Knowledge is connections

Lifelong learning: policies and programme

European Policy Network On School Leadership

(EAC/42/2010) Grant Agreement EAC-2010-1388

Specific Agreement number: EAC-2010-1388/1

Knowledge is Connections

Reflections on knowledge management activities in EPNoSL

Del 3.1

Version: 1 Date: 09-01-2014

With the support of the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Union

European Policy Network on School Leadership (EAC/42/2010)

Page 1 of 36

Work Package: No. 3

Contributors: Nóra Révai, Justina Erculj, Attila Horváth,

Lilla Lukács, Eszter Szegedi

Status, Version No. Final

Submission date: 09/01/2014

Start Date of the Agreement: 12 December 2012

Duration of the Specific Agreement 13 Months

Dissemination Level: Public

Project coordinator: Kathy Kikis-Papadakis, FORTH/IACM [email protected]

Financing: With the support of the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Union

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission.

This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.


Page 2 of 36

Executive Summary This report is developed in the framework of the European Policy Network of School Leadership (EPNoSL)

project’s third work package (WP3) entitled “Knowledge Management”. The objective of this WP was three-

fold:

“To promote discourse and networking between diverse stakeholders groups on current pitfalls for

school leadership and documenting lessons learnt.

To design, develop and implement collaborative activity-based tools under the scope of enhancing

self-reflections on SL roles, tasks, responsibilities and accountability, qualifications and quality

assurance and accreditation parameters from an equity and learning perspective.

To enhance the networking capacity amongst target groups within national contexts on pertinent

factors relating to the selection and preparation of School Leadership.” (Specific Work Programme

2012-2013)

The present report aims to summarise and analyse the knowledge management activities of the 2nd phase of

EPNoSL. It starts with giving a more theoretical insight into the special role of knowledge management in the

field of educational policy drawing on the conceptualisation of knowledge and on recent recognitions

concerning the importance of networking in enhancing a global educational knowledge.

The report gives an overview of how knowledge management was conceived and implemented in the

project by describing the spaces and channels of knowledge transfer and by offering a typology of the

involvement of the different stakeholder groups. Thus it distinguishes those who actively create content

from those who “only” follow the discussions and identifies 4 stakeholder groups, by adding knowledge

agents to the traditionally identified groups of researchers, practitioners and policy-makers.

The synthesis of national networking highlights two different approaches of networking at the national level:

the “push” and the “pull” approach; describes how the partners relied and drew on the main EPNoSL themes

and the online events and discussions; and summarises the nature of findings they drew. It further presents

two particular examples: the Greek and the French national networks, the former of which was special with

regards to its content, whereas the latter with regards to the method of building the network.

The virtual platform (EPNoSL VIP) is explored from three different perspectives: with regards to its structural

characteristics, from the perspective of how it deals with equity and learning and from the point of view of

its implications on teacher education. We conclude that all the stakeholder groups were represented in the

discourse and their contributions show a mixed pattern. The perspective of “equity and learning” appeared

in diverse ways in the discussions, although the dimension of actual school practice on equity was less

intensely present. The discussions had various implications with regards to the content and methodology of

teachers’ and leaders’ professional development, as well as more general considerations as to the context in

which teachers can work effectively.

After a detailed statistical analysis of participation, the report draws conclusions with regards to how

knowledge is essentially captured in connections and reflects on the impact of the activities.


Page 3 of 36

Table of Contents

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 2

INTRODUCTION 4

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT – CONCEPT AND STRUCTURE 6

SYNTHESIS OF NATIONAL NETWORKING ACTIVITIES IN 2013 9

APPROACH TO NATIONAL NETWORKING 10

STAKEHOLDERS AND ACTIVITIES 11

THEMATIC FOCUS 12

NATURE OF FINDINGS 13

GOOD PRACTICE CASES 14

STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF VIP CONTENT 15

EQUITY AND LEARNING IN THE VIP DISCUSSIONS 22

THE TEACHER EDUCATION PERSPECTIVE 26

ABOUT ATEE 27

SCHOOL GOVERNANCE AND TEACHER EDUCATION 27

THE ROLE OF SCHOOL LEADERS 27

SYSTEM LEADERSHIP 28

AUTONOMY – ROOM FOR MANOEUVRE 28

LEADERSHIP FOR EQUITY 28

CONCLUSIONS 29

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS 29

VIP PARTICIPATION STATISTICS 29

NATIONAL NETWORK STATISTICS 32

CONCLUSION 34

REFERENCES 35


Page 4 of 36

Introduction

Eszter Szegedi

One of the major challenges of the 21th century’s educational policy in particular after the economic crises is

to contribute to the understanding of knowledge and learning in the context of economic development and

social cohesion. Educational experts as well as the governments make efforts to define a new role for schools

in building and servicing a knowledge-based society, both schools and other educational institutions have to

face this new requirement. Since the late 20th century’s new paradigm ‘lifelong learning’ has spread, the

question of what functions schools can fulfil in the emerging learning society that would not be better

fulfilled by other actors and institutions is increasingly more relevant. Is it possible to exploit research and

other forms of knowledge so as to make the sector more effective? There are many practitioners still

convinced that education is rather an art which is strongly rooted in practical experience; thus establishing

and implementing more comprehensive theoretical knowledge is irrelevant. These are often the underlying

questions of discussions among researchers, policy makers and practitioners, whatever might be their

central issue. We cannot however answer these questions without a deeper understanding of the concept of

knowledge and the nature of knowledge flow between the educational actors.

Defining knowledge has been in the centre of interest of philosophy for centuries. A generally accepted view

nowadays is the classification of four different kinds of knowledge by Lundvall and Johnson (Lundvall and

Johnson, 1994):

Know-what.

Know-why.

Know-how.

Know-who.

In a more recent article Lundvall highlights the ancient roots of this categorisation, which helps us

understand the deeper meaning behind them (Lundvall, 2003, p. 3):

“Knowledge has been at the centre of analytical interest from the very beginning of civilisation.

Aristotle distinguished between: EPISTÈMÈ: knowledge that is universal and theoretical. TECHNÈ:

knowledge that is instrumental, context specific and practise related. PHRONESIS: Knowledge that is

normative, experience based, context-specific and related to common sense: “practical wisdom”. At

least two of our categories have roots that go back to these three intellectual virtues. Know-why is

similar to epistèmè and know-how to technè. But the correspondence is imperfect, since we will

follow Polanyi and argue that scientific activities always involve a combination of know-how and

know-why. Aristotle’s third category, phronesis, which relates to the ethical dimension, will be

reflected in what is to be said about the need for a social and ethical dimension in economic analysis

and about the importance of trust in the context of learning.”

Our present knowledge in the field of education has been based on the results of scientific research which

took place in the past few decades. As a result, we have learned a lot about the first two elements of the

above mentioned four categories of knowledge, the question of know-how is however gaining increasingly

more importance and together with know-who seem to be an increasingly more complex issue.

Education systems have often been described as multilevel, multiactor and complex adaptive systems in the

21th century. Multilevel refers to the co-existence of a transnational level, in which actors, factors, initiatives

and sources determine the development of educational governance and systems, and traditional levels such


Page 5 of 36

as national, regional, institutional or personal levels of education. The concept ‘multiactor’ is similar,

however it implies another type of change, namely that policy makers, representatives of different interest

groups of the society, different stakeholders such as parents, employers, teachers, teacher educators etc. all

influence the formation of educational systems and it is the interactions of these actors that determine the

processes of educational systems.

Considering the above described complexity, it is easier to understand the raison d’être and importance of

knowledge management in the field of education. The OECD published a study in 2000 which – based on the

experience in the knowledge-intensive economic sectors – emphasises that designing an infrastructure to

support knowledge management is crucial to serve tomorrow’s needs, moreover the educational institutions

require a conscious change in their culture to manage knowledge better. The study seeks to answer the

most relevant and recent questions for the education systems which are as follows (OECD, 2000, p. 69):

– “What knowledge (and innovation) is likely to be needed and by whom in education systems of the

future?

– What are the best ways of i) producing, ii) mediating/disseminating and iii) applying such

knowledge?

– What action needs to be taken to increase the education system’s capacity for the successful

production, mediation and application of knowledge, and what infrastructure might be needed to

support and sustain this capacity?

– How can this be done to ensure that education systems are efficient and effective and meet the new

goals and functions that are likely to be set for them?

– In particular, how might all these developments influence and support “schooling for tomorrow”?”

According to the conclusion in Chapter 3 of the OECD report, these questions can only be answered by using

a global framework for managing knowledge rather than sequencing knowledge into production,

transmission and application. The authors emphasise that establishing and using networks and ICT to

support knowledge management, forging new roles and relationships between researchers and practitioners

to support better educational R&D and expanding the role of practitioners in knowledge management are

crucial.

Networking could be a key element of facilitating the production and application of new pedagogic

knowledge on a large scale however it requires the engagement of practitioner-teachers in schools as well as

the research community. Educational research is under pressure to become more applied and one of the

reasons for the low rates of successful application of research knowledge in pedagogical practice may

originate in the difficulties of knowledge transfer. School-generated knowledge could equally enrich

academic knowledge, it is however necessary that the different actors make a collaborative professional

effort so that the boundary between research and its application become permeable.

