Team leadership in upper secondary education1

This article aims at presenting some of the findings from the Norwegian part of the 'Successful School Leadership Project.Footnote2 In order to adequately capture the complicated and dynamic nature of leadership in the participating schools, a distributed and micro-political perspective on leadership is chosen. The Norwegian team has been investigating elementary as well as secondary education, but we will for this presentation emphasize some general aspects of leadership in upper secondary education. Three upper secondary schools will be presented and used as examples in our discussion. Our findings underscore how school leadership is an interactive process involving many people and players. Geographical location, school history and size point to a variety of challenges, but in all schools we could identify success as a result of a continuous team effort. Leadership analysed within a distributed perspective can be described as an organizational quality in these schools. The many faces of distributed leadership in upper secondary education can best be comprehended in the light of the schools' historical, cultural, political and social context. The study also demonstrates how trust and power within distributed leadership of an organization were closely interrelated.Footnote3 Notes 1. The article is based on a paper presented at the 33rd Congress for Nordic Educational Research, University of Oslo, 10–12 March 2005. 2. The 'Successful School Leadership Project' is a 4 year international research project which is designed to identify the qualities, characteristics and competences of successful school leadership in primary and secondary schools in different socio-economic circumstances. The project includes teams of researchers from the UK, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Canada, the USA, Australia and Hong Kong. The International Academic Coordinator is Professor Christopher Day of the Centre for Research in Teacher and School Development, School of Education, University of Nottingham, UK. Each team is developing case studies of successful leadership in their own countries. Further details are available at http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/∼schoolleadership/ssl.html. 3. In this analysis we are indebted to all our colleagues working in the Norwegian part of the international project: Otto L. Fuglestad, Gjert Langfeldt, Anne-Marie Presthus, Siw Skrøvset, Else Stjernstrøm, Roald Valle and Gunn Vedøy. 4. In Norwegian upper secondary education written assignments organized as whole day testing is a common activity that may be beneficial for learning, but also strictly outcome control. The disagreement concerns this alternative purpose and the relationship between the purpose and the vision of the student and learning-centred pedagogy as stated in the school platform.