Leadership and Collaborative Practice in School Improvement

Abstract

This chapter focuses on principal and teacher interpretations of the decision-making structures within schools to make sense of the different ways this model of school improvement was taken up and interpreted through existing practices and commitments at the school. Existing histories of change management within schools framed the degree of compliance to the regional model with responses ranging from renewed collaborative practices to overt resistance, and conscription of the language of the model to existing leadership agendas. Interviews with principals and teachers included visual maps of patterns of decision-making and the enactment of ideas, and these are combined with interview data to argue the strong influence on local context and leadership style, interacting with existing patterns of commitment in framing the school improvement agenda and practice. The analysis leads to insights into the conditions under which regional policy initiatives support the development of productive school improvement practices.