Nevertheless in recent decades there has been a spectacular shift of thinking in education from the question

of what should be done to the question of how this can be achieved. The focus has been on the

implementation issues: we know relatively much about what we should do, however we do not always have

the capacity to actually realise the required changes. The reason for this lack of capacity is rooted in the

complex, multilevel and multiactor nature of the educational systems, which imply that the results of a

policy measure or an institutional innovation are theoretically not predictable. As a consequence the

importance of policy experimentation and the subsequent policy learning increases, these two are the key

elements of governance.


Page 6 of 36

Although technology makes it easier to disseminate theoretical knowledge, electronic publications of results

are not necessarily easy to understand, so human networks remain crucial in accessing information. The

emerging global information society has created a new profession, the role of which is essential in the

mediation between different stakeholders who “do not speak each other’s language“. We coined

representatives of this emerging profession ‘knowledge agents’. They are those who design the most

appropriate knowledge management activities, manoeuvre the knowledge sharing fora and motivate the

participants. They can equally play a role in helping school leaders in their task to integrate policy

requirements, theoretical and practical educational knowledge.

The programmes of the Virtual Platform of the European Policy Network on School Leadership and the

opportunity itself to create spaces for the different actors from different nations and with various

professional background where they can exchange their experience, share their views and engage in an open

dialogue is a great form of enhancing policy learning and building trust as a mutual base of partnerships. The

essence of the one year long communication process is summarised in the paper on policy response by

Bagley and Ward from the perspective of today’s policy making, policy learning and formation of policy

consensus:

“… Bates et al (2011, p. 41) identify how policy ‘ownership’ is considered to be crucial to

implementation. This is because a dispersed, rather than top-down, model of implementation is more

likely to ensure that various stakeholders (e.g. parents and local authorities) view policy as benign,

rather than an alien interloper, and terms such as ‘influential stakeholders’ and ‘policy community’

(ibid, p. 42) are used to describe the multitude of individuals who must be “on-board” with a policy

message in order for it to be embraced. Clearly, this view is consistent with Harvey’s (2009) account

of the embedding of novel ideas. The conflation of policy with “common sense” and the cultivation of

policy ownership is engineered through such things as consultations and conferences, and of course

policy documents play a key role in recruiting stakeholders’ support. Interestingly, it has been argued

that policy networks, which would include our own European Policy Network on School Leadership

(EPNoSL), ‘are displacing hierarchy and markets and developing as the dominant mode of

governance and social organisation’ (Ball, 2012, p. 7), meaning that we ourselves are playing an

increasingly important role in the formation of policy consensus.”

Knowledge management – concept and structure Nóra Révai

Knowledge management (KM) activities in EPNoSL were conceived to fulfil the following 3 objectives:

“To promote discourse and networking between diverse stakeholders groups on current pitfalls for

school leadership and documenting lessons learnt.

To design, develop and implement collaborative activity-based tools under the scope of enhancing

self-reflections on SL roles, tasks, responsibilities and accountability, qualifications and quality

assurance and accreditation parameters from an equity and learning perspective.

To enhance the networking capacity amongst target groups within national contexts on pertinent

factors relating to the selection and preparation of School Leadership.” (Specific Work Programme

2012-2013)


Page 7 of 36

As mentioned in depth in the introduction, KM activities were designed to facilitate knowledge sharing

between policy-makers, practitioners (school heads, teachers, teacher and leader trainers, etc.) and

researchers both within the EPNoSL partnership and at the national level of the participating countries.

Knowledge management in the second period of EPNoSL (2013) took the form of several interrelated

activities, just like in the first period: national networking, online discussions, conferences, PLAs, resource

sharing, newsletters, policy briefing notes etc. The first two of the above list – national networks and online

fora – were the two methods that constituted the activities of WP3. National network building strategies,

activities and the composition of national networks varied in the different countries, a more detailed

description of these will be given in the section on national networks. The online fora comprised a series of

structured events: 6 webinars and 5 forum discussions thematically closely related to the five main EPNoSL

themes: accountability, autonomy, distributed leadership, policy response and educating school leaders for

equity and learning. The series of programmes were coined EPNoSL VIP – the Virtual Platform of the

European Policy Network on School Leadership –, conveying the obvious message that the programme is

open: anyone interested or in any way involved in the improvement of school leadership is a “very important

person”, since any knowledge, experience, thought or idea enriches the discourse on the topic. The analysis

of its content with special regards to how the horizontal perspective – equity and learning – appeared in the

discussions is provided in the third and fourth sections.

Both the openness of the programme and the technological background (a dynamic portal) allow for all

participants to contribute to the discussions, share resources and information within the spaces (platforms)

created for the purposes of KM. The figure below represents how the concept of KM was realised within

EPNoSL:

Figure 1: Knowledge management spaces in EPNoSL

Figure 1 shows the two main spaces created to facilitate the transfer of knowledge and to foster the

generation of new knowledge. The left side is the Virtual Platform (VIP), the international virtual space

where EPNoSL partners and all those whom they invite and attract into this space – members of the national


Page 8 of 36

networks, members of European associations, partners’ colleagues, etc. – come together to share their

knowledge, while the right side is the multitude of the national networks on school leadership created by

EPNoSL members. Nodes represent the people involved, some of whom are highly linked – also called hubs

(Barabási, Albert-László, 2005) –, that is, they know and work together with many, whereas others are less

central (more lowly linked) actors. The edges linking the nodes represent some kind of relationship between

these two people, which for our purposes is interpreted in a broad sense including for example the link

between the presenter of a webinar with its audience. These links are the channels through which

knowledge flows.

The link between the two spaces was strong: reports on national networking as well as the final evaluation

of the VIP prove that the international discourse was used as an input for the national events in many cases.

Specific examples for how the VIP discussions inspired national networking activities will be given in section

2.

Concerning the roles the members of a community can take on there are various typologies. When

describing social epidemics Gladwell distinguishes three “agents of change”:

connectors: those who know many people usually across social, cultural, professional circles, and

introduce people from different circles, they correspond to network hubs;

mavens: “information specialists” who accumulate knowledge and know how to share it with others;

salesmen: “persuaders”, people with powerful negotiation skills, who can easily make others want to

agree with them. (Gladwell, 2000)

According to the type of participation, the members of a collaborative website (such as wiki) can be

viewers: those who only view content,

editors: those who also edit content,

creators: those who create new content.

As for the proportion of these different types of participants the “90-9-1 principle” holds, which states that

90% are viewers, 9% are editors and only 1% create content. Yet another classification says that the rule of

thumb or the 1% rule holds for the participation in an internet community, that is, only 1% of the users

actively create new content, the other 99% only “lurk”. (Wikipédia “1% rule (Internet culture)”,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%29)

While all these classifications may have relevance in the knowledge management of EPNoSL, neither of them

can directly be applied in our particular settings. We will see later (in section 3) that the roles participants

can assume in the VIP events are very similar to those of a collaborative website. In general the members of

EPNoSL and its national networks may have had one or more of the following roles:

contributors: those who actively contribute by knowledge input: presenters of webinars, keynote

article writers, moderators of and contributors to the forum discussions;

followers or participants: those who “passively” participate in webinars and national workshops,

read the keynote articles, resources and/or follow the discussions;

mavens or sharers: those who actively share the information/knowledge they gained through

various channels (e.g. a school principal / teacher who tells their colleagues, a trainer who builds it in

their training course, etc.).

Although we had no tool to measure the activity of people from this perspective as no information was

available on the number of mavens nor were EPNoSL partners asked and provided tools to carry out detailed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%29


Page 9 of 36

statistical network analysis, the VIP events’ participation could be analysed to a certain extent. The analysis

found that the activity of people in EPNoSL VIP corresponds to the typical online behaviour of people, thus

the vast majority are followers (passive participants), while only a small proportion actively create or share

knowledge (see section 3 for details).

Besides their different roles or type of activity, individuals have a particular professional background that

connects them to school leadership: they can be practicing school principals, leaders or teachers, teacher or

leader trainers, researchers or policy (or decision) makers, etc. The common platforms (international and

national) ensured the grounds for knowledge exchange between the different stakeholder groups. More

details about the participation of the stakeholder groups will be given in section 2 and 3.

After a short summary of the spaces of knowledge management, let us first go into more details about the

national networks by giving an overview of the approach to networking and examples of how they were put

into practice.

Synthesis of national networking activities in 2013

Attila Horváth, Nóra Révai

Establishing and exploiting networks has become a major tool of knowledge management and has

increasingly gained ground in the field of educational governance as described in the introduction of the

present report. With the objective of facilitating a dialogue on school leadership between different

stakeholders across Europe, one of EPNoSL’s key activity lies in fostering networking both at the

international (EPNoSL itself) and the national level and in strengthening the connection between the

European and the national discourses.

When synthesising networking activities it is useful to consider some of the results of the emerging science

of networks which provides new insights in many scientific areas and has a huge potential of application. In

the report entitled National Platforms on Educational Policy on School Leadership (Révai, 2012) a short

overview was given of the typology of networks describing self-organising and artificial, horizontal (informal)

and vertical (formal) networks. Some important characteristics that influence the way networks function

were also highlighted. Thus we noted that

“National networks established in the framework of EPNoSL are interesting mixtures of artificial and

natural networks in as much as in most cases they rely on existing informal connections but gather

people for a specific purpose and around a common interest.” (Révai, 2012)

We equally emphasised that networks can transform over time due to their internal dynamics: artificial

networks can become natural ones and natural (informal) networks may be formalised. These different

types of networks can however not only be linked through time but they also have a symbiotic linkage since

artificial networks are very rarely viable without close cooperation with natural networks. In order to further

develop networks in EPNoSL we must keep in mind some basic conditions which are necessary for the

effective functioning of artificial networks:

The basis of the network should be mutual trust between the members

All members should be motivated to function the network and to cooperate

Common language and sustainable communication channels

Continuous knowledge sharing

Resources must be allocated in a sustainable way.


