Anna Öqvist

Teachers’ leadership: a maker or a breaker of students’ educational motivation

ABSTRACT Teachers’ leadership plays a critical and central role in students’ educational motivations. This indicates that, in the school context, a teacher’s leadership can have both positive and negative impacts on students’ educational motivation and performance. This article explores these assumptions, building on the path-goal theory, more specifically the effects of teachers’ leadership from students’ perspectives. Using a qualitative research design, this study collected data comprising 35 interviews with children and young people in both primary and upper-secondary school. The results show that the degree of teachers’ developmental leadership greatly affects students’ educational motivation and school performance. Two contrasting teachers’ profiles were found: teachers with a high degree of developmental leadership and teachers with a low degree of developmental leadership. Our findings suggest that teachers with the profile of a high degree of developmental leadership create an environment that fosters educational motivation positively among students, facilitating students’ achievement of high performance levels and a sense of well-being about their studies. In contrast, we show that teachers with a low degree of developmental leadership create an environment that is nonconductive for educational motivation, performance or the welfare of schoolwork.

What Motivates Students? A Study on the Effects of Teacher Leadership and Students' Self-Efficacy.

Abstract Students’ educational motivation is significant for performance and achieving learning, but little is known about what fuels such motivation. Educational motivation is regarded as the drive and inner state that energise educational activities, facilitate learning and channel behaviour towards achieving educational goals. Educational motivation paves the way for students to learn and acquire the knowledge that is essential for successful study outcomes. This article aims to explore what determines students’ educational motivation. Building on the self-determination theory, we modelled the influence of teachers’ leadership and students’ self-efficacy on students’ educational motivation. We used survey data from a sample of upper secondary school students in Sweden; we received a total of 993 answers, equal to a response rate of 74%. The results show that students’ self-efficacy and teacher leadership are of extreme importance for students’ educational motivation, and that highly efficacious students lose most educational motivation when the teacher’s leadership is poor. The results thus support the importance of teachers’ leadership for encouraging student learning.

Teaching in preschool: heads of preschools governance throughout the systematic quality work

ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to investigate how the heads of preschool govern teaching in practice through systematic quality work. In the new Swedish Education Act, which came into force on 1 July 2011, the mission of preschools changed because teaching was introduced as a new concept, and preschool teachers were now responsible for teaching. Swedish National Agency for Inspection report that there is a lack of how the concept of teaching is used in preschools. Heads of preschool are crucial for implementing teaching, and a valuable tool for their governing is the systematic quality work which they also are responsible for. This study collected data comprising 120 systematic quality reports from preschools in Sweden, and by text analysis, we explored how the heads of preschool used the concept of teaching. The results showed an absence of governance and management among the heads of preschool concerning teaching and when teaching is used, it was mainly according to the development of all staff competencies and to the concept of variation in teaching. This indicates that the heads of preschool govern the practice in a way that made preschool teachers responsible for teaching invisible.