Purpose – This study aims to gain better understanding of the perceptions comprehensive school principals and chief education officers have about the implementation of school reform and the means they use to facilitate the development of such.
Design/methodology/approach – This research project was carried out using a systemic design research approach. Open-ended questionnaires provided the data for the study and these were completed by educational leaders operating in local school districts.
Findings – The results demonstrated that pedagogy was emphasized most often as the core of school reform by principals but chief education officers considered technical and financial factors more often as the critical core of educational reform. Nevertheless, both groups had quite similar ideas on how to promote school development.
Research limitations/implications – The findings reflect the Finnish educational system and capture only two levels of leadership within the system. Future research ought to focus on studying school reforms within different school systems as a complex of correlated events, processes, strategies, interactions and qualities.
Practical implications – To be able to achieve a successful and sustainable school reform more attention must be devoted to creating and activating collaborative learning environments, not only for pupils and teachers, but also for educational leaders at all levels of school administration.
Originality/value – The study adds to an understanding of the often-mentioned gap or conflict in perceptions and beliefs between different actors in an educational system.
Design/methodology/approach – This research project was carried out using a systemic design research approach. Open-ended questionnaires provided the data for the study and these were completed by educational leaders operating in local school districts.
Findings – The results demonstrated that pedagogy was emphasized most often as the core of school reform by principals but chief education officers considered technical and financial factors more often as the critical core of educational reform. Nevertheless, both groups had quite similar ideas on how to promote school development.
Research limitations/implications – The findings reflect the Finnish educational system and capture only two levels of leadership within the system. Future research ought to focus on studying school reforms within different school systems as a complex of correlated events, processes, strategies, interactions and qualities.
Practical implications – To be able to achieve a successful and sustainable school reform more attention must be devoted to creating and activating collaborative learning environments, not only for pupils and teachers, but also for educational leaders at all levels of school administration.
Originality/value – The study adds to an understanding of the often-mentioned gap or conflict in perceptions and beliefs between different actors in an educational system.
Introduction
Comprehensive schools around Europe, Finland included, are currently faced with numerous multidimensional educational reforms concerning all levels and actors of the schooling system. In Finland three major pedagogical comprehensive school reforms have been launched since the 1990s, initiated mainly by politicians and administrators. The most basic and possibly the most challenging reform consisted of a shift from viewing the teaching-learning process primarily as a transmission of knowledge, to viewing teaching as focused on active and collaborative knowledge construction. The second reform consisted of decentralization of school administration, which was shown, for example, in the replacement of the National Curriculum by a set of fairly general goals approved by the Ministry of Education, with the responsibility for curriculum planning shifted to the grass-roots level of communities and single schools. The most recent of the pedagogical school reforms, implementation of undivided basic education, aims to support pupils in their learning path through the various transitions of their school career from pre-school to ninth grade and even upper secondary school or vocational education (Finlex, 1998; Ministry for Education, 1998, 1994, 2004).
The Finnish school system represents a Scandinavian approach for political decentralization and local accountability of school administration. The new school legislation made municipalities fairly autonomous in arranging primary- and secondary education. The legislation offers only general aims for the reform while
the responsibility for the reform implementation is up to the single municipalities and schools (Aho et al., 2006; Johnson, 2006; Moos and Moller, 2003). Accordingly principals and chief education officers play a key role in translating the reform into local educational practices and structures that requires intensive collaboration between the groups. Moreover principals and chief education officers need to sustain the reform implementation in schools and municipalities by supporting teachers’ in their professional development and by enabling generation of pedagogical innovations at root-level school work (Stoll et al., 2006). This means that perceptions and strategies adopted by principals and chief education officers have a substantial effect not only on each other, but also on the way the local board of education operates (Kanervio and Risku, 2009). Therefore it is of the most importance to understand how these local
educational leaders perceive the ongoing reforms.
The research project
This study is a part of a larger national research project: “Learning And Development in Comprehensive Schools” (2004-2009) on undivided basic education in Finland (Huusko et al., 2007). The project aims to identify and understand preconditions for successful school reforms. Altogether 87 municipalities and 237 schools around Finland participated in the first phase of the research project (2005-2007). The project
was carried out using a systemic design research approach (Brown, 1992; Collins et al., 2004; De Corte, 2000; Salomon, 1995). It included data collection from four different levels of the schooling system: heads of school districts (chief education officers); principals; teachers; and pupils (9th graders). To capture the views of different actors, the data was collected through mixed methods such as inquiries, interviews, reflective
discussion, and activating methods. In this article the focus is on analyzing chief education officers’ and principals’ perceptions about the ongoing national school reform.
