Abstract:

Concept of leadership have become very popular in education during the last two decades. It gained popularity both in academic research and in educational practice. It was also recently recognized as an important element of recommended educational changes by European Commission and OECD in their documents. At the same time there is still not clear what educational leadership is or should be. Paper presents short review of theories of leadership in education focusing on their limitations from the perspective of specificity of schools as educational organizations. Next, it describes the attempt to define educational leadership according to specificity of educational context and build leadership development model based on such educationally proper understanding that was designed within the project „Leadership and management in education – design and implementation of new model of headteacher’s training“ run jointly by Polish Ministry of Education and Jagiellonian University.

Paper presents three main steps of the project. Firstly, it presents the list of basic educationally important values that were chosen with their detailed description showing way of their understanding and complex interdependency between them. Secondly it describes how presented set of values was used as the basis for development of leadership competencies model that consists of six broader areas of educational leadership competencies that are described. Thirdly, it presents the main characteristics of a model of leader’s preparation, induction and continuing development that was prepared and piloted with participation of several hundred teachers and school heads in Poland. Results of evaluation of that pilot courses is presented as well as some recommendations for changes in existing formally ways of leadership training and development.

Keywords:

Educational leadership, values, leadership training.