Conference Agenda

Riverside Elementary (pseudonym) is a Title I school located in the southeastern United States. This school was identified for Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI) in 2022, indicating that certain subpopulations in their school were underperforming that year. This identification led to just one of many planned supports that Riverside has received in the last five years, including extra intervention periods for students, additional professional development from the state department, and external training from multiple nonprofit programs and universities. Additionally, Riverside has been the benefactor of a recent state-level equity-focused funding reform, which went into effect in June of 2025. This new legislation allows the state to give districts additional funding based on their varying needs, which has allowed Riverside to hire additional support staff to meet the needs of their students. While these supports coincide with improved student outcomes, their simultaneous implementation raises important questions about coherence, sustainability, and educator capacity.

In recent years, Riverside has exited its support status and has shown promising results in helping their students improve in math and literacy from the time they enter Kindergarten to later grades. However, disentangling the numerous supports that Riverside has received to determine what has helped the most is a complicated undertaking. Understanding the efficacy of the various supports that Riverside has received is important in helping replicate this success in other schools. Furthermore, preliminary observations and interviews have revealed that teachers and staff may be feeling overwhelmed by the multitude of support systems in place, worrying that it all may be too much for their students. In this proposed exploratory case study, the research team will conduct semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and observations to gain a better understanding of the successes, struggles, and concerns Riverside has had regarding these various support systems.

This study is grounded in leadership and policy enactment literature, which argues that school improvement cannot be enacted through simple policy implementation, and instead occurs through a complicated multistep process. From this perspective, school leaders and teachers are active sensemakers who must navigate multiple, and sometimes competing, initiatives within organizational contexts (Braun et al., 2013; Spillane et al., 2002). Recent leadership theory has highlighted concerns about reform overload and the importance of coherence in instructional improvement efforts (Fullan & Quinn, 2015). This relates closely to the present case study by examining how these theories play out in practice within a school experiencing layered support systems.

In this study, leadership is defined as the work of coordinating, mediating, and making sense of improvement efforts across the school, a process that often extends beyond formal administrative roles (Gronn, 2003). This study contributes to leadership literature by highlighting relational and organizational facets of school leadership and focusing on educator experiences. Together, these perspectives align with established models of successful school leadership that emphasize organizational, instructional, and relational conditions rather than just direct effects on student outcomes (Leithwood et al., 2017).

Schools are operating under increasing pressure and are becoming a visible manifestation of broader societal tensions. In a globalized, digitalized environment, school principals must navigate a variety of challenges, including mis/disinformation, social media dynamics, migration, climate change, and anti-democratic tendencies. Collectively, these challenges reshape the demands on school leadership. Their responses are of paramount importance for ensuring equitable learning opportunities. A substantial body of international research underscores the important role of principals in shaping school quality and student outcomes (Day et al., 2020; Sun et al., 2024).

School principals have gained importance in research discourse over the last decades; at the same time, it is a young profession (Bøje et al. 2021) with ongoing qualification requirements (Montecinos et al., 2022). Nevertheless, the present research focuses primarily on individuals and competencies in terms of “best practice/what works” recipes (e.g. Daniels et al. 2019) and does not sufficiently penetrate the logic of practice in depth. Therefore, the present study proposes a reconstructive perspective that analyzes the complexity of leadership practice in depth.

In order to understand contemporary school leadership, it is necessary to view principals' work from two perspectives: the external expectations that define what leadership should achieve and the internal organizational logics that influence what leadership can practically realize.

The first perspective emphasizes the discursive pressures that influence self-perception and behaviour. Hansen and Frederiksen (2017) offer a helpful heuristic: four dominant, partially contradictory discourses shape school leaders’ self-understanding and actions. These discourses are the personhood-based discourse (self-awareness), the profession-based discourse (professional values), the standard-based discourse (goals and measurability), and the resource-based discourse (competition). Navigating between these discourses creates tensions regarding what constitutes success and quality. This underscores the complexity of the expectations faced by school leaders.

The second perspective locates leadership within the everyday mediation between professional autonomy and organizational coordination. Schools are specific types of organizations (Klatetzki, 2023; Mehta, 2013), specifically, professional bureaucracies (Mintzberg, 1992) and loosely coupled systems (Weick, 1976). This configuration turns the principal into a mediator between professional autonomy and organizational coordination, making collective coordination of professional practice the recurring role problem. Qualitative research has shown that principals operate between the poles of organization/management and profession (Köpfer 2016; Ritacco & Bolivar 2018).

