Conference Agenda

A movement of continuous improvement (CI) is on its way of becoming a new paradigm of school improvement. CI is a label that groups ideas such as Improvement Science, Design-Based School Improvement, Lesson Study, Data-Wise, and the like as a prototypical approach to improving school organizations (Yurkofsky et al., 2020). A dominant “What Works” paradigm (Bryk et al., 2015; Penuel et al., 2011) has positioned leaders as implementers who must create “buy in” for addressing problems and solutions decided from the outside. The CI movement, by contrast, offers opportunities to reframe the role of leaders as to foster agency for internally-driven and participatory change in schools. At its core, CI involves a novel way to navigate complex and dynamic improvement problems for which prescriptive programs or centrally coordinated standards do not necessarily have answers (Mintrop, 2016).

Addressing emergent organizational problems can give school leaders agency to define and diagnose problems and design well-adjusted solutions that respond to local needs. However, given the prevalence of outside-in approaches to change, it cannot be presumed that leaders necessarily have the right skills or mindsets for internal organizational problem solving (Author, 2019; Yurkofsky et al., 2020). Before CI can take off as a method of organizational change, we need to find powerful ways to help educational leaders cultivate an appropriate problem-solving mindset. How to do this depends on understanding what specific core competencies school leaders need to develop to enact new problem-solving skills. To fill this gap, this paper asks: what are the core competencies that educational leaders must develop to successfully implement CI-like strategies of change?

We begin this inquiry by first identifying the purpose and scope of problem solving for continuous improvement at the school level. Next, we review the literature on problem solving, leadership decision making, and continuous improvement in education. Third, informed by the literature review, we consider a particular model of problem solving that captures key thinking steps for CI: the IDEAL model (Bransford & Stein, 1984) which stands for Identify, Define, Explore, Act, and Look. We break down the IDEAL model to understand the specific competencies—knowledge, skills, and attitudes—that school leaders need to learn for applying this model to school organizations.

The findings offer a competency framework for developing a problem-solving mindset. The framework sheds light on skills needed to breakdown the complexity of adaptive challenges at the school level through specific heuristics that can be applied to emergent problematic situations. At the same time, the framework highlights the critical competencies to engage people in continuous improvement dynamics through practice-centeredness, work motivation, and adult learning. These aspects are critical to encourage leaders’ agency in the face of situations for which there are not ready-made solutions. In line with the ICSEI 2024 conference theme of quality professional education for enhanced school effectiveness and improvement, this competency framework shows a promising path to professionalize school leaders who seek to develop a new skillset for improving their schools in the context of growing social complexity.

Research in Danish ECEC practices points to quality differences resulting in different opportunities in what children gain from and experience when participating in childcare (EVA, 2020; Nordahl, Hansen, Ringsmose, & Drugli, 2020; VIVE & EVA, 2023). With research stressing the importance of leadership as an important lever for educational quality (Douglas, 2019; Robinson, 2011; Fullan & Quinn, 2015) the Municipality of Copenhagen initiated the research- and development project ‘Leadership with Markable Impact for Children’ (2021 – 2023). The project is based on a partnership with Laboratory for Research-informed ECEC and School Improvement (LSP), Aalborg University. It builds on systemwide collaborations and obligations using evidence and thinking evaluatively about the impact (DuFour & Marzano, 2011; Fullan & Quinn, 2015; Rickards, Hattie, & Ried; Urban et al., 2011). It has a specific focus on how to foster quality improvement in ECEC by leading staff professional learning and development (Robinson, 2011; Timperley, 2011).

