Abstract:

Introduction:
In autumn 2015, the Danish Ministry of Education send out a call focusing on instructional leadership within upper secondary schools. The Ministry of Education referred in its tender documents to new research (OECD, 2016; Hallinger, 2009), that indicates that leadership involvement is of significant importance when striving to enhance the quality of teaching. A group of university researchers and consultants from a private consultancy company won the call with a design focusing on three different approaches to instructional leadership (the authors were part of this consortium). Forty-two schools were selected for the development project. Two educational leaders (each attending school were headed by a principal. Depending on the size of the school, the principal had a number of educational leaders below him/her, each responsible for a team of teachers) from each school were required to participate. The objective of the project was to test the three designs for instructional leadership and evaluate each design’s ability to support teachers with relevant feedback when striving to enhance the quality of their teaching.

The three designs:
The three designs all sought to provide feedback for the teachers about their own teaching based on a dialogue about data collected by the teachers themselves. The feedback was to be given through a dialogic process between the instructional leader and the teacher with the purpose of creating a reflexive developmental process. However, the designs differed in a number of ways in proportion to the number of participants, the way of retrieving the data that the feedback processes were based upon and the use of dialogic tools.

All three designs were structured around feedback conversations that took their starting point in data about teaching. Data could either be retrieved through the teachers own observations (Design 1 and 2) or by questionnaires filled out by the pupils (Design 3).

Methods:
The research process was divided into 5 phases:
1. Explorative interviews with managers and teachers.
2. A Questionnaire survey among educational leaders and teachers issued before the intervention enabling the research team to define a baseline measurement that could function as a basis for assessing the development throughout the project.
3. Questionnaire survey among educational leaders and teachers issued after the intervention in order to assess the personal and organizational development generated by the project
4. Conversations with managers and teachers. The purpose of these conversations was to follow up on selected results from the questionnaire survey.
5. Closing conference arranged by the research team and the project steering committee.

Results and Discussion:
In the full paper we will discuss our findings and their implications for instructional leadership as a method for enhancing teaching quality at Danish upper secondary schools. Furthermore, we will compare results from the three designs in order to be able to advice schools on which design would be the most likely to foster success, given the specific, contextual circumstances of a certain school.

References:
[1] Hallinger, P. (2009). Leadership for 21st century schools: From instructional leadership to leadership for learning.
[2] OECD (2016). School leadership for learning, Insights from TALIS 2013, TALIS, OECD Publishing, Paris.

Keywords:

Instructional Leadership, Dialogic Feedback Conversations, Qualitative and Quantitative Research.