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This paper explores the question, “what does it mean to be an engaged school leader in an educational context that promotes standards-based accountability as a model of quality development?” Specifically, what drives educational leaders? What do they do to lead schools as quality organisations? and How do they lead schools as quality organisations?

An ethnographically grounded theory case study was conducted with 16 principles in Sweden, USA and Finland, who participated in a three-year project to lead schools as global learning centers.

Findings showed that school leaders used a variety of leadership styles as they developed worked cultures grounded in a value system, to support student learning and development. Also, work cultures that engaged members of the school and community were critical for leading schools as learning organisations.

The small sample may not be generalizable to all educational systems.

This study provides evidence about the complexities for school leadership today that are not currently addressed in most principal preparation programs. The findings can serve to help inform further development of principal preparation.

The experiences shared in this study provide an alternative perspective about what it is that school leaders do and think about amidst a high-stakes testing context of school development. The grounded theory nature of this study, combined with an ethnographic approach, provides deep insights into the daily working life of engaged school leaders to learn first hand from their dialogue about what it takes to lead schools as quality organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to develop representations for teacher coaching sessions that are (1) useful for communicating the session to other coaches or researchers and (2) capture the roles of the coach as convener of dialogue for teacher development as well as facilitator of design for learning.

Two coaching sessions with preservice science teachers are analysed using two forms of discourse analysis: (1) the T-SEDA coding scheme (Vrikki et al., 2019) to analyse the dialogic interaction; and (2) a novel coding scheme to show the development of the design for learning over time. A synthetic representation is developed that combines and communicates the results of both analyses.

Results show a novel way of representing coaching sessions with teachers during design for learning. Theoretical claims about the utility of this representation are made with reference to the literature.

The representations and methods for developing them are useful to researchers in analysing coaching sessions. They have application for helping coaches to communicate their practice with one another. They are a step towards understanding the scalability and transferability of coaching programmes for school improvement.

The paper highlights shortcomings of existing representations for teacher coaching sessions and produces a novel representation that has value for researchers.

This study inquires into the ways that three preservice teachers enrolled in one English education program at a state namesake university in the Southeastern part of USA, oriented to uncertainty when interacting with one another as they discussed potentially challenging/uncomfortable topics.

The tools of conversation analysis were used to analyze the three preservice teachers’ talk as they discussed the potential for using President Obama’s (2008) A More Perfect Union speech with their own secondary students.

The findings from this study suggest that when discussing uncomfortable topics like race and politics, preservice teachers tend to work toward consensus, rather than valuing tension and disagreement. Specifically, the preservice teachers in this study engaged in several strategies as they worked toward consensus with one another and also to excuse themselves from having potentially divergent opinions from one another or their potential future students.

Possible explanations for the tendency toward agreement, as well as recommendations for future teaching that could challenge such an inclination for agreement, are delineated.

Previous studies on the role of discussion within educational settings have focused on the possibilities of dialogue to contribute to the construction of individuals’ identities and also to encourage participants to arrive at a singular understanding of the topic being discussed. This study offers a new perspective on the role of discussion, by suggesting that attempts at consensus and the development of singular identities limits potential for dialogue, thus limiting learning and development.

This chapter provides an overview of a literature study on knowledge creation in client–consultant interaction. Clients and consultants can interact with each other to create knowledge (Kang et al., 2007), and knowledge creation can take place through dialogues (Hautala, 2011; Hennessy et al., 2016; Lorino & Mourey, 2013; MacIntosh et al., 2012; Majchrzak et al., 2012; Nursey-Bray et al., 2010; Quinlan, 2009; Rutten, 2017; Rutten & Boekema, 2012; Sapir et al., 2016; Tsoukas, 2009). But how do these dialogues “work?” In knowledge creation dialogues the following process (Majchrzak et al., 2012) is used: “(1) voicing fragments, (2) co-creating the scaffold, (3) dialoguing around the scaffold, (4) moving the scaffold aside, and (5) sustaining engagement” (p. 958). Interaction and dialogues are impacted by social elements, of which the use of power resources (Heizmann & Olsson, 2015) seems to be an interesting dimension in client–consultant interaction. We suggest doing further exploration to increase our understanding of how knowledge is created in client–consultant interaction.

The article presents the construction of a conceptual framework, which is rooted in mathematics education and in dialogic analysis. It aims to analyse how dialogic interactions contribute to constructing teachers' mathematical problem-solving knowledge. The article provides one example of this analysis.

The networking between a content analysis framework (Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching Problem-Solving) and a dialogic analysis framework (Lesson Study Dialogue Analysis) is presented. This leads to the construction of indicators to quantitatively and qualitatively code our data: five meetings during one lesson study cycle of a group of eight Swiss primary teachers, working on the teaching of problem-solving.

This article does not present empirical findings. The developed conceptual framework is the result presented.

The presented framework allows modelling, on the one hand, the knowledge relating to the teaching and learning of problem-solving and, on the other hand, the analysis of interactions during a lesson study. The article does not contain the results of the research.

