1,721,003 research outputs found
Principals’ autonomy in the Nordic countries:governing positions, responsibilities, and expectations
No full textGrowing political expectations exist for educational leaders in terms of their efforts to enhance students’ outcomes and apply education as a tool in national and international competition regarding school quality and student achievement. Educational leadership can be viewed as a multi-level phenomenon distributed over several levels, in which multiple actors interact and collaborate in dynamic networks. In this article, we investigate how the mission of a principal is constructed according to formal documents in the Nordic countries by conducting a document analysis with emphasis on the following research question: what degree of autonomy do school principals have as public educational leaders in the Nordic countries? Depending on the educational leadership levels above them (municipality and national levels), principals have different relative autonomy with regard to national laws, curriculum, policies and local municipal directives. For principals, many tasks may stand in contradiction with each other and point in different directions, making it impossible to uncritically conform with all responsibilities and expectations. Instead, principals need to interpret and relate to these in a reflective manner.</p
Communication between principals and teachers in successful schools
No full textThis thesis examines the interplay between organizational structure and culture and principals’ communication with their teachers in a Swedish school setting. Especially communication about issues connected to teaching and learning, student outcomes and school improvement are in focus. These issues are examples of what principals work with as pedagogical leaders. The thesis consists of four published articles on principals’ communication in relation to organizational prerequisites and aims. The four separate articles are all connected to three overall questions. How do organizational factors relate to the communication process? How does the communication between principals and teachers affect and reflect principals’ and teachers’ work towards the national objectives in the Swedish curriculum? What, if any, differences are there in the communication process between successful and less successful schools? The research undertaken in this thesis is a part of a larger project called ‘Structure, Culture, Leadership – prerequisites for Successful Schools?’ The empirical data used consists of interviews and questionnaires with teachers and principals in twenty-four Swedish schools as well as one school outside the projects study population. The twenty-four schools within the project have been divided into four groups depending on how they have succeeded in reaching academic and social objectives in the curriculum. The overall result shows that most communication in schools is related to everyday activities and individual students. Teachers claim that their communication with their principals is uncomplicated and straightforward. Viewing communication as a multidimensional process including information, affirmation/feedback and interpretation reveals that many principals overestimate their ability to communicate as pedagogical leaders. The difference in the communication process between the schools was more due to organizational factors like structure and culture than the principal’s individual communication abilities. In the successful schools, principals and teachers communicated more frequently about issues related to teaching and learning. These principals made more classroom visits and provided more frequently feedback on teachers’ professional role. In many of the other schools, there were signs of a communicative and organizational blindness. There is a potential in many schools to improve principals' and teachers' daily conversations so the communication process to a higher extent support long-term work towards positive school outcomes
Tolkningsförmåga, kommunikation och samspel : viktiga förmågor för rektor i en allt längre styrkedja
No full textGoing Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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