Managing Educational Champions: Entrepreneurship in Schools

Abstract

This study explores how educational champions—teachers who initiate unsolicited innovation—construct their entrepreneurial endeavors while interacting with principals’ management styles and how that interaction influences the sustainability of teachers’ initiatives. Through semistructured interviews ( N = 71) and analysis anchored in grounded theory, champions revealed three entrepreneurship strategies: semiautonomous entrepreneurship while interacting with a facilitative managerial style, loosely coupled entrepreneurship with directive management, and sponsored entrepreneurship with consolidative management. Analyses of these entrepreneurial endeavors illuminate teachers’ strategies for negotiating the ongoing tension between autonomy and control in schools and their influence on the sustainability of champions’ innovations.

The ambiguity of pedagogical entrepreneurship – the state of the art and its challenges

“…The majority of informants were students and teachers/educators. Only a few studies focused on school leadership, the principal's role or function related to pedagogical entrepreneurship, or on the implementation of entrepreneurial strategies in schools (Eyal and Yosef-Hassidim 2012;Leffler 2006;Mahieu 2006; Sjøvoll and Pedersen 2014).…”

“…However, several studies reported confusion about the concept of entrepreneurship among representatives at several levels of the school systems. On several occasions, entrepreneurial and traditional schools were interpreted in terms of a dichotomy (Dahlstedt and Hertzberg 2012;Eyal and Yosef-Hassidim 2012;Leffler 2006), and it was reported that the introduction of an entrepreneurial approach requires fundamental change and development. Therefore, statements of requirements were often supported by referring to societal and economic challenges manifested in policy documents.…”

“…The first source of tension that research addressed is the lack of congruence between the intentions signalled by policymakers and the implementation by educators in schools (Cardow and The second source of tension is that teachers stress the need for coordination between subjects to develop a more entrepreneurial working community (Seikkula-Leino et al 2010) and that teachers find that the implementation of entrepreneurship may challenge older pedagogical and educational doctrines (Dahlstedt and Hertzberg 2012;Leffler 2006). The principal is responsible for the direction and structure of a school's activity, which may create tension between autonomy and control in the school regarding the teachers' teaching priorities if entrepreneurial approaches are to be applied (Eyal and Yosef-Hassidim 2012). Two challenges are revealed in this issue.…”

“…Well-connected schools are more likely to exhibit entrepreneurial strategies than less-wellconnected schools. Eyal and Yosef-Hassidim (2012) The interaction between principals' management styles influences the sustainability of teachers' entrepreneurial endeavours.…”

Characteristics and behaviours of formal versus informal nurse champions and their relationship to innovation success

“…This procedure has been used before (e.g. Eyal & Yosef‐Hassidim, ). First, the head nurse and deputy nurse were asked to name any nurse involved in initiating and implementing innovation beyond the direct, routine treatment of the patients he or she is responsible for.…”