SPECIFYING SCHOOL LEADERSHIP PRACTICE DIMENSIONS TO DEVELOP SCHOOL LEADERSHIP COMPETENCE FRAMEWORK FOR LATVIA

Latvia is undergoing a nation-wide curriculum reform in general education, with an aim to develop 21st century skills and competences. School leadership plays a crucial role in a successful reform implementation and innovations related to learning and teaching, as they have a direct impact on the vision and goals of the school, its academic structures and processes, as well as their staff capacity (Hallinger, 2011).

This research continues authors’ study on school leaders’ practices that have an impact on student learning and that are relevant for the local context, i.e. educational setting in Latvia and changes initiated by the curriculum reform. Authors’ previous research resulted in an adapted version of the school leadership competence framework applicable to the Latvian context. The work on the framework was based on the literature review and Hitt and Tucker’s (2015) work in particular, as well as interviews of 21 school leader in Latvia. The developed framework covers five overarching domains of school leadership practices:
(1) Establishing and conveying the vision,
(2) Facilitating a high-quality learning experience for students,
(3) Building professional capacity,
(4) Creating a supportive organization for learning,
(5) Building relationships with local community and external partners; and each domain consists of several dimensions.

The aim of this research is to specify and describe dimensions under each of the domains of school leadership practices, and the research question focuses on the identification of the lowest possible and the highest possible value for each of the dimensions, i.e. the research aims to indicate the possible scale for each dimension and the two extreme points on it. To accomplish this, the data from 21 interview was used, as well as expert group discussion to review the results.

As a result, the specified extremes for each of the dimensions under the five school leadership practice domains were determined, thus setting the ground for the development of a detailed school leadership competence assessment framework, applicable to the Latvian context. The results of this research will lead to the next stage, i.e. work on descriptions of several value-points/levels between the two extremes and identification of relevant practice illustrations from the local context.