Eli Ottesen

Reflection in teacher education

The concepts ‘reflection’ or ‘reflective practice’ are entrenched in the literature and discourses of teacher education and teachers’ professional development. The concept is rather vague, although Schön’s notion of the reflective practitioner seems to be at the core of several understandings. In this paper, conversations between student teachers and their mentors during internship are analysed to explore how they reflect and what they seem to accomplish through reflection. Building on sociocultural theory, reflection is constituted as collaborative communicative action through which an object of reflection is constructed and expanded by the participants. By introducing the notion ‘mode of reflection’, the relationship between reflective action and the motive of the activity are explored. In this paper, three modes of reflection during internship in teacher education are discerned and discussed: (1) reflection as induction to warranted ways of seeing, thinking and acting; (2) reflection as concept development; (3) reflection as off‐line or imagined practices.

Learning to teach with technology: authoring practised identities

Over the years there has been a strong urge to incorporate information and communications technology (ICT) in teaching practices; however, the pace of integration has been characterised as disappointing. Teachers’ lack of competence, their resistance and lack of availability and stability of computers and infrastructure have been offered as explanations. The paper advocates sociocultural theory as a fruitful approach in the research on developing teaching practices with ICT. Empirical evidence from the discourses of student teachers and mentors during internship is used to illustrate how practised identities for teaching with ICTs emerge in action through processes of positioning and authoring. An enhanced understanding of the situated interplay of personal and institutional horizons for meaning making could be crucial for the development of programmes for learning to teach with ICT.

School leadership: constitution and distribution

Leadership is currently viewed as a guarantee for educational quality and reforms, as a crucial component for schools’ capacity building and as a major contributor to the transformation of practices. Although an array of leadership studies report on the need for leadership by demonstrating what leaders must do or how leadership practices should be configured for schools to be successful, less attention has been drawn to how leadership is played out and how it becomes consequential in social practices. In this article, the authors analyse leadership as an interactive process, in a leadership team in a Norwegian school that aims to develop assessment practices. Cultural historical activity theory frames this analysis. The analytic concepts’ perspective, position and interaction trajectory allow an investigation of leadership as an emergent property in the interactive process. Leadership emerges in complex chains of actions oriented by purposes constituted in the interplay of hierarchical and distributed dimensions of agency and authority.

Leadership Preparation for Culturally Diverse Schools in Cyprus, Norway, and the United States

This chapter surveys the professional development of principals in Cyprus , Norway , and the United States with a particular focus on how cultural diversity issues are addressed in leadership preparation programs. Our analysis indicates that principal preparation (particularly preparation for diverse schools) varies in scope, organization, and approach across these three countries, ranging from a highly centralized system where a handful of in-service courses are offered by the Ministry of Education after appointment as a school leader (Cyprus ); to a proposed national system of university-based courses (Norway ); and finally wide-ranging university-based programs with increasing theoretical work on equity and social justice issues but a paucity of well-researched models (USA). We recommend the development of contextually specific leadership preparation programs to help aspiring school leaders learn to be culturally responsive and demonstrate strong advocacy for students, parents, and communities who have been marginalized.

Organisational routines – the interplay of legal standards and professional discretion

Discretion is described as a hallmark of professional work. Professional discretion rests on trust in the ability of certain occupational groups to make sound decisions ‘on behalf’ of societal authorities. It has been suggested that in Europe, managerialist-influenced policies with increased focus on control and accountability have placed pressure on professional discretion. Although earlier studies have demonstrated tensions between external and internal accountability, they have not highlighted how legal forms of authority are key aspects in the regulation of education, or how professionals handle legal standards in their practices. The purpose of this study is to understand the interplay between legal standards and professional discretion. An organisational-routines perspective is used to examine this interplay. Empirically, the students’ legal rights to a good psychosocial environment are used as a case. Based on interviews with principals, deputies and teachers in Norwegian schools, the paper examines how legal norms are translated into social practices, and how practitioners construct and legitimise their work. The study shows how preventive and remedial measures are prevalent in Norwegian schools. When laws and regulations require specific procedures, they are transformed into routines based on the schools’ iterative practices. The study adds an empirical analysis to current understandings of juridification in education.

School leadership and ethnic diversity: approaching the challenge

In this article we explore school leaders’ responses to challenges of inclusion in two Norwegian upper secondary schools. The empirical data are interviews with principals, deputies and social advisers in the two schools. We use multicultural education and inclusive leadership as theoretical lenses in the analysis. The results show that while the school leaders recognised challenges of inclusion of minority students, it did not become a driving force in their strategic work. Individual teachers were trusted to carry out their teaching practices in ways that would accommodate the needs of all students. There were few arenas for collective learning and sharing experiences about teaching the students from ethnic and linguistic minorities. The study contributes to a currently weak research base about school leadership in multicultural schools.

Building Leadership Capacity: The Norwegian Approach

This article analyzes how leadership development and preparation is conceptualised and contextualised in the national education program for newly appointed school principals in Norway. Our main focus is on exploring whether there are differing epistemological foundations of various approaches to learning-centred school leadership. Our theoretical framework is informed by a review of a variety of studies, which focus on the relationship between leadership and student learning, and by Michael Fullan’s (2001) framework for thinking about and leading complex change. As empirical basis we have selected and compared two different preparatory programs. While both programs have been granted a status as a national leadership program in Norway, they also demonstrate a variation in understanding leadership for school improvement and student learning. The findings also demonstrate some significant differences across providers with regard to perspective and the emphasis on outcomes, and questioning the extent to which the knowledge base is characterised by a combination of educational theories and research on leadership. Despite these distinctions, which are anchored in different epistemological foundations, both programmes are assumed to contribute to the implementation of a national policy for leadership development and training in Norway. Our main argument is that to understand how this is possible, it is important to trace historical and cultural patterns of social development within the Norwegian context.

Leadership for Inclusive Education

The purpose of this book is to examine the constituent elements that contribute to the construct of inclusive education and to explore the implications for school leadership practice. In order to achieve this, different aspects of the discourse framing inclusion will be examined by the contributors to this collection.

Educational Methods as Commodities within European Education: A Norwegian-Danish Case

A number of studies in the past few decades address how the governing of educational systems are changing as a result of intensified measurement and use of statistics. This article suggests that another consequence may be the construction of solutions, tools, and methods which target the problems constructed through comparable indicators and benchmarks. An increased proliferation and accessibility of models, methods, and outcomes has inspired both governments and practitioners to look beyond their national borders for solutions to specific problems or challenges. As a consequence, ideas, methods, and approaches increasingly resemble commodities in the global marketplace. The article investigates the diffusion of a method for school development, namely the model for learning environment and pedagogical analysis (the LP-model). The model was developed in Norway in 2005 and later spread to a number of schools and municipalities across the country, and subsequently to Denmark. We analyse the cross-national borrowing process by applying the framework of policy borrowing. The framework serves as a heuristic in our analysis of information from the LP-models websites, evaluation reports and booklets. The analysis shows that similar descriptions of problems and high policy expectations for addressing the problems constitute central preconditions for the borrowing process. We also find that claims that the model works play an important part in marketing the model. Moreover, the model was warranted by high-profile researchers in Norway and Denmark constituting powerful personal and professional networks.

Leadership and Inclusion

Increasingly, educational policies are concerned with issues of equity and social justice. One effect of international comparisons, such as PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS, and high-stakes testing regimes, is that they produce evidence of inequality, putting pressure on governments and schools to act in a remedial manner (Blackmore, 2009).