In the project, 2 out of five of the city’s ECEC districts participated, including 2 district leaders, 19 middle-tier leaders (with overall responsibility for 4-7 ECEC centers), 105 ECEC-center leaders and 20 municipal consultants. Together these participants had a shared and distributed leadership of the quality in 100 ECEC centers, including 2000 ECEC staff and 9000 children aged 0-6. The research interest was to investigate the effects on the learning environment of introducing ECEC leaders to knowledge, approaches and tools supporting capacity building for learning environments of high quality in own organization. The participants were i.e., introduced to theory and research about instructional leadership and organizational learning (Robinson, 2011; Timperley, 2011; Timperley, Ell & Le Fevre, 2020), they learned about systematic environmental quality rating scales (ERS), and they were educated in observations gathering data in their own ECEC centers (Ringsmose & Kragh-Müller, 2020). In addition, they were introduced to analyze data and identify improvement goals (Datnow, 2014; Bernhardt, 2013; Nordahl, 2013). This skill was emphasized as an essential tool for making informed decisions and driving improvements in own practice together with staff . Also, they were given a specific task to lead staff professional learning and development (Robinson; 2011; Timperley, 2008; Timperley, Ell, Le Fevre, 2020). Their work in own organization was supported by their district- and middle-tier leaders as well as municipal consultants. With the first data as a baseline, the ECEC-center leaders worked with the data and improvement goals for a year. The work was followed up with a second round of data and analysis.

The learning from the mixed-methods research (Creswell, 2011) using results from observations (n:190), document analysis (n:190) and interviews (n:20) indicates that developing quality ECEC environments building a collaborative approach and evaluative capacity in a whole system effort is important and that educating leaders in ERS, data analysis and leadership raised the awareness of quality in own ECEC center, and an improvement by 10-20 % were identified in many of the ECEC centres. The qualitative data provided insights into what leadership tools and processes were used when the leaders took the lead in improvement.

Leadership and management scholars are concerned with time, how leaders use it and on what (e.g. French & Daniels, 2007; Lavigne, Shakman, Zweig, & Greller; Reid & Creed, 2021; Riley, See, Marsh, & Dicke, 2021). This paper sits within this corpus of work; it complements the argument made by Creagh and colleagues (Creagh, Thompson, Mockler, Stacey, & Hogan, 2023) that it is insufficient to simply quantify hours worked and to attribute negative career and well-being consequences to the sheer number of hours over the average. Rather, it is important to also focus, they suggest, on work intensification, the nature of the work expected and its pace.

This paper takes this argument as its starting point, offering an analysis that explores how work intensification plays out in, and as, ongoing work practices.

The pandemic created new time problems for school leaders, with most reporting both additional time spent as well as new forms of work intensification. This paper brings three iterative studies of school leaders’ work during the pandemic in England (authors, 2021, 2022, 2023) together with Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis. The three studies included two national surveys and over 100 interviews with headteachers, deputy and assistant heads.

Lefebvre (2004) was interested in recognisable patterns which are not identical and not entirely predictable, but which can still be anticipated. For Lefebvre, while the experience of everyday life appears to be linear - one moment after another, one day following the next – it is also made up by a range of different cyclical patterns. Drawing on this insight, the paper explores how the bedrock rhythmic cycles of daily, weekly, termly and annual events which usually structure work and learning in schools were disrupted during the pandemic by an external cycle of virus, government and media.

In ‘normal’ times, school time-space patterns provide knowable, predictable, stable routines for teachers’ work and children’s learning. They provide a solid foundation on which the inevitably serendipitous and reactive work of living and working together for prolonged periods can take place. Such stability is the basis for improvement and for sustainable careers. Part of the job of school leaders is to manage these routines, as a bedrock for cycles of learning and improvement. Leaders must also manage the inevitable but not always predictable arrythmic events that impact on schools – such as a visit from the inspectors, unwanted media attention, or a dramatic change in student population from one year to the next - restoring order and routine so that everyone can get on with their work. The pandemic however was of a different order to the usual crises which schools and their leaders understand: as a result, re-establishing regular rhythmicity proved almost impossible for extended periods. The resulting arrythmia had profound and damaging impacts on leaders’ work and well-being as well as on the longer-term cycles of cohorts, careers and improvement.

We argue that rhythmanalysis has important implications for the recruitment, training and retention of school leaders and offers rich possibilities for further research.