Comprehensive schools around Europe, Finland included, are currently faced with numerous multidimensional educational reforms concerning all levels and actors of the schooling system. In Finland three major pedagogical comprehensive school reforms have been launched since the 1990s, initiated mainly by politicians and administrators. The most basic and possibly the most challenging reform consisted of a shift from viewing the teaching-learning process primarily as a transmission of knowledge, to viewing teaching as focused on active and collaborative knowledge construction. The second reform consisted of decentralization of school administration, which was shown, for example, in the replacement of the National Curriculum by a set of fairly general goals approved by the Ministry of Education, with the responsibility for curriculum planning shifted to the grass-roots level of communities and single schools. The most recent of the pedagogical school reforms, implementation of undivided basic education, aims to support pupils in their learning path through the various transitions of their school career from pre-school to ninth grade and even upper secondary school or vocational education (Finlex, 1998; Ministry for Education, 1998, 1994, 2004).
The Finnish school system represents a Scandinavian approach for political decentralization and local accountability of school administration. The new school legislation made municipalities fairly autonomous in arranging primary- and secondary education. The legislation offers only general aims for the reform while
the responsibility for the reform implementation is up to the single municipalities and schools (Aho et al., 2006; Johnson, 2006; Moos and Moller, 2003). Accordingly principals and chief education officers play a key role in translating the reform into local educational practices and structures that requires intensive collaboration between the groups. Moreover principals and chief education officers need to sustain the reform implementation in schools and municipalities by supporting teachers’ in their professional development and by enabling generation of pedagogical innovations at root-level school work (Stoll et al., 2006). This means that perceptions and strategies adopted by principals and chief education officers have a substantial effect not only on each other, but also on the way the local board of education operates (Kanervio and Risku, 2009). Therefore it is of the most importance to understand how these local
educational leaders perceive the ongoing reforms.
The research project
This study is a part of a larger national research project: “Learning And Development in Comprehensive Schools” (2004-2009) on undivided basic education in Finland (Huusko et al., 2007). The project aims to identify and understand preconditions for successful school reforms. Altogether 87 municipalities and 237 schools around Finland participated in the first phase of the research project (2005-2007). The project
was carried out using a systemic design research approach (Brown, 1992; Collins et al., 2004; De Corte, 2000; Salomon, 1995). It included data collection from four different levels of the schooling system: heads of school districts (chief education officers); principals; teachers; and pupils (9th graders). To capture the views of different actors, the data was collected through mixed methods such as inquiries, interviews, reflective
discussion, and activating methods. In this article the focus is on analyzing chief education officers’ and principals’ perceptions about the ongoing national school reform.
The aim of the study
The present study aims to gain better understanding of the kinds of perceptions comprehensive school principals and chief education officers have about the implementation of the most recent school reform in Finland, developing undivided basic education, and the means used to facilitate the development work at the district level. The study also focuses on exploring principals’ and chief education officers’
perceptions about their own role in the reform.
The research task of the study is addressed as follows:
(1) How do principals and chief education officers perceive undivided basic education as the object of the development work?
(2) What kinds of means do principals and chief education officers use to promote the school development?
(3) What kinds of relationships seem to exist between the perceptions of the educational leaders of a local school district?
The study context
Characteristics of Finnish comprehensive school system In order to understand the nature of challenges that principals and chief education officers face in the most recent school reform (developing undivided basic education) some distinctive features of Finnish basic education system need to be discussed
briefly. The Finnish basic education system is composed of nine-years of comprehensive schooling, preceded by one year of voluntary pre-primary education. Children start the basic education at the age of seven and end it usually by the age of 16. Education is publicly financed from pre-school to higher education. Finland is divided to school districts according to municipalities. There are altogether 348 municipalities and hence school districts. Numbers of schools in the districts varies from one to 158 comprehensive schools (Tilastokeskus, 2009). The pupil population is nowadays decreasing in many municipalities; hence the school net has been cut up in many districts through annulling and incorporating small schools (Johnson, 2006). Since 1998 parents have had a right to choose the school for their children regardless of boundaries of school network, however most parents still prefer the neighborhood school. There are no ability tracking structures or other structures that separate students early on into academic or vocational education, and there are flexible accountability structures that place a strong emphasis on trusting schools (Aho et al., 2006.)
The Government and the Ministry of Education, as part of it, formulate and implement education policy. The National Board of Education (NBE) approves the national curriculum and promotes school development for example by providing a variety of courses for teachers and principals. However, municipalities and schools are obliged to prepare the school-based curriculum, and have the right to choose their instructional methods and materials used in teaching such as textbooks and workbooks. Also the pedagogical development strategies are constructed both in the municipalities and schools by the principals and chief education officers. Moreover they are responsible for strategic management including financing and recruiting of teachers and other personnel. At the same time educational comparisons are gaining more footholds also in basic education.
