Abstract:

Our paper is related to an Erasmus Plus Project - The ENABLES (European Arts-Based Development of Distributed Leadership and Innovation in Schools). This project (2019-2021) aims to strengthen collaborative leadership of innovation in schools by developing and disseminating innovative methods of arts-based and embodied collaborative leadership development. As part of the ENABLES project, a total of five European countries (UK, Finland, Latvia, Romania and Austria) have been working together since November 2019 to develop, test and reflect on the use of new approaches in the field of art-based and bodily methods to promote distributive leadership. All five institutional partners developed an Action Research Trial under the coordination of UK Leadership Institute of Hertfordshire University.

The goal of our article is to present the results of our Action Research Trial - Romanian Narrative Research Trial, which included three practical workshops conducted with teachers -a range of school-based leaders (including MA students) between November 2020 – March 2021; we intended to apply, test and evaluate narrative-based and embodied learning approaches to developing distributed leadership. Our narrative methods constructed collaborative spaces where constraints of hierarchy are minimized and agency, reflexivity and development of personal and collaborative intentions by participants are facilitated. Learning became visible as all 76 participants make tacit knowledge explicit, explore its applicability to other contexts and transform the knowledge into a shared resource. Starting from the collected data, we present a set of conclusions (including excerpts from the participant’s reflective assessments) which are important - in our opinion - for developing the new competences based teacher professional profile. The main conclusion is that these narrative approaches have good results on the level of developing leadership capabilities and could become an important resource for teachers training courses.

Keywords:

Teacher professional development, narrative methodology, leadership capabilities, distributive leadership, reflective teacher.