Abstract:

Last decade seems to be the period of growing interest in educational leadership. Numerous authors claim that educational management theory and practice need to rethink managerial approaches and take into account the issue of leadership in order to understand properly the nature of educational organizations. They also claim that it is a need of definition of educational leadership different from existing attempts in general management theory. Such educationally specific understanding of leadersip as to take into account basic educational values as founding stones of such understanding of leadersip.

Proposed paper tries to describe attempts to transfer paradigms of leadership from general management theory to educational field as well as gives a proposal of educationally specific definition of leadership, describing its main characteristics and showing educational specificity built around core educational values such as learning and development.

The main aim of the paper is to present results of research tat was carried out with participation of randomly selected group of existing school heads from more tan 200 Polish schools. It was carried out in 2013 using the method of interview. Research was focused on school heads understanding of educational leadership. Results show how different are those understandings and raise question how can they be changed in order to support educational changes and reforms focused on transformation of educational systems into more democratic ones. The main problem that can bee seen is dominant existence of managerial thinking about educational management and leadership among those taking part in the research that can be an important obstacle in attempts of school leadership transformation and reform of Polish schools.

Keywords:

Educational leadership, educational management.