Page 10 of 36

On the basis of network theory and the conclusions regarding national networking in Phase 1 we adopted an

open and flexible approach to the further development of national networks in Phase 2, which is based on

trust and support. The approach can be summarised as follows:

1. Each partner could create their own particular approach to networking. They were free and

encouraged to build on their existing networks, to determine their thematic focus and to select the

channels of communication and methods of knowledge sharing most appropriate for their purposes

and national context.

2. In order to effectively plan networking activities partners were provided with a planning tool to help

them think over their own strategy and needs. Plans were then shared within the partnership and

could be used as a source of inspiration.

3. A methodological toolkit, a collection of ideas to inspire partners and facilitate the effective

implementation of the national workshops, was compiled to support EPNoSL partners in their

national network building activities.

4. Partners were provided with a short synthesis of previous EPNoSL outcomes that they were

encouraged to translate and disseminate in their national networks in order to introduce EPNoSL

understandings and discourse in the national contexts.

5. Partners were asked to report on their national networks using a common template and to evaluate

their activities against a set of criteria that was commonly established and agreed upon.

In the following we are going to synthesise partners’ individual approaches to developing their networks, the

composition of stakeholders in the networks, the various activities that took place, the thematic focus

partners chose as well as the nature of findings, conclusions and implications that were drawn.

Approach to national networking

The strategy to national networking varied among participating countries. This is easy to understand as the

different national systems, national policies towards school leadership require adequate approaches. There

are, however, some patterns that can be drawn based upon the national reports.

An important but hidden agenda was the intention of national partners. What did they want the network

for? What was the aim of setting up a national network?

We identified two approaches: the “pull” and the “push” tactics. Some networks intended to provoke

change in their educational system and the organisers of the network had specific ideas of what and how

should be done. Their approach was to provide as much information as possible about specific practices.

Practices and policies the network makers considered as worthwhile to explore. This is what we call the

“push” tactics. The Portuguese network, for example, has built a strong and meaningful program in order to

instigate new ideas among teachers and other stakeholders in school leadership. Similarly, in Poland and

Hungary network activities were focussing on specific topics and brought in information, expertise to

introduce ideas on accountability, equity or distributed leadership. The Lithuanian example is interesting

because the national report clearly sees the need for a “push” approach but the resources are considered to

be inadequate for this effort. In another Baltic country, Estonia, the “push” approach is also clear as they

were focussing hard on finding better ways of school evaluation within the network.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1c_GFXuis2wlFFJrCQny8BFq7djVeJMvmyvGK7RcuoV8/viewform


Page 11 of 36

On the other hand we saw other countries where the intention was to open up a wide variety of information

without filtering and where the network operators made no effort to promote any particular concept or idea

or to formulate educational policy. The idea behind is that things will happen anyway if they want to

happen, we can help the process by providing all the pros and cons so that stakeholders can make an

informed decision. This is the “pull” approach. We could see a good example on this in the case of Sweden

where several networks exist already and EPNoSL is seen as an extra resource but not a tool for bringing in

change. The Danish and Spanish networks took similar stance and have been organised with the aim of

providing information on the international scene and share experiences they have.

Depending on the local circumstances networking took two alternative routes in developing. In a number of

countries, reportedly in Sweden, Latvia or Poland there are several networks and partners saw the danger of

organising yet another one just for the sake of a project. In these countries the strategy was to coordinate

or to join existing networks so as not to duplicate efforts.

In some countries the formalisation of the network was seen to be unproductive or an option that is not

viable. In Hungary the establishment of formal network was simply stated as “not possible”. The reasons

may have been similar to the Lithuanian case where the national partner described the situation in a bleak

perspective. The formalisation of a network needs resources, some funding in any case, and some of the

organisations who have been partners in this project cannot provide this. The network operators clearly saw

the national networks as grass root organisations. While this approach is a proper alternative but it is not

seen how the networks will survive following the end of the project. It is rather true that networks grow

freely in a free environment and die out in dark unless they get support.

Some other partners chose another way and started the network with a strong government support. The

top-down method was chosen in Slovenia, Portugal, Greece, France and Flemish Belgium. The formulation

of these networks required very good lobbying capacities and as a result the maintenance and the

operations are also easier. The possible danger of top down organised networks is that it could be

ambiguous after a while who is informing and influencing whom.

The German experience is very exciting as they have realised that while there are already existing networks,

during their activities they observed that new professional relationships have been coined and new micro-

networks were formed. This throws light on the nature of networks: networks if not formalised into

institutions are constantly rebuilding themselves and practically consist of many bilateral relations and

micro-networks of only a few people who have some other links to other micro-networks. The German

example vividly explains the nature of networks, that is, networks consist of networks and not all members

are connected with everybody.

Stakeholders and activities

The report form on the national networking activities listed a number of stakeholders and respondents were

asked to provide numbers for each item. The form had an “other” item as well so that unmentioned

categories could also be reported.

Partners in some cases misunderstood the section and reported the potential number of the target group

instead of the positively attending or participating people. Numerical statistics therefore may be misleading.

Nevertheless, there were some partners who have involved all listed stakeholder types (Poland, Latvia and

France). It is hard to assess if there were some other stakeholders included in the process because not filling

out the “other” cell does not necessarily imply a negative answer. However, one partner, Slovenia, listed


Page 12 of 36

NGO leaders, Student Associations’ heads, minority group representatives. Some of these may be

considered on the list of categories for future reports.

In some cases it was difficult to see why some stakeholders have been omitted. This is particularly true in

the case of school inspectors. School inspectors may be working under different names in countries. The

Danish partner’s remark was that this term is not relevant for them. The Hungarian report also crossed it

out as at the time of the project there has been no school inspection in this country.

In general the participating countries focussed on different groups of stakeholders and tried to avoid the

“one size fits all” approach in their communication. If there was more than one event organized these were

aiming at partly different audiences.

It was characteristic of some actions, like in Hungary, Germany, Greece, Lithuania that parents were not

addressed by the activities. The idea was that these professional networks are dealing with problems and in

a language that is not suitable for a wider debate. While others, France, Latvia and Poland tried to reach as

many stakeholders as possible in order to publicize good practice to all. In France, e.g., even books were

published on the topic.

It can be said that all reporting partners established some kind of activity during the period in question. The

number of activities per partner varied between 1 (Lithuania, Spain, Denmark, Belgium-FL, Estonia) and 5

(Portugal).

The types of activities ranged from seminars and conferences to research. Most partners considered it to be

very important to disseminate the different good or interesting and challenging practices they witnessed

during the project. Therefore seminars, conferences were overwhelming on the list of activities. The

participation generally seemed to be very good and exceeded the expectations of organisers.

Non traditional ways of meetings, namely on-line discussions, webinars or forums have not been reported

very much in the national network reports. The Polish report mentions virtual platform and in one case, in

Lithuania, the webinars and e-forums were evaluated as a way of communication participants liked very

much.

It has not been part of the national networking per se but must be mentioned here that the webinars

organised for the partners and interested stakeholders on the project level have contributed largely to the

success of developing not only national but transnational networks.

Thematic focus

The topics for some national network meetings, conferences show a strong emphasis on philosophical issues

concerning leadership. Even the wording “leadership” (and not e.g., management) suggests this. Terms like

“distributed leadership”, “autonomy”, “equity” were in the focus of activities in Denmark, Hungary, Portugal

and Spain. Therefore the key questions have been like in Spain: “What do you mean by Leadership? What

do you mean by Accountability?”

A rather different approach was taken by other countries where they concentrated on down to earth,

pragmatic issues, like effective organisation (Lithuania), school development and improvement of the

performance of the educational system (France). The German workshops referred to similar areas but also

added “distributed leadership” signalling that it has a day-to-day significance as well. In Estonia the key

topic was how to evaluate school leaders and schools and how to inform the public about their performance.


Page 13 of 36

In some cases the thematic focus seemed to be less important than the event itself. In some countries, like

Slovenia the headteachers had an opportunity to meet with decision makers and the Minister to discuss any

issues that concerns them regarding school leadership. A similar case was reported by the German partner:

“stakeholders from ministries of education found it very beneficial to have the opportunity for an exchange

of ideas with school heads”. In Lithuania the networking itself was a great step forward. While in Greece

the target group of special education institutions set the topic as well.

The Belgian-Flemish system is going through some significant changes as, so called, school groups will be

formed from small organisations. The Belgian partner conducts a research in finding out what new

competencies will this amalgamation call for and what specific needs will arise in training of school heads.

Also in Belgium a survey is pursued on the need for training novice school leaders (serving less than 5 years).

Nature of findings

Many of the findings in the reports are very country specific. The solutions and suggestions described by

e.g., the Greek report are excellently structured and most probably useful for local use. The real outcome

and the conclusions will only show years from now. It is only then to see if there was anything that could be

generalised or used in other national contexts.

