Search results

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of principals in light of public management reforms taking place in the German educational system and in reference to the empirical patterns uncovered by the papers contained in the Special Issue. Policy makers have created new expectations and new technologies that seem to suggest to necessitate a shift from principals acting as rule-bound administrators to acting as entrepreneurial managers. The paper asks if the availability of new managerial technologies is complemented by shifts in role conception or enactment.

The author discusses the papers included in this Special Issue by suggesting one possible overarching frame for the German situation as documented by the papers and contrasting this frame with the situation in the USA.

The Special Issue papers reviewed in this paper ask if the principalship in Germany across various states has become more managerial, and the author’s conclusion is that it has not. The author suggests that in Germany, managerialism and professionalism may accommodate each other in ways uniquely German, perhaps without making the principalship more managerial.

This paper sketches a way to conceptualize the role of the principal in the tension between Weberian bureaucracy, public managerialism, and professional self-governance.

School leadership is considered a central agent in the implementation of “New Governance” concepts which have been introduced in Germany by means of accountability measures, decentralization and a growth of autonomy and competition. With the adjustment of policies, rights and duties of school leaders have changed considerably. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to leadership research by providing descriptive evidence on the relevance of specific areas of leadership activity reported by school principals and their actual priorities in terms of day-to-day workload. In particular, the authors analyze whether individually reported priorities are reflected in the actual distribution of workload in a daily routine.

The empirical analysis uses data collected in the German SHaRP study (“School leaders’ activities between more responsibility and more power”). Based on a sample of 153 school leaders from six German federal states the authors perform regression models to determine the association between workload in specific fields of leadership activity, individually reported relevance of management tasks and systemic and contextual conditions at school.

As expected, organizational and personnel management and development are stated to be most important for leadership activity. These priorities are not at least reflected in the observed distribution of workload over fields of activity. Rather, a vast amount of time – as far as it is not absorbed by lessons – is spent on administrative tasks. A shift of workload from teaching responsibilities to governmental tasks is mainly achieved by longer working hours and appears to depend primarily on the system context.

The results highlight the relevance of organizational skills and the need to develop conceptual foundations for strategic leadership at schools. Further research should focus not only on the contextual setting and system characteristics, but on the interplay of contextual characteristics and leadership strategies. In times of increasing budgetary constraints leadership research needs to consider outcome measures in terms of quality of schooling to identify determinants of effective leadership.

The paper contributes to leadership research by a quantitative analysis of the individually reported relevance of organizational, curricular and human resources management and development for leadership activity. The authors provide descriptive evidence on a significant gap between these claims and reality in terms of actual day-to-day workload.

In Germany up until now, there has been very little research on staff development in schools. The purpose of this paper is to comprehensively assess school-based staff development and to describe the interplay between different instruments of staff development (e.g. classroom observations, development discussions) at the school level.

Considering that different constellations of organizational management tools may be differentially effective in different contexts (see Mintzberg, 1983/1992), an approach that takes a combination of different staff development instruments into account was chosen. Data were gathered from principals of primary and secondary schools in two federal states of Germany. Using regression, cluster analysis, and analysis of variance, the authors examined different instruments and patterns of staff development used in everyday school practice and determined how these affected the professional development of teachers.

Five staff development patterns could be identified. With regard to the extent of professional development activities of teachers, these patterns have been proven to have a different impact. Furthermore, the use of the different staff development patterns seems to be heavily dependent on the type of school.

Further research would be needed that examines if the three most relevant staff development patterns identified in this study can also be proven to be effective with regard to somewhat “harder” criteria than the extent of professional development activities of teachers. Such criteria could be teachers’ teaching skills or even student achievement.

The current study is the first to examine staff development in German schools systematically. The results provide some good leads for further studies in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how principals and school supervisory authorities understand and use feedback from mandatory proficiency tests (VERA) in the low-stakes context of Germany. For the analysis, the authors refer to a theoretical model of schools that differentiates between Autonomous and Managed Professional Organisations (Thiel, 2008a).

The empirical basis of the qualitative research are contrastive case studies which are focusing on individual schools and on school supervisory authorities. The selection of cases was oriented on Theoretical Sampling according to Glaser and Strauss (2005). For the analysis, the authors used a sample of upper track secondary schools (Gymnasien), four from Berlin and five each from Thuringia, Brandenburg and Baden-Wuerttemberg. In total, the authors conducted 229 structured interviews over two periods in 19 schools with different protagonists on all levels of the educational system (principals, heads of subject departments, teachers and school supervisory officials). The interview data were descriptively analysed according to procedures of qualitative content analyses (Mayring, 2010).

The analyses show a clear tendency in the direction of the Autonomous Professional Organisation within the context of VERA. However, some principals reported activities according to a Managed Professional Organisation. The traditional decoupling remains and the supervisory authorities retain their picture of the individual school as an Autonomous Professional Organisation. Both levels have a major deficit in a competent use of VERA and lack profound experience with accountability and evaluation processes.

The sampling has certain restraints: schools of a particular type, few schools within one state, four of 16 states.

Even though German test-based school reforms have been in progress for one decade, systematic analyses of the reform’s relevance for leadership and for school supervisory authorities’ actions in a low-stakes context have not been conducted yet. The analysis meets this lack of research with an explorative reconstruction of principal leadership within the context of test-based school reform as well as the corresponding school supervisory officials.

In Germany, principals’ working environments are data-rich for school improvement purposes in a rather low-stakes test-regime. An effective use of externally as well as internally generated data, also known as data wise leadership, is considered to be a key competence of successful principals. The purpose of this paper is to describe data use practices in German schools, especially focussing on schools facing challenging circumstances.

The paper draws on findings from two projects funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. A standardized questionnaire study was conducted to measure the usage of available data for school improvement quantitatively. The perceived usefulness, the reflection upon, and the use of information sources by principals were measured. Moreover, semi-structured interviews with school leaders from schools in deprived areas were conducted, transcribed and analyzed by means of qualitative content analysis.

The results showed that internal sources of information were used frequently while (international) student assessment, statewide comparative tests, and school inspections proved to be of relatively little use for the principals’ professional practice. Moreover, there was a discrepancy between the perceived usefulness of information sources and the actual use of the data.

In contrast to the USA, for example, research on educational leadership and principals’ data use – particularly at schools in challenging circumstances – is rather limited in Germany. This paper seeks to take up this desideratum.