In Finland educational leadership in the districts is distributed between principals, chief education officers and educational boards (Aho et al., 2006; Kanervio and Risku, 2009). Although there is variation in the ways local education management is arranged, in most cases it is the municipality or a cluster of municipal education institutions that supervise education sector development. This means that district-level leaders such as chief education officers and principals are attempting to reconcile the tension in their work and interaction with each other (Aho et al., 2006; Johnson, 2006; Kanervio and
Risku, 2009.) Principals and chief education officers act in different yet complementary positions, and therefore are in ongoing negotiations with each other (Elmore and Burney, 1997; Kanervio and Risku, 2009). Consequently it seems that educational leaders are treading softly through a field of diverse and partly contradicting demands and expectations. For instance, principals are close to the educational practice and every day life of schools. They are also representatives of teachers and pupils and collaborate with their parents. Respectively, chief education officers are the leaders of the educational boards affected by local level politics. They also have a financial responsibility for organizing schooling at the municipality level. Aims and means to promote the school reform are therefore centrally constructed in negotiations in and between different stakeholders from different levels of the educational system. All and all, the Finnish context of educational leadership offers opportunities for collaboration
and distributed leadership in the local and district-level of schooling. While, at the same time it creates rivalry between actors in the district and would probably benefit from more systematic leadership training.
Toward undivided basic education
The most recent school reform – developing undivided basic education – is based on the Finnish school legislation and regulations emphasizing constructivist views of learning that refer to the active and collaborative nature of learning (Vygotsky, 1978; Wenger, 1998). Accordingly, learning within school is seen as an active, collaborative and situated process in which the relationship between individuals and their environment is constantly constructed and modified. The aim of this theory-based reform (McLaughlin and Mitra, 2001) is to support pupils in their learning path through the various transitions of their school careers and to facilitate pupil’s agency over their learning. The reform is motivated by several complementary causes. Pupils have for example been found to have problems in transferring from primary to secondary school in many European countries, Finland included (Anderson et al., 2000; Galton and Hargreaves, 2002; Davies and McMahon, 2004; Kvalsund, 2000; Muschamp et al., 2001; Ward, 2000). Signs of earlier social exclusion and a rise in depressive symptoms among girls and an
increase in negative attitudes towards school among boys have been identified in national surveys of school health issues (Rimpela¨ et al., 2008, 2007). These signs of ill-being are not solely due to problems in the normative transitions in school path however, the transitions are found to cause gaps and an increasing the risk of exclusion in the school path.
Moreover, though the parallel school system was replaced in the 1970s by a national nine-year basic education, in the comprehensive school model there is still a problematic gap between primary and secondary school. This is exemplified in the school culture as a lack of collaboration between the pupils as well as between teachers and other staff, and as a fragmentation of school-based curricula between primary and secondary schools. In Finland the gap between primary and secondary school is partly upheld by teacher training practices: comprehensive schoolteachers for the grades 1-6 and teachers for the grades 7-9 are still trained separately[1]. In sum, the idea of undivided basic education emphasizes a consistent, coherent and understandable comprehensive school education for each pupil, both in terms of studying different subjects in meaningful continuums and in terms of safe and supporting every-day learning environments. Therefore the reform also includes developing inner coherence of schools by showing curricular consistency from pre-school to ninth grade and even upper secondary school or vocational education (Finlex, 1998; Ministry of Education, 1998, 2004). However, it is the responsibility of municipalities and single schools to construct their own strategies and forms to
implement the undivided basic education.
Theoretical framework
School system as a systemic entity Basic education is a complex, interactive and systemic entity. Success in school development is therefore simultaneously affected by several complementary elements.
A reason for ineffective school reforms is that they tend to focus on parts while disregarding the way the whole structure hangs together (Salomon, 1995). The problem in focusing on isolated parts, such as a principal’s action orientation, is that the approach ignores the complex, context dependent and interactive nature of school development and therefore such a focus is yet another predictor for failure of the school reform (Sarason, 1991). Accordingly, creating capacity for change requires systematic
efforts on several fronts simultaneously (e.g. Senge, 1990; Fullan and Miles, 1992; Fullan, 2003b, 2007). In particular, building understanding and negotiating meaning across levels of the schooling system and coordinating efforts is essential for the reform to take root (Resnick and Hall, 1998). Hence a successful reform means dealing with complex entities and the orchestration of multiple elements simultaneously. This suggests that building understanding and negotiating meaning across levels of the
schooling system are key challenges for educational leaders.