There are, however, a few conclusions provided either by the partners or could be drawn from the national

reports. One important implication was emphasised by the French report referring to a book that was

published in the framework of the project. The new leadership task for a school principal is “to find, within

the scope of schools, ways to coordinate pedagogical action between partners who do not share the same

views as to the objective of education. Even if these partners do not agree on the basic principles, they can

do so on practices, for instance a similar work organization”. The suggestion is that the key role of leadership

is to mediate the sometimes conflicting interest in the operation of a school. Networking may be a good tool

to find good ways and learn from unsuccessful cases.

Somewhat similar ideas emerged in the Slovenian report in which the workshop with parent associations

resulted in the following findings:

“Parents involvement must overcome individual interest for their child

National parents association can play important role in raising involvement and parents influence on

schools policies

Schools must find different ways of co-operation with parents”

The consequences here are also stemming from the complex social environment of schools: children use

schools, parents are the guardians of their children’s interest, school have to take into consideration the

interest of all children and the state must ensure proper and high quality operations. The interplay of these

stakeholders determines the freedom of action for the school leader.

Without making hasty generalisations about systems and their history it seems that the communication

between government level (ministry) and schools differ significantly in, so called, “old” and “new” members

of the EU. Discussion of policy makers and government officials is an everyday action in some countries with

a long history of democracy or stakeholder involvement. One example is Sweden where the partner is the

Ministry of Education but at the same time it did not vindicate the power of setting the topics or the pace for

local networking. They repeatedly emphasized that the ministry is not in the position of organising events or

have a decisive word in the activities. All these have been outsourced to the other Swedish partner, Umea

University. The ministry and the Centre for Principal Development at the university have regular meetings


Page 14 of 36

with school leaders and their representatives, trade unions, school board politicians. As they frankly stated:

“We don’t see a great need for us to form another network. (…) If we shall be successful we need to have a

very good program or task for us to discuss.” As they do have proper communication among stakeholders as

a usual practice what “very good task” could they find?

In the case of Slovenia participants found it to be very useful to meet policy makers and the minister in

person. They may need the network to instigate this communication as this was the exceptional occasion

and not the routine. As the report words it: “it was the agreement, as one of the final conclusions, that it

should be useful to involve the headteachers in the process of policy decisions and not only inform them

after they are made already.” In Hungary efforts have been made to involve ministry officials to attend the

two workshops they organised but no one was able to attend. Nevertheless lower level decision and policy

makers did participate in both events. The Lithuanian case is even bleaker as the report is speaking about a

“bewitchment circle” in which people are not used to speak up openly which is inevitable to run a network.

At the same time only networks can encourage people to share their values and see that they are not alone.

All in all, the morale of these examples is that a function of networks is to bring people together who can

share views and values and are “ganging up” to influence policy. This function is badly needed in some

countries and is completely meaningless in others.

Finally, there is a technical finding that is coming back again and again from the national reports. In short,

the obvious became clear yet again: in Europe English is the new lingua franca. This suggests that any

school leader who intends to be involved in international networks needs to be able to communicate in

English. Many partners mentioned that the abundance of excellent materials has been spread in EPNoSL but

they had no capacity to translate them. The problem implies that intermediates are needed in conveying

international experiences on national level. One important function for national networks could be to

provide this cultural translation of good (or not that good) practices.

Good practice cases Listing the following good practices does not mean that these were the only interesting examples. However,

we found that there are some approaches which may spark new ideas regarding either the content or the

method of building networks in the area of school leadership.

One of the specific approaches was presented by Greece. The network was built in a top-down direction by

a ministerial background research organisation, the Institute of Educational Policy (IEP). The IEP prepared an

overview on the educational leadership scene and realised that there is a field with a lack of leadership

support. They started to focus on a group of institutions that has not been in the centre of development due

to its special stakeholder group. The schools of special education with specific and differentiated

characteristics were selected to be the main target group for the national networking activities. Special

education schools related to leadership is a very new area for development in Greece. The strategy IEP

chose was not to duplicate networks in school leadership, or offer yet another event to overloaded school

leaders but to find a “Blue Ocean” if the market terminology fits this case. The lesson that could be learnt

from this case is that networks grow faster and in a more effective way in areas which are relatively

neglected or new in an educational system rather than trying to establish a competing network in already

“occupied” areas. The success of this strategy is earmarked by the fact that organisers had to change the

venue of the planned seminars due to the high number of participants coming to the event at their own cost

from all over the country.


Page 15 of 36

Another interesting example was provided by France. The national network team was also comprised of

highly organised institutions. The central research institution and some other local divisions and higher

education institutions put in the focus of their effort the topic of Latin versus Anglo-Saxon approach to

educational leadership. It is already well known that because of historical reasons different systems and

philosophies of education emerged in various parts of Europe. It is also known that the North American and

British influence on education is very strong and one of the pitfalls of making education policy is to copy the

methods used in other countries without proper adaptation. The French approach is not arguing against the

Anglo-Saxon model but takes another twist in interpretation. They state that in Latin European systems the

key issue is not accountability (as these are highly centralized state systems) but to develop pedagogical

coordination. This is to “develop an ability to manage schools without agreements between partners about

the actual purposes of education: the goal is to find objects and objectives stakeholders may be able to

agree on.”

Structural analysis of VIP content Nóra Révai

Generating dialogue on school leadership issues between diverse stakeholders is the main objective of

knowledge management in EPNoSL. Therefore it is worthwhile to analyse the outcomes from the

perspective of stakeholder participation and to examine the discourse in terms of identifiable patterns

characteristic to the different groups.

Before going into that it is important to underline however that the data available on the professional

background of participants is limited (we do not have information on every participant’s background).

Moreover the frontier between the different stakeholder groups is blurry, the groups are not disjoint. There

might be people who belong to several of them at the same time, for example someone who is engaged

both in research and in leader training at a university is a researcher who also works in the field of practice.

Others might have belonged to several groups over time, for instance someone who was a school leader for

many years and works now as a researcher. It was thus not always easy to decide which group somebody

belonged to, for the statistical purposes however we had to make a decision in each case, which we tried to

do in the most coherent manner possible. (Boukhelifa, Révai, 2006) We decided to consider the actual

professional activity of each participant or the one he/she represents more strongly in EPNoSL. Thus the

head of a leader training institute within a university was considered a practitioner even though the

discourse he/she engages in may differ from that of a school leader who has no professional background in

educational research.

The main stakeholder groups engaged in the discussions were:

practitioners – including school leaders, teachers, teacher or leader trainers, inspectors,

representatives of practitioners’ (SLs’, teachers’, etc.) professional organisations,

researchers (from universities, research institutes),

policy-makers – including people from ministries, national authorities but also from regulatory

bodies or executive agencies established by governments.

The field of knowledge management is infiltrating the world of education as well, as mentioned in the

introduction, the number of organisations, companies and individuals whose expertise resides in mediating


Page 16 of 36

between different stakeholders by making the results of a profession more digestible and meaningful for

another profession, and in facilitating dialogue between different groups by creating the most suitable

platforms and spaces for knowledge sharing. In the EPNoSL consortium these organisations have a special

role, but their presence in the dialogues is also important as they are likely to function as mavens/sharers

(see in section 1). Thus for our purposes, we have introduced a fourth group:

knowledge agents – including representatives of the so-called capacity building organisations,

counsellors/advisors of ministries and authorities, etc.

Different levels of participation can be distinguished according to the nature of contributions made. We will

use the following categories:

main input providers – webinar presenters, writers of keynote articles of the forum discussions,

contributors – those who posted comments in the chat box during webinars or on the forum

discussion thread,

viewers – those who “passively” participated in events, viewed the webinars, and visited the forum

discussions.

Note that these categories, although similar, are not identical to the roles that were described in the section

on knowledge management as they are specific to the participation in an event (here), while those listed

earlier are roles more generally assumed in creating/transferring knowledge and are not restricted to a

particular event. The following table summarises the participation of the different stakeholder groups:

VIP Practitioner Researcher Policy-makerKnowledge

agentUnknown Total

MAIN INPUT

PROVIDER 3 17 1 0 0 21

CONTRIBUTOR25 24 4 17 4 74

VIEWER*52 37 16 33 37 175/1049**

Total80 78 21 50 41 270/1319

*The number of participants in the webinars per stakeholder group. The total number of followers of forum discussions can be estimated with webpage analytics (visitors with individual IP addresses) however information on their professional background is not available. ** The total number of followers of forum discussions estimated with webpage analytics.

Table 1: Participation in VIP events according to stakeholder groups and roles

It is clear from the data that the VIP discussions were very much research-inspired, 80% of those who

provided the main input are researchers. As for the proportion of contributors it is closer to the distribution

of all the participants, there is no observable dominance of one or the other stakeholder group.


Page 17 of 36

Figure 2: Participation in VIP events according to stakeholder groups and roles

Figure 3: The proportion of the different roles assumed by participants

The pie chart above underpins that the behaviour of participants in the VIP events is very similar to that of a

typical online community, the percentages are very close to the 90-9-1 principle, and they correspond

surprisingly precisely the rule of thumb if we only consider those who create new content (in our case the

main input providers) and those who only “lurk” (here the contributors and the viewers).

