Leadership from a distributed pedagogical perspective involves engaging multiple professionals in implementing shared responsibilities. In educational organizations, leadership responsibility structures have changed, with researchers advancing a more decentralized leadership system for sustainable pedagogical improvement. These global changes in…

This study explores school leaders' and teachers' experiences of leadership in assessment during the Covid-19 lockdowns. A total of 148 school leaders and 582 teachers participated in a survey, and 15 school leaders from four schools also participated in focus group interviews. In Norway, the pandemic led to closed schools for long periods, from…

Learning analytics platforms (LAPs) have become important modes of anticipatory governance in education. Educational futures are governed by utilizing various forms of learning analytics to track student data over time, suggesting that school leaders and teachers are expected to improve school quality by engaging with digital presentations of…

Studies have shown how school professionals deal with large quantities of student test data and accountability policies in different ways. However, the subtle ways in which school leaders and teachers use their time, their power and their talk when dealing with external policy demands in daily practice is understudied. Using data from interviews…

This article presents the development and application of a model that can be utilized to compare the autonomy of principals in various historical and national contexts. Drawing on former conceptual work on autonomy in education, the model conceptualizes principal autonomy as two-dimensional. The first dimension is the decision making expected from…

This qualitative explorative case study aims to investigate Norwegian early childhood education and care directors' and deputy directors' enactments of distributed pedagogical leadership to get a deeper understanding of the relational dynamics between them. In order to achieve the aim, an interpretative approach was used to collect data from…

This article addresses study programme leadership, a still-emerging phenomenon in European higher education (HE). Given its novelty, descriptions and insights into study programme leadership remain sparse. Therefore, this study aims to describe and critically explore health profession study programme leaders' work tasks and responsibilities as…

This study investigates policy work in educational leadership courses at universities. It analyses the types of engagement present in university teachers' policy work and in their interpretations and translations of policy intentions into teaching designs and practices. The study illustrates policy work as a phenomenon and draws on the theory of…

This paper investigates how Norwegian school principals prepared to carry out the LK20 reform process. The importance of school principals and middle-level leaders as enactors of change efforts results from their close ties to teachers and teacher classroom practices. This suggests that without negotiation and support from micro-policy actors,…

Educational leaders are responsible for educational change, and many scholars have argued that academic developers (ADs) have expertise with the potential to influence educational change. We argue, however, that ADs' influence depends on how educational leaders perceive educational change and position ADs' roles and responsibilities in relation to…

This study explores how Norwegian school leaders develop their capacity for instructional leadership, a leadership style that is strongly related to school effectiveness and school improvement across a range of national school systems. The concept captures important aspects of Norwegian school leaders' task preferences. To gain further insight…

Metamodernism, which is used synonymous with post-postmodernism or neo-modernism, has come forward in response to postmodernism and the emerged crises, instabilities, and uncertainties in all areas of this epoch. Metamodernism is a perspective situated epistemologically "with" (post)modernism, ontologically "between"…

This article examines the leadership of school principals who, based on the narrative case of the Blueberry School, discuss how they as principals would have responded to a similar problematic situation regarding a school change process. The study is grounded in the context of the Norwegian National School Leadership Programme. Theoretically, the…

Department heads are increasingly responsible for instructional leadership. Therefore, it is important to understand the antecedents of self-efficacy in their work, which can motivate them to increase their leadership efforts. Our theoretical model depends on principals' feedback for department heads, department heads' trust in their principals,…

Previous research has contributed to the literature on what constitutes school leaders' and teachers' democratic practices in both high- and low-stakes accountability contexts, but less is known about how they interpret, legitimize, and translate the democratic purpose of education in a low-stakes, 'soft-regulation' system. The current study used…