While these movements can be reconstructed biographically (e.g. Bøje & Frederiksen 2021), my study explicitly includes the organization as learning environment, because it co-produces leadership as a (collective) practice (Mensching & Hunold, 2023). Consequently, understanding how principals actually act requires attending to situatedness and collectivity (Lave & Wenger, 2011): the organization’s roles, rules, and practical logics are constitutive of principals’ action (Mehta, 2013). Analytically, my study tries to specify how leadership practice is distributed between biographical orientations and organizational arrangements—identifying what persists as organizational practice and what varies as biographical enactment, and how both interact in concrete coupling work. In this view, biography is read as sedimented, action-guiding orientations, whose enactment is analyzed in relation to the organizational context.

The aim of this study is to explain how principals’ biographically sedimented orientations and organizational path dependencies co-produce leadership in practice.
Research Questions:

1. Which practice-shaping orientations do principals display when addressing the coordination of professional practice?
2. In a within-school comparison of two principals over time, what can be identified as organizationally persistent versus biographically specific?

Across European education systems, youth exclusion from education and employment represents a persistent and complex challenge. Such challenges cut across institutional, professional, and sectoral boundaries and cannot be addressed by schools alone. Consequently, educational leadership increasingly unfolds within governance arrangements that involve collaboration between education, welfare, employment, and local government actors. While policy discourse frequently emphasizes collaboration and partnership, educational leadership research has paid comparatively limited attention to how leadership is enacted in practice when responsibility, authority, and expertise are shared across organizational boundaries. This paper addresses this gap by examining leadership as a shared and relational practice in a cross-sectoral initiative aimed at preventing youth exclusion.

The study is guided by the following research question:
How is shared leadership enacted, negotiated, and sustained in cross-sectoral innovation processes addressing youth exclusion across education and welfare systems?

Empirically, the paper draws on Våre unge (“Our Youth”), a Norwegian long-term cross-sectoral initiative involving upper secondary schools, municipal education services, welfare agencies, and regional authorities. Although situated in a Norwegian context, the initiative reflects challenges that are shared across European education systems, including fragmented governance structures, sector-based accountability, and the need for coordinated responses to complex social and educational problems. The case, therefore, offers analytically transferable insights into leadership under conditions of institutional complexity rather than context-specific solutions.

The theoretical framework integrates three strands of educational leadership research central to Network 26: shared leadership, relational leadership, and boundary-spanning leadership. Shared leadership provides the core conceptual lens, emphasizing leadership as a collective process distributed across multiple actors rather than vested in a single individual or formal position. In this perspective, leadership emerges through interaction, mutual influence, and negotiated responsibility, particularly in contexts where no single actor holds formal authority over the whole system. Shared leadership is therefore especially relevant for understanding leadership in cross-sectoral initiatives addressing youth exclusion.

Relational leadership perspectives complement this lens by conceptualizing leadership as constituted through relationships, trust, and ongoing sense-making processes. Rather than focusing on leadership traits or formal decision-making structures, relational leadership directs attention to how leadership is produced in everyday interaction, dialogue, and coordination across professional and organizational boundaries. Boundary-spanning leadership further extends the framework by highlighting leadership practices that connect actors, institutional logics, and mandates across sectors, enabling collaboration despite fragmentation.

Together, these perspectives frame educational leadership as a situated and emergent practice shaped by context, relationships, and governance arrangements. Importantly, they enable analysis of leadership that extends beyond school-level leadership and captures system-level dynamics without assuming hierarchical control or formal integration.

The study’s analytical focus is not on programme outcomes or effectiveness, but on leadership practices as described and enacted by actors involved in the initiative. The findings are around three interrelated dimensions of shared leadership. First, leadership is enacted through facilitation and coordination, in which leaders emphasize creating shared understanding and aligning perspectives rather than directing action. Second, shared leadership is sustained through relational work, including trust-building, recognition of distinct professional mandates, and ongoing negotiation of responsibilities across sectors. Third, leadership is characterized by adaptive sense-making over time, where actors collectively interpret emerging challenges and adjust practices through learning rather than through standardized procedures or performance management.

By foregrounding shared leadership as a collective and boundary-spanning practice, the paper contributes to European educational leadership research in three ways. It provides empirical insight into how shared leadership operates beyond schools, extends shared leadership theory into cross-sectoral governance contexts, and offers a practice-oriented understanding of leadership for educational inclusion under conditions of complexity. In doing so, the study speaks directly to international debates on educational leadership, governance, and social inclusion across diverse European education systems.