In order to explore the patterns of discourse of the different stakeholder groups we established a simple

typology of contributions based on the forum discussions and the webinar comments. Essentially there were

4 main types of contributions: questions, comments, which formulated a certain opinion about the topic or

introduced a new perspective to the discussion, specific examples and feedback on the input or the other

comments/posts. To give a more precise picture of these contributions we further broke down 3 of these

categories and thus came up with the following:


Page 18 of 36

questions that move the conversation forward by introducing a new aspect/perspective

Questions questions that ask to precise a previous statement, idea

Opinions, comments

examples of a specific practice (e.g. in a school)

Examples examples of a specific policy (e.g. in a country) or a general phenomenon

general feedback (e.g. “Thank you for the inspiring presentation”)

Feedback specific feedback on a previous opinion (e.g. “I agree with X with regards to…”)

The number of the different types of contributions per stakeholder group is shown in Table 2.

WEBINARS PRACTITIONER RESEARCHER POLICY-MAKERKNOWLEDGE

AGENTSunknown Total

forward moving7 9 3 11 1

31

asking to precise1 1 0 4 0

6

OPINION,

COMMENT25 18 0 10 0

53

of practice7 2 0 1 0

10

of policy4 1 1 1 0

7

general 4 13 1 1 1

20

specific 7 10 0 2 2 21

Total 55 54 5 30 4 148

FEEDBACK

EXAMPLE

QUESTION

Table 2: Different types of contribution per stakeholder group in the webinars

Figure 3: Proportion of types of contribution in the webinars


Page 19 of 36

Figure 4: Types of contribution per stakeholder group in the webinars

Comparing the percentage of participation per stakeholder group and that of contributions per stakeholder

group in the case of the webinars, we find no significant differences, that is none of the stakeholder groups

contributes significantly more or less intensely (compared to their participation). Concerning the type of

contributions, the most common form was comments/opinion on the whole, however policy-makers did not

use this form, they asked questions, gave examples or feedback. Nonetheless, it would be false to draw

conclusions as to general trends on contribution patterns as the number of policy makers were too low to

have reliable results.

In the case of the forum discussions a fourth type of contribution appeared:

of resources (e.g. with links)

share of research results (e.g. in the form of specific references).

The following table and diagrams show the type of contributions per stakeholder group in the forum discussions:


Page 20 of 36

FORUM PRACTITIONER RESEARCHER POLICY-MAKERKNOWLEDGE

AGENTSunknown Total

forward moving 3 4 1 1 1 10

asking to precise 1 2 0 0 0 3

OPINION,

COMMENT10 18 1 3 2 34

of practice 3 1 0 4 0 8

of policy 3 5 0 4 0 12

general 3 11 1 2 2 19

specific 6 15 0 2 2 25

resource 0 1 0 2 0 3

research

result/citation2 5 2 1 0 10

Total 31 62 5 19 7 124

QUESTION

EXAMPLE

FEEDBACK

SHARE

Table 3: Different types of contribution per stakeholder group in the forum discussions

Figure 5: Proportion of types of contribution in the forum discussions


Page 21 of 36

Figure 6: Types of contribution per stakeholder group in the forum discussions

In the case of the forum discussions the proportion of contributions per stakeholder group corresponds

exactly to the rate of participation that is our data does not show any difference in the intensity of

participation between the stakeholder groups. As for the types of contributions, the picture is colourful here

as well: all 5 types reached more than 10%, the most common ones seem to have been feedback and

comments/opinion. Before we start to compare the data on webinars with those on forum discussions we

must note the difficulties encountered during data coding. While in the chat during a webinar it is relatively

easy to count the different types of contributions as most of the time one chat comment contains one or

maximum 2 types of contributions, it is not the case in forum discussions. Forum posts are usually longer and

often contain for example several comments and opinion related to various points. In the phase of data

coding we counted the types of contributions each forum post contained, thus if there were three long

paragraphs with detailed views on various subtopics, it was counted as 1 comment only. For this reason

webinars and forum discussions are not comparable.

On the whole, we can say both for webinars and forum discussions that the dialogue generated was quite

varied with regards to the different types of contributions. Moreover the contributions of the stakeholder

groups also show a rather mixed pattern, it is not for example the case that practitioners asked and

researchers expressed opinions, or that policy makers gave examples of policies and practitioners examples

of practice. The variety of contributions of the different groups reflect in a sense the success of the dialogue,

knowledge sharing seems to have been present between people with different professional backgrounds.

After the structural analysis of the programme series, let us explore more deeply the discourse itself by

analysing it from two specific perspectives. The next section will discuss how the issue of equity and learning


Page 22 of 36

appears in the discussions, whereas the one after summarises the events from the point of view of teacher

education.

Equity and learning in the VIP discussions Nóra Révai

Equity and learning was chosen as the overarching topic of the EPNoSL themes by the expert group in the 2nd

period of the project after detailed discussion as to whether it should be a separate theme or it should

underpin every theme. The 5 thematic areas in which partners carried out research activities were defined

as follows:

1. Autonomy for equity and learning

2. Accountability for equity and learning

3. Distributed leadership for equity and learning

4. Policy response for equity and learning

5. Educating school leaders for equity and learning.

In accordance with the objectives of the online activities the events were designed to support other

activities by providing a platform for dialogue where the main project themes could be discussed. Therefore

the thematic orientation of the VIP followed and complemented the above listed 5 areas. To give more

emphasis to the importance of equity and learning a separate webinar and forum discussion was dedicated

to this theme. The thematic map and schedule of the VIP events were as follows:

Date Topic / title Speakers

Webinar 1 7th May School autonomy - challenge or

privilege for school heads?

Hasso Kukemelk (EE) Fred Verboon (NL)

Forum 1 13th to 24th May Diverse perspectives and hopes on

autonomy in school leadership

Lejf Moos (DK)

Webinar 2 28th May Leading and Managing Change

Peter Earley (UK), Grzegorz Mazurkiewicz (PL)

Forum 2 3rd to 14th June Policy Response

Carl Bagley, Sophie Ward (UK)

Webinar 3 11th September Accountability

Mika Risku (FI), Igors Grigorjevs (LV)

Forum 3 16th – 27th September Accountability Andrej Koren (SI)

Webinar 4 1st October Educating School Leaders

Michael Schratz (AT), Tom Hamilton (UK), Huub Friederichs (NL)

Webinar 5 15th October Distributed leadership – one concept,

different understandings

Olof Johannson (SE), Michael Uljens (FI), Petros Pashiardis (CY)

Forum 4 7th – 17th October Leadership IS distributed

Philip Woods, Amanda Roberts (UK)

Webinar 6 22nd October Leading for equality in a changing

Europe

Jacky Lumby, Chris Downey (UK)

Forum 5 28th October – 8th

November Leadership for inclusive education Gerry Mac Ruairc (IR)

Table 4: VIP Programme series

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-1-school-autonomy-challenge-or-privilege-school-heads


http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/discussion/forum-1-diverse-perspectives-and-hopes-autonomy-school-leadership

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/discussion/forum-1-diverse-perspectives-and-hopes-autonomy-school-leadership

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-2-leading-and-managing-change-why-it-so-hard-do

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/discussion/forum-3policy-response-critical-engagement

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-3-accountability

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/discussion/webinar-3-and-forum-4-accountability

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-4-educating-school-leaders

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-5-distributed-leadership-0


http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/discussion/forum-5-leadership-distributed

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-6-leading-equality-changing-europe


http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/discussion/webinar-6-and-forum-6-leadership-inclusive-education


Page 23 of 36

When looking at the keynotes (presentations, articles, video) and the discussions more closely we can clearly

see that the topics are strongly interrelated. Some of the issues come up in nearly every discussion such as

distributed leadership, which appears e.g. in the webinar on leading and managing change (leadership as a

process which involves numerous people), in that on educating school leaders (distributed leadership at

various – micro-, meso-, macro- – levels) and in the context of standards, etc. Other topics are treated quite

deeply in webinars not specifically dedicated to the topic, e.g. accountability, in particular with regards to

measurement systems, is discussed by Chris Downey in the perspective of leading for equality. It would be

interesting to carry out a more profound discourse analysis to map the connections between the topics and

to explore overarching concepts, recurring or contradicting arguments; however it is beyond the scope of

this report. Instead of exploring the complexity and interconnectedness of the various issues, this section of

the report will focus on the dimension of equity and learning.

At the second PLA of EPNoSL in Vilnius (November 2013) prof. Jacky Lumby when looking back to the results

and outcomes of various activities raised again the issue whether it was a good solution to have our main

priority area – equity and learning – as a horizontal topic or whether paradoxically by being everywhere it –

if not disappeared – was subsumed in a wider context and was not considered in depth. In order to

contribute to further exploring this matter we decided to examine the online activities from this perspective

to see if and if yes how equity and learning are included in the dialogue we generated.

We used simple quantitative and qualitative methods to approach the question. Firstly, we carried out a

word count in all VIP events, namely in the transcription of webinars (what was said), the webinar chat

conversations, the forum keynote articles and the forum discussions for the following terms: equity (and

inequity), equality (and inequality), social justice, inclusion and learning. We obtained the following results:

Figure 7: Frequency of key words in VIP discussions Figure 8: Frequency of key words in VIP discussions

according to their themes

Not surprisingly the webinar and the forum discussion dedicated to the topic contained the largest number

of the first four words (equity, equality, social justice, inclusion), however the number was not particularly

low in other events either. Of course the sheer number does not reveal anything about how profoundly the

topic was addressed or what were the particular approaches, dimensions brought up. We will try and

explore these to some extent with a more qualitative analysis of the discussions.


