sense-Making Process as a Complex System

“…First, I have drawn on a comprehensive array of leadership theories and studies from different scholars using various synergetic terms, such as flexible, relational, distributed, shared, integrative, dispersed, or generative leadership (e.g., Goldstein, et al, 2010;Graen, 2007;Grint, 2005;Gronn, 2008;Harris, 2009;MacBeath, 2005;Raelin, 2005Raelin, , 2006Spillane, 2006;Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2008). The second source consisted of the results of collaborative leadership features in two large-scale nation-wide studies (Jäppinen, 2012a).…”