Research has shown the importance of teacher leaders in improving professional learning and schools. This case study investigates the development of a new teacher leader position at a Norwegian upper-secondary school with the responsibility for leading peer teachers' collective professional development. Our aim is to understand the interplay…

In this article, we explore how values in education are negotiated and partly redefined by teachers, school leaders and local administrators with data use and accountability. Two dilemmas are prominent for the teachers: 1) Testing and data use are perceived as important to meet the needs of the students and to create transparency and initiating…

In this paper, we investigate how professional cultures and situated, material and external contexts relate to dynamic low- and underperforming schools in Scandinavia, particularly how the leadership is constructed through the leader, the followers and the situation. The first school studied was a low-performing school in Norway called…

The aim of this study was to explore trajectories of teachers' instructional support as perceived by students during a national initiative to develop lower secondary schools. Grade eight and nine students (N = 815) from nine Norwegian schools participated in three waves of data collection within one-and-a-half academic years. Growth mixture model…

In Norway, the interdisciplinary theme Public Health and Life Skills has been introduced in the new National K-12 curriculum, with the intention of promoting students' physical and mental health and enhancing their social and academic coping resources. This paper presents a case study related to a project of expanded student services in an upper…

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…

Are teachers and principals aligned in their perceptions of the core components of the theory of Leadership for Learning across countries, or are there subgroups of schools in which there is misalignment? The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which a congruency-typology model of leadership for learning is distributed across…

This article reports on the design of interdisciplinary units in five International Baccalaureate schools in Norway and Denmark, each with fewer than 100 students in their Middle Years Programme. The mixed methods study describes subject combinations and time frames of 37 enacted units and 111 hypothetical interdisciplinary units, and the…

Purpose: To understand what motivates students for social studies. Design: Social studies as a school subject is defined in terms of its contents (knowledge, skills, values), by its teaching methods and by the organisational regulation of how students and teachers should engage in the subject. Student motivation for these components of social…

School improvement efforts rely on teachers' capacity for professional development and learning. We investigate the kind of roles taken by early career teachers (ECTs) with a master's degree from a research-based teacher education programme in relation to professional learning and school development in Norwegian schools after five years in the…

Time is intrinsic in all forms of education. A growing body of educational research has begun examining time as something more than a context within which teaching and learning happen. While much of the existing research has tended to focus on either 'objective' clock time or 'subjective' time as experienced by individual teachers or students,…

This study aimed to explore teachers' and head teachers' understandings of how they work to support pupils' mental health through their everyday practices. A qualitative study, including individual interviews with head teachers and focus groups with teachers, was conducted in lower secondary schools in Norway. Rich descriptions of teachers' and…

Over time, and influenced by various stakeholders, a global trend has emerged regarding learning environments, pedagogies and learning skills for the 21st century. This article describes the transition of a secondary school building's physical learning environments through two snapshots; one from when the school was built and the other 9 years…

This article presents findings from a qualitative case study focusing on teachers' communication concerning expectations and responsibilities in different schools. The study indicates the following: (1) the connection between structural expectations and responsibility is important, (2) different expectation structures provide different…

This article examines how teachers and students connect disciplinary knowledge to contexts outside the classroom in naturally occurring teaching in 80 Nordic lower secondary social studies lessons using a standardized observation manual. We found evidence that teachers often connected disciplinary knowledge to students' experiences and wider…