Page 24 of 36

The word learning was the most frequent one, which can be used in a wide range of contexts, let the most

often recurring collocations stand here in the form of a word cloud generated by the frequency of the

expressions:

Picture 1: Word cloud of “learning” according to frequency in VIP discourse

In order that the numbers and this appealing picture above gain any sense, we explored the webinar and

forum discourses (transcripts of webinars, keynote articles and forum discussions) with regards to how the

issue of equity (equality, social justice, inclusion) and learning appears in them. We will not go into details

about the definition and differences of these terms, when we refer to equity as the subject of discussion we

mean either of the above concepts. We will consider the last webinar and forum discussion separately as

they were both specifically dedicated to these issues.

As far as learning is concerned, the high overall frequency of this word reflects that in terms of the core

purpose of schools learning is a key factor. This, however obvious it may sound, is crucial to keep in mind

when talking about aspects of leadership so as never to forget that “the primary task of the school leader is

to support learning at all levels” (Révai, Kirkham, 2013). Educational leadership, leadership for learning, or

learning-centred leadership appeared in several of the discussions and were clearly in spotlight in some of

them (e.g. in the webinar on educating school leaders). An explicit focus on learning was not however

predominantly present in all the events, the scope of some keynotes and discussions were more specifically

targeted then a focus on learning per se.

The issues of equity, equality, social justice, inclusion came up explicitly or implicitly at one point in nearly all

of the discussions, the extent to which they were dealt with and their forms differed however. Essentially

there were two distinct forms in which the issue of equity appeared in the discussions: in some cases it was

treated as an abstract and separate concept, in other cases it was highly contextualised and interpreted


Page 25 of 36

within the framework of the particular topic that the discussion addressed. In the keynote article on

accountability (Koren, 2013) for example a separate section was about “education for equity”, which offered

terminological interpretations for equity and discussed the use of the terms ‘equality of opportunity’ and

‘equity of results’ without placing them in the context of accountability. In contrast the forum paper on

autonomy (Moos, 2013) for example contextualised the issue of equity by defining levels of responsibility

with regards to social justice, or the keynote on policy response (Bagley, Ward, 2013) took policies on equity

and leadership as its main example to illustrate the theoretical discourse on policy implementation. In those

cases where the issue of equity only appeared implicitly, it was evidently embedded in the discussion over

the particular topic and was thus highly contextualised. An example for the latter is the webinar on leading

and managing change, in which both presenters, P. Earley and G. Mazurkiewicz, emphasised the importance

of the inclusion of different perspectives and the involvement of everyone (teachers, students, parents, etc.)

in the change process (Mazurkiewicz, 2013, Earley, 2013) which placed the idea of inclusion and also the

participative dimension of social justice in a particular context.

In the case of forum discussions, when it came to generating dialogue on equity, the most important factor

seemed to have been the nature of the keynote questions proposed by the writers. If these questions

addressed equity explicitly then the discussion that followed also dealt with the issue explicitly (e.g. the

forum on autonomy), if it was implicitly embedded in the questions, then so was it in the discussion (e.g. the

forum on accountability), on the other hand even if equity was treated deeply in the keynote article, if there

was no explicit reference to it in the questions there were no reflections made on the issue in the dialogue

(e.g. the forum on policy response).

The different events dealt with equity from a range of different perspectives. Many gave specific examples of

policy or practice on dealing with equality. E.g. Risku in his webinar presentation on accountability (Risku,

2013) gave two examples of Finnish policy on equality:

“When we’ve noticed that inequality in Finland has been and is still increasing, the minister of

education allocated money to help those communities that seemed to need more support to help

people or students, pupils whose parents are for example unemployed or do not have that good

social welfare.”

“Finnish legislation obligates all education providers […] to evaluate the quality on the

implementation of curriculum, instruction and teaching arrangements, support to learning and

growth and well-being, inclusion and influence, school-home cooperation and safety and learning

environment.”

An example of policy from the field of educating school leaders is given by Tom Hamilton (Hamilton, 2013)

on how the involvement, participation can be present at all levels not only with regards to students but also

teachers and leaders. More examples of policy and practice with regards to working with ethnic diversity in

Sweden and Cyprus were mentioned in the webinar on distributed leadership by Olof Johannson and Petros

Pashiardis (Johannson, 2013, Pashiardis, 2013).

Other parts of the discussions were characterised by more general theoretical discourses. For example in the

webinar on leading and managing change when G. Mazurkiewicz discusses the necessity of change, he

argues that changing is a moral obligation towards our students, as we need to “change the unfair and

unethical world”, for which changing the school is necessary. (Mazurkiewicz, 2013) The keynote article on

policy response considers what happens to these issues through the process of policy implementation and in

what form they appear (or remain absent from) governmental discourses (Bagley, Ward, 2013). Some


Page 26 of 36

discussions raised issues which were not directly connected to equity – e.g. shared values, mission

statement, ethos of the school –, but which had a strong underlying connection with these issues.

Finally, we would like to draw the attention to the terminological perspective of this topic. As there is no

unique and agreed meaning of or definition for the concepts equity, equality, inclusion, social justice in the

literature (Ward et al, 2013), it might be worth exploring the different interpretations present in the VIP

discourse. Some of the discussions explicitly dealt with the definition of some of the concepts. The keynote

article on accountability, as we have seen above, says that there are two ways we talk about equity in

education: as the ‘equality of opportunities’ and as the ‘equity of results’ (Koren, 2013). Bagley and Ward in

the paper on policy response analyse the conceptualisation of equity and social justice in the neoliberal

policy discourses and also give examples on the interpretation of the terms in practice (e.g. the

interpretation of Canadian principals in the Goddard and Hart study) (Bagley, Ward, 2013). It was more

common however that presenters, writers or contributors used the terms without clarifying the meaning or

giving a precise definition.

The most interesting terminological debate occurred in the webinar and forum discussion specifically

dedicated to the topic (Leading for equality in a changing Europe and Leadership for inclusive education), in

which participants raised the issue of the importance of agreed definitions. Some participants radically

claimed that it is no use talking about equity without knowing what exactly we mean by this, others in the

forum discussion emphasised the importance of giving local definitions, by saying that it is essential for a

school to agree on what the term means for them, however, were less convinced of the necessity of having

unique global definitions. The keynote article of G. Mac Ruairc also drew the attention to potential

implications of some narrow interpretations, e.g. when inclusion is limited to discourse on SEN (Mac Ruairc,

2013). Similarly Philip Woods stressed that social justice should also be interpreted in a broad way and

proposed 4 dimensions of the concept: cultural, participative, distributive and developmental.

Coming back to Jacky Lumby’s reflection on the possibility that equity and learning as a horizontal theme

might become subsumed as an issue within a wider discussion, the evidence from our experience in the VIP

does not underpin this fear. On the contrary, equity and learning appeared to feature relatively strongly in

the discussions. In fact, it appeared in rather diverse ways, from general and theoretical approaches to

specific examples of various policies. Yet, a dimension that could be strengthened in the future is the actual

school practice on equity; we only had few examples of how a school (the leadership team and teachers)

work for equity. It might enrich our dialogue to know more about the challenges schools face during the

implementation of equity aims and how they overcome them.

The teacher education perspective Justina Erčulj1

1 The author is the past president (2010-2013) of the Association for Teacher Education in Europe (ATEE hereinafter)

but her views may differ to a certain extent from those of the association as she has not discussed them thoroughly

with the members of the Administrative Council. On the other hand she has been the chair of RDC Education

Leadership and Management which makes the relations between leadership and teacher education highly relevant.


Page 27 of 36

This section of the report is intended to relate aspects of leadership discussed and developed within the

EPNoSL project with issues in teacher education. The report is organised around the themes suggested for

the National Networks (except School leaders' selection, preparation and development) develop

complemented by Year 2 leading theme, i.e. leadership for equity and learning.

About ATEE The Association for Teacher Education in Europe (ATEE2) is a non-profit European organisation, whose aim

is enhancing the quality of Teacher Education in Europe and supporting the professional development of

teachers and teacher educators at all levels. It is a multicultural association with a wide expertise on the

various fields of teacher education. It tries to increase the co-operation between individuals and institutions

involved in Teacher Education both inside and outside Europe by promoting international networks. The

ATEE tries to reach its aim through active dialogue and international exchange of research and practice in

initial and in-service teacher education.

The Research & Development Communities (RDCs) are the core of this organisation, creating a backbone for

social coherence within the association. They provide the first platform for dialogue, exchange and joint

international activities between individuals and institutions. In political dialogues the ATEE does not

represent personal political opinions or standpoints, but takes a professional position, based on a shared

knowledge on the required professionalism and professional development of teachers based on the

collected theory and practical experience of its members.

School governance and teacher education Control, autonomy and accountability have been the focus in teacher education for many years. The

concepts are closely related to the notion of trust which has been frequently raised also during the PLA in

Vilnius. At the teacher level we should emphasize the importance of trust in teacher professionalism by

school leaders. This is probably related to the wider scope of trust to schools and school leaders. However

the accountability measures have increased the need for transparency at all levels so teachers perceive their

work to be highly (over)loaded by bureaucracy which de-professionalizes their role and work. From this

point of view the need for autonomy at school leadership level should be broadened to teacher level and the

issues of professionalism should be more explicitly discussed and also resolved in the framework of control,

autonomy and accountability. If trust in teachers is raised they will become even more responsible for

student outcomes.

