Leading Changes in School Culture : Insights from a Three-Year School Improvement Program
Roč.30,č.3(2025)
School Leader(ship) in Focus: Understanding Current Challenges and Shaping Future Perspectives
Kätlin Vanari
Eve Eisenschmidt
Mikk Granström
In decentralized educational systems, schools are expected to meet high standards, with school principals granted wide-ranging autonomy in decision making. This creates significant challenges for school leadership. Previous studies have suggested that partnerships with universities can be an effective way to drive change in the school culture by creating artifacts to initiate discussions about espoused beliefs and values, and even about basic underlying assumptions. This article presents a longitudinal study of five schools participating in a three-year program. The program aimed to create a collaborative culture by enhancing teaching and learning practices through distributed leadership, co-creation, and evidencedriven decision making. The study identified changes in school culture based on interviews with school teams and mentors and on teacher surveys conducted during the program. The findings highlight the challenges that the school leadership encountered when creating practices for effective professional learning, such as learning communities and peer observations. Effective leadership is crucial in evidence-driven decision making, as goaloriented leaders are necessary for sustaining collaborative organizational routines for data use. The program's structured support facilitated the circularity of learning for the school teams.
school improvement program; leadership; school culture; longitudinal study
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