The use of our framework can contribute to teacher educators' and facilitators' training by highlighting which types of intervention are favourable to the development of knowledge.

Our analysis involves a “systematic coding” approach. It allows a fine-grained analysis of the interactions in relation to the evolution of knowledge. Such a systematic approach offers the possibility of questioning the coded data in various ways.

The school-to-prison pipeline is a booming pipeline that is the cause for alarm. Increasingly, this pipeline includes more of Chicano males, and this dynamic is reflected in low rates of high school graduates going to college contrasted with the growing number of Chicanos in the juvenile justice and court systems. This study focuses on the impacts of the school-to-prison pipeline on Chicano students. Furthermore, utilizing a CRT and LatCrit framework, this study centers the experiential knowledge that Chicano students contribute to conceptualizing ways of disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline. Themes of this study include the following: (1) Chicano student experiences with the school-to-prison pipeline, (2) innovation of discipline policy and practice, and (3) effective alternative practices to a zero tolerance framework. Through this, Chicano students point to a praxis grounded in community to clear educational pathways and interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.

This chapter discusses a form of pedagogy of reflection suggested to be defined as the dialogical-reflective professional-development school (DRPDS) – a framework that develops and empowers students by engaging them in a process of continual improvement, responding to diverse situations, providing stimuli for learning, and giving anchors for mediation. The pedagogy of reflection relates to dialogue not only from a theoretical historical context but also by way of example – that is, it offers empowering dialogues within the traditional teacher-training framework. This chapter outlines the importance of the pedagogy of reflection in the multicultural educational space of the preservice education field in Israel, analyzing the first university PDS model. The pedagogy of reflection in the context of the educational dialogue of educators is outlined as a tool for student empowerment, achieved through a community of learners who dedicate space to the development of their whole personality within the profession, taking a moral stance toward the educational discourse, minimizing judgmentalism and prejudice, creating national/gender equality with the goal of examining the fundamental question of educational performance, and reinforcing their sense of organizational belonging within the system. In these contexts, the chapter is based on the elements of dialogical philosophy exemplified in the thought of Burbules, Nelson, Isaacs, Bohm, and Heckmann and the reflective basis of educational and organizational performance exemplified in the writings of van Manen. The chapter also presents two examples from a project in which teaching units based on dialogue and reflection were developed within a dialogic community that represents in its very being collective empowerment, the possibility of coping with problems that are too large for an individual to solve on his/her own, and an alternative to sealed and alienated organizations.

There is an identified need in higher education research for methods which have the capacity to generate conceptual insights grounded in concrete local practice but with wider applicability in understanding and facilitating research-based change. This chapter outlines an intermediate approach to qualitative data analysis which can support theoretical knowledge advancement from practice-based research, which I call the difference-within-similarity approach. It involves a particular way of conducting dialogues with our data: of interanimating similarities and differences within our qualitative datasets. The approach outlined involves first identifying a similarity, then systematically examining differences within that similarity to generate theoretical explanations. Drawing on sociocultural theorising, particularly dialogic theory and cultural–historical activity theory, the approach is based on the idea that new meanings arise from a comparison of multiple perspectives on the ‘same’ phenomenon. The tensions between such perspectives are seen as a key driver for change in educational practice. Therefore, articulating and examining such tensions in our data gives an opportunity to simulate the possibility of change in our analysis and, hence, develop insights which can inform change beyond local settings. Important here is that the differences examined are bound together by an analytically productive similarity. Through multiple research examples, the chapter identifies and illustrates a range of ways of articulating productive analytical similarities for comparison in our data: through theory/literature, through forward and backwards processing of data itself and through a process termed ‘weaving’.

The purpose of this study is to examine how dialogic spaces were co-constituted (opened, broadened and deepened) between students engaged in divergent and convergent collaborative learning tasks, orchestrated by teachers in Finnish primary and secondary schools. The concept of dialogic space refers to a dynamic, shared resource of ideas in dialogue and has come to represent an ideal form of educational interaction, in the contexts of collaborative learning, joint creative work and shared knowledge-building.

A socio-cultural discourse analysis of video-observed classroom dialogue, entailing the development of a new analytic typology, was undertaken to explore the co-constitution of dialogic space. The data are derived from two qualitative studies, one examining dialogue to co-create fictive video stories in primary-school classrooms (divergent task), the other investigating collaborative knowledge building in secondary-school health education (convergent task).

Dialogic spaces were opened through group settings and by the students’ selection of topics. In the divergent task, the broadening of dialogic space derived from the heterogeneous group settings, whereas in the convergent task, from the multiple and various information sources involved. As regards the deepening of dialogic space, explicit reflective talk remained scarce; instead the norms deriving from the school-context tasks and requirements guided the group dialogue.

This study lays the groundwork for subsequent research regarding the orchestration of dialogic space in divergent and convergent tasks by offering a typology to operationalise dialogic space for further, more systematic, comparisons and aiding the understandings of the processes implicated in intercreating and interthinking. This in turn is of significance for the development of dialogic pedagogies.