The role of school leaders This could be the central theme of our view on connections between leadership and teacher education.

While we are aware that the impact of school leaders on initial teacher education is limited due to the

autonomy of universities, their role in continuing professional development (CPD) is crucial. Although in

some systems the content and structure of CPD is strongly influenced by the central authorities, there is still

a large scope of activities left to schools. School leaders should focus on (to mention only a few issues):

needs analysis at school level – focusing on teachers and their practices not on programmes offered;

monitoring teacher performance for development purposes;

2 More about ATEE can be found on http://www.atee1.org

http://www.atee1.org/


Page 28 of 36

establishing networks within and among schools;

establishing the conditions for peer learning;

evaluating the impact of CPD on teacher practice.

We should also mention that school leaders play a vital role in maintaining teacher interest and motivation

throughout their careers that are being extended to rather late ages in most EU countries. Therefore the

questions of working with teachers in their late-career stage and leading learning communities of teachers

representing at least »two generations« will have to be put on the leadership agenda.

Generally, we could claim for leadership for learning focused on connections between teachers' learning and

student outcomes. If we want to strengthen this aspect of leadership it will probably be important to

develop the existing and also new programmes for leaders' professional development. They should stress

school leaders' role in improving learning at all levels and in developing the whole school commitment to

lifelong learning. There is also a message for policy makers, namely that school leaders should be relieved at

least from some administrative tasks.

System leadership Although system leadership refers to leaders and their role in bringing about system transformation, we can

relate it to teacher education, specifically to their CPD. As already mentioned under the previous heading,

the need for networking and peer learning has increased during the last years. It is a way of connecting

theory and practice but also a way of creating new knowledge in and about teaching. We understand school

leaders' role in this context as establishing and/or developing conditions for effective teaching and learning

not only in one's own school but in a system wide by supporting joint (action) research, collaboration and

networking among teachers and schools, and preparing proposals for researchers and policy makers to learn

from theory AND from practice.

Autonomy – room for manoeuvre Generally speaking, teachers claim for more autonomy in all respects of their work. It has been

acknowledged that autonomy in schools is always limited for schools serve public interest and teaching

profession is subjected to certain professional standards. On the other hand autonomy is a very contextual

notion, so school leaders have relatively strong influence on »in-school autonomy«. From this point of view

we should tackle again the issue of trust connected to teacher professionalism. They are closely related so

school leaders should ensure the conditions for teachers to develop their professionalism and then give

room for applying their competences in classrooms.

The second issue related to autonomy is developing leadership skills in teachers and offer them as many

opportunities as possible to apply them. We refer to leading projects, work in school development teams,

getting involved in decisions about school policy, etc. It is about distributed leadership in practice.

Leadership for equity In the WP 2 report »Critical Factors in the Discourse on School Leadership from the Perspective of Equity and

Learning« we can read about factors that may shape the capacities and potential of school leaders to

implement strategies that would lead to higher equity in their schools and beyond. The report and

discussion during Vilnius PLA indicated a strong need for involving all stakeholders, to communicate with

them and (again) to establish trust. If we want to achieve this we need the best people in leadership


Page 29 of 36

positions but also political coherence and financial resources. We believe that the issues of equity should

become an integral part of both teacher and leadership professional development.

Conclusions Several questions have been opened in the perspective of teacher education. If we try to summarise this

report we would suggest the following:

it is important that the best candidates are selected for school leaders' positions;

school leaders' training programmes should be reviewed and/or revised to ensure that they equip

school leaders with competences required to cope with the above mentioned challenges;

teacher training programmes should follow the development of theory, practice, and contextual

challenges;

teacher training programmes should be based on networking, collaboration, (action) research, and

peer-learning activities – here the school leaders' support is essential;

teachers should be given sufficient autonomy to apply new competences;

teachers should be given even more opportunities for developing their leadership skills and applying

them in practice.

Statistical analysis Lilla Lukács

VIP participation statistics In this section we will summarise the statistics of the knowledge management activities of the 2nd phase of

the European Policy Network on School Leadership (EPNoSL). The statistical analysis will contain descriptive

statistics with regards to the VIP and the national networking activities, as well as the analysis of the self-

evaluation of the national networking activities by EPNoSL partners and the overall evaluation of the EPNoSL

VIP events.

As presented before, six webinars and five forum discussions were organised (see page 23.) in the 2nd phase

of the EPNoSL. The webinars and forum discussions count 21 contributors as presenters or keynote article

writers and three people who were responsible for the organisation and the IT support of the activities.

Webinars had all together 185 views, where each viewer is counted as many times as the number of

webinars she/he viewed. A participation (view) in a webinar was considered valid from ten minutes of

attendance; those who only attended the webinar for a shorter period of time were not counted. Figure 9

shows the number of participants per webinar. Thus the average number of participants is approximately 30.


Page 30 of 36

Figure 9: Number of participants

As far as the presence of the different stakeholder groups is concerned, we cannot give precise percentages

of the 4 groups defined as not every participant’s professional background was known. Nevertheless, Figure

10 gives us an idea of the distribution of participants according to which stakeholder group they

represented.

Figure 10: Percentage of webinar participants by stakeholder group

In the following we will overview some statistical data gained by the examination of the EPNoSL VIP portal.

Data was extracted for the time period of 1st April 2013 and 10th January 2014, as the VIP was launched in

May this covers the period of the second phase of EPNoSL when the VIP subpage was active. The portal

(www.schoolleadership.eu) - in the given time period – had 14673 visitors (with 9053 unique visitors), and

52 821 page views (not unique). The average time a visitor spent on the portal was 1:25 minutes.

The data provided by Google Analytics, show however that the EPNoSL VIP subpage behaves somewhat

differently from the main directory of the portal. It is ranked as the 7th most visited page of the portal (it is

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/


Page 31 of 36

also ranked high among the first and the second interaction pages), with 1571 unique page views of the

EPNoSL VIP blog (“Discussions” subpage of the VIP platform), and around 600 unique page views of the

Resources subpage (where webinar recordings were uploaded), that is, the VIP page counts all together

more than 2100 unique visitors. The average time spent on both of these subpages (EPNoSL VIP Discussions

and Resources) is approximately 3:00 minutes. Furthermore, both the bounce and exit rates3 of the EPNoSL

VIP blog are about half of the corresponding rates of the main page (www.schoolleadership.eu). This data

suggests that people who visit the VIP are more likely to stay within the VIP platform (not bouncing to and

fro the VIP and other subpages of the portal), spend more time on the chosen page, and are less likely to

quit or abandon the page.

As for the forum discussions, let us see some data on both the active and the ‘passive’ participation (or

‘lurking’). Regarding the comments and posts created, the five forum discussions altogether have generated

57 posts, the highest number of posts was generated in Forum 1 (see details in Figure 11 below). As for the

number of visits, the most visited discussion was the one on distributed leadership with 413 unique page

views, also with the longest average time spent on the discussion (approx. 7 minutes), while the least visited

one was the last forum on inclusion. (See details in Figure 10 below)

Figure 10: Number of unique visitors of the forum discussions

When comparing the number of contributors and the number of visitors in the forum discussion the rule of

thumb is largely confirmed again, in our case the proportion of active participants (contributors) varied

between 2 and 7% of the total number of discussion followers. Actually 2-7% of active participation seems to

be high compared to the 1%, which would be the typical behaviour of people in collaborative websites

according to the rule of thumb.

3 For all sessions that start with the page, the bounce rate is the percentage that were the only one of the session, while

for all page views of the page the exit rate is the percentage that were the last in the session.

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/


Page 32 of 36

Figure 11: Number of posts generated in the forum discussions

Let us now shortly summarise participants’ evaluation of the VIP events, data gained from the final

evaluation questionnaire of the VIP series, filled in by 26 participants. As for the overall satisfaction of

participants of the various events, nearly every programme was rated satisfying or totally satisfying by over

70% of those who answered. Participants were somewhat less satisfied with the involvement of the different

stakeholder groups, only a bit more than half of them (approx. 58%) considered it satisfactory, both

practitioners and policy-makers were mentioned among the groups that should be more involved in the

future. Open questions referred to the potential uses and benefit of the knowledge gained in the

professional work and in the professional development of participants, as well as the ways in which they

transmitted and shared this knowledge. More than 70% of the participants said they regularly promoted or

used the content of the webinars and forums among their colleagues or other national stakeholders. With

regards to the interest of the participants the three most popular topics were: school autonomy, educating

school leaders and distributed leadership. (See the detailed results of the evaluation in Annex 3.)

National network statistics Statistical data on the national networking activities have been extracted from the reports on national

networking and the information partners provided us with in emails. Comparing networking in the first and

the second phase of EPNoSL, there has clearly been an increase in the number of the involved countries.

While in the first phase of EPNoSL (2012) 16 countries were engaged in national networking, in the second

period (2013) 20 countries have sent information on their networks, which amounts for an increase of 25%.

As far as the number of events is concerned, partners engaged in networking reported on 8 seminars, 17

workshops, 14 conferences all together. Some events involved several countries (e.g. the conference on

Educational leadership in Latin Europe in Rome or the one in Germany). Partners also reported on 7 research

projects about policies on school leadership linked to national networking. Although not all partners

organised face-to-face events, all national network reports give evidence on intensive networking and

information sharing activities, (e.g. press releases and coverages, or national associations involved). By

adding up the number of participants in all national network reports, minimum 22000 people were reached

through lists, forums and newsletters. (For the exact numbers on workshops and participants see the table in

Annex 1: National networking events). Regarding the participation of the different stakeholders groups we

do not have precise and comparable data, as the partners interpreted the numbers in different ways.


Page 33 of 36

Let us now summarise the self-evaluation carried out by partners with regards to national networking on the

basis of the 13 full reports received. (For the set of questions see any of the national reports in Annex 1.)

Figure 11 shows the results of all the answers (of all the countries). Most countries are more satisfied with

their work, promotion, involvement, and given documents. The lowest average concerns the involvement of

the policy-makers – a topic we have discussed in more details in the section on national networking.

Figure 11: Summarized answers and data for the questions listed above, not country specific

The results of the self-evaluation are represented by country in Figure 12.

Figure 12: Summarized points of the countries’ self-evaluation, all questions

On the whole, most of the countries are mostly satisfied with their work on networking; the average is 3.7

points. Lower marks often indicate deeper reflections on their own work and may refer to a deeper

commitment to make it better.


Page 34 of 36

Conclusion

Considering the results of the knowledge management activities in the 2nd phase of EPNoSL in view of the

original objectives of Work Package 3, it seems that these latter were very satisfactorily achieved with

regards to both the international and the national spaces created for this purpose. We have seen that the

two spaces were strongly interconnected, while we have found extensive evidence for the wide use of the

international discourse in the national networks, in some cases the outcomes of national networking also

featured in the VIP discussions. Furthermore the analysis of the stakeholder involvement showed that all

stakeholder groups – practitioners, researchers, policy-makers and knowledge agents – were represented

although not to the same extent. They all engaged in the dialogue in diverse ways with diverse content, thus

actively contributing to a transnational knowledge sharing.

The theoretical introduction on knowledge management showed that educational systems are complex

systems, and stressed that due to this complexity the results of any particular policy measure or local

innovation are not predictable with certainty. Similarly, knowledge is shared and created in a highly complex

manner in a transnational platform as the one of EPNoSL, thus the real impact and outcome of such activities

is difficult to measure or to predict. It seems clear however that networks – in particular those which build

on and connect natural networks and different stakeholders – play a key role in enhancing the global

knowledge of the educational community. The motto of connectivism theory – “Knowledge is Connections”,

that is knowledge cannot be regarded as a physical entity, rather it is something that grows as we create

more connections (Siemens, 2005) – holds for the world of education as well, and is particularly nicely

demonstrated in the work of EPNoSL.

Although some specific implications appear in the various discussions (for example the need to develop

leadership skills of teachers was an implication in discussions on autonomy, distributed leadership and

educating school leaders or the need to strongly integrate issues on equity in teachers’ and leaders’

professional development), it was not in the scope of the present analysis to draw general conclusions or

implications from the discourse. One must also have a certain caution with regards to formulating specific

implications because – as formulated by G. Halász – “we can see what the main characteristics of effective

educational systems and educational governance are, it is however important to stress that elements of

these can only be interpreted together, as they form one coherent system.” (Halász, 2014 forthcoming) The

objective of the national and international discourse in EPNoSL was not to come to certain agreed

conclusions or implications but to enhance knowledge in general across Europe.


Page 35 of 36

References

Bagley, C., Ward, S. C., 2013: Policy Response: A Critical Engagement. EPNoSL VIP keynote paper:

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/carl_bagley_sophie_ward_policy_response-

a_critical_engagement.pdf

Barabási, Albert-László, 2005: Taming complexity. Nature Physics 1: 68-70.

Boukhelifa, F., Révai, N., 2006: « Quand les demonstrations s’écrivent ou se disent… », études de cas en

classe de seconde. Cahier de Didirem 53/2006.

Downey, C., 2013: School Effectiveness: issues for equity and quality. EPNoSL VIP keynote presentation:


Earley, P., 2013: Leading and managing change: why is it so hard to do? EPNoSL VIP keynote presentation

and paper: http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-2-leading-and-managing-

change-why-it-so-hard-do and http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/peter_earley_leading-

and-managing-change.pdf

Friederichs, H., 2013: School leadership: A holistic approach. EPNoSL VIP keynote presentation and paper:

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-4-educating-school-leaders and

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/huub_friederichs_school-leadership-holistic-approach-

2013_5.pdf

Gladwell, M., 2000: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Little, Brown and

Company, USA

Grigorjevs, I., 2013: Accountability. EPNoSL VIP keynote presentation:


Halász, G., 2014 forthcoming: A jövő oktatási trendjei. In B. Tier, N., Szegedi, E. (eds): Alma a fán – a tanulás

jövője. Tempus Public Foundation, Budapest. (Educational trends of the furure. In Apple on the tree – the

future of learning.)

Hamilton, T., 2013: Educating school leaders in Scotland. EPNoSL VIP presentation:


Johansson, O., 2013: Democratic Distributed School Leadership: Ethics, Responsibility and Authority. EPNoSL VIP keynote presentation and paper: http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-5-distributed-leadership-0 and http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/distributed-leadership-2013_7.pdf

Koren, A., 2013: Accountabilities for equity and learning. EPNoSL VIP keynote paper:

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/accountability-2013.pdf

Kukemelk, H., 2013: School autonomy – challenge or privilege for school heads? EPNoSL VIP keynote

presentation: http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-1-school-autonomy-

challenge-or-privilege-school-heads

Lumby, J., 2013: Leading for equality in a changing Europe. EPNoSL VIP keynote presentation: http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-6-leading-equality-changing-europe

Lundvall, B.-Å. and Johnson, B. (1994), “The learning economy”, Journal of Industry Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1994, pp. 23-42. Lundvall, B.-Å. (2003), „Economics of knowledge and learning”, Department of Business Studies, Aalborg

University

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/carl_bagley_sophie_ward_policy_response-a_critical_engagement.pdf

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/carl_bagley_sophie_ward_policy_response-a_critical_engagement.pdf




http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/peter_earley_leading-and-managing-change.pdf

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/peter_earley_leading-and-managing-change.pdf


http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/huub_friederichs_school-leadership-holistic-approach-2013_5.pdf

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/huub_friederichs_school-leadership-holistic-approach-2013_5.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brown





http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/distributed-leadership-2013_7.pdf

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/distributed-leadership-2013_7.pdf

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/accountability-2013.pdf





Page 36 of 36

Mac Ruairc, G., 2013: Including Inclusion – Exploring inclusive education for school leadership. EPNoSL VIP

keynote paper: http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/exploring-inclusive-education-for-

school-leadership-2013.pdf

Mazurkiewicz, G., 2013: Why is it so hard to change? The answer is simple. EPNoSL VIP keynote

presentation: http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-2-leading-and-

managing-change-why-it-so-hard-do

Moos, L. 2013: Diverse perspectives and hopes on autonomy in school leadership. EPNoSL VIP keynote

paper:

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/diverse_perspectives_and_hopes_on_autonomy_in_sch

ool_leadership.pdf

Specific Work Programme 2012-2013 for EPNoSL

OECD, 2000: Knowledge Management in the Learning Society, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, OECD.

Pashiardis, P., 2013: Successful school leadership - theory and practice for sustainable school improvement. EPNoSL VIP presentation: http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-5-distributed-leadership-0

Révai, N., 2012: National Platforms on Educational Policy on School Leadership. EPNoSL Deliverable 3.2 /

Phase 1.

Révai, N., Kirkham, G. (ed.) (2013): The Art and Science of Leading a School. Tempus Public Foundation.

Budapest.

Risku, M., 2013: Accountability. EPNoSL VIP keynote presentation:


Schratz, M., 2013: Beyond the reach of Leading: Exploring the Realm of Leadership and Learning. EPNoSL VIP

keynote presentation and paper: http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-4-

educating-school-leaders and http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/leadership-for-learning-

2013.pdf

Siemens, G., 2005: Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, Vol. 2 No. 1, Jan 2005

Uljens, M., 2013: Educational Leadership for School Development as Shared and Distributed Critical-Constructive Activity. EPNoSL VIP presentation: http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-5-distributed-leadership-0

Verboon, F., 2013: School autonomy – challenge or privilege for school heads? The School head’s

perspective. EPNoSL VIP keynote presentation:

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/epnosl_vip/resource/epnosl-webinar-1-school-autonomy-challenge-or-

privilege-school-heads

Ward, S. C., Bagley, C., Woods, P., Lumby, J., Hamilton, T., Roberts, A. 2013: Scoping paper on school

leadership and equity. EPNoSL WP2.

Woods, P., Roberts, A., 2013: Leadership is distributed. EPNoSL VIP keynote video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5F0MNrDSpY

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/exploring-inclusive-education-for-school-leadership-2013.pdf

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/exploring-inclusive-education-for-school-leadership-2013.pdf



http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/diverse_perspectives_and_hopes_on_autonomy_in_school_leadership.pdf

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/diverse_perspectives_and_hopes_on_autonomy_in_school_leadership.pdf






http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/leadership-for-learning-2013.pdf

http://www.schoolleadership.eu/sites/default/files/leadership-for-learning-2013.pdf

http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jan_05/article01.htm




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5F0MNrDSpY

Documents

Knowledge is connections