Challenges for promoting sustainable school development
While the leader or the leadership alone does not determine the success of school reforms, in managing the complexity of educational development the educational leadership is in a significant role. However leadership does not exist in a vacuum, rather it is highly contextual and therefore reliant on other elements, or it may be distributed with other actors in the context (Gronn, 2000; Harris, 2005). Bringing new ideas into schools is largely dependent on the chief education officers’ and the principals’ skills and motivation to adopt and facilitate the ideas within their school community and school districts in collaboration with other educational professionals (Earley et al., 2002). In order to succeed, school reforms require development of a learning culture in schools. Therefore guiding the change processes in schools requires leading the professional learning community (McLaughlin and Mitra, 2003; Stoll et al., 2006). School as a learning community is a complex context with multiple levels and practices, some of them contradictory. There are opportunities for agency, avoidance, opposition and resistance, and as a consequence there is inevitable tension in interactions between different actors in the context. Pupils, parents, teachers,principals and chief education officers often have different expectations for desired school practices and development that may cause frictions. Moreover there is a growing tension between external accountability and at the same time a desire to maintain and develop belief in educational leadership, both at the school and municipal level. Therefore a challenge for promoting school development is that principals and chief education officers need to balance between two roles: perceiving oneself primarily as managers and controllers of resources or perceiving oneself as the facilitator of a shared learning process (Huusko et al., 2007; Johnson, 2006; Lewis and Murphy, 2008).
Another challenge for promoting school development is that the teacher community forms a loosely coupled expert organization. In other words, teachers affect each other suddenly rather than continuously, occasionally rather than constantly, negligibly rather than significantly, indirectly rather than directly, and eventually rather than immediately (Weick, 1982, 1979; Orton and Weick, 1990). Loose coupling enables and even facilitates autonomy and pedagogical freedom but does not necessarily provide encouragement for taking collaborative responsibility for pupils’ learning throughout comprehensive school. Hence teachers are balancing between autonomy and control:their work is to some extent controlled by governmental and communal level decision making, but at the same time they are autonomous experts in teaching their class and their subject area. This is especially evident in Finland where teachers are highly educated and have a high status in society. Teachers are also heavily involved in the curriculum process not only in their schools, but also at the school district level. As such, teachers are expected to be active professional agents in school development and to be involved in implementing pedagogical reforms and facilitating district-level collaboration between schools. However, according to the substantial research on school change, both nationally and internationally, it seems that teachers are not highly committed to developing the school community outside their own classrooms and content area; in fact, quite the opposite is true (Clement and Vandenberghe, 2000; Fullan and Miles, 1992; Fullan, 2003a; Hargreaves et al., 1998; Sarason, 1991; Stevens, 2004; Syrja¨la¨inen, 2002; Tyrack and Cuban, 1995). Hence a challenge for school leadership is to find ways to utilise teachers’ expertise in school development and to help broaden teachers’ sense of professional agency from classroom to school- and district-level professional interaction and developmental processes.
The real challenge for educational leadership is that sustainable educational reform (Hargreaves and Fink, 2004) and local development work requires a coherent shared pedagogical theory upon which new structures of activity and participation can be based, and also for new practices to be created, sustained and modified “after the special project” status of the pedagogical experiments ends. This means a jointly constructed working theory of change that defines what should change (Fullan, 2001).
Further, teachers, principals and chief education officers need also time to negotiate and construct a meaningful and shared conception of the reforms’ pedagogical implications and a map of how to reach goals in the context of application (Earley et al.,2002). This can also be referred to as a theory of changing: shared and informed assumptions of how change can be brought about (Fullan, 2001).
Taken all together, to avoid gaps and pitfalls in the implementation of school reform and management, explicit discussions and meaning making that promote learning in the development process is required in and between the different levels of schooling. This also suggests that a condition for implementing a systemic school reform (one that promotes active agency in terms of the reform both at the root-level pedagogical practices of schools, as well as in decision making in the local council) is to initiate
complementary parallel horizontal development processes between schools and educational leaders, and vertical negotiation processes, both from the “bottom-up” and the “top-down” between levels of schooling in the district (Anderson and Togneri, 2005;Fullan, 2003b). These processes of coherence making are needed in negotiating both theories of change and changing.
Study design
Participants and data collection
This study included data collected from comprehensive school principals and chief education officers from 87 municipalities and 237 schools around Finland[2]. These school districts (municipalities) and schools were selected based on their participation in the pilot project of the reform conducted by the Ministry of Education. The sample of school districts typifies broadly the national variation in terms of size of school network and local educational management structure. The survey was conducted in December 2005 by e-mail. After the non-response analysis, researchers contacted principals and chief education officers who did not answer the e-mail questionnaire and offered an alternative choice to answer with a paper version of the questionnaire. Altogether, 122 comprehensive school principles and 48 chief education officers responded to the survey. The total response rates were 60 percent (principals) and 55 percent (chief education officers).
Instruments
The survey consisted of open-ended questions and background information. The themes of the survey were: principals’ and chief education officers’ perceptions about the aim of the reform, the kinds of means they preferred to promote the goal, and what they perceived as the core challenges in development work in general and for themselves. The background questions were on participants’ tasks, work experience and training, and the municipality in which they were working. In addition the background information within the principal survey covered questions about the enrolment numbers and grades in the school.
Analyses
The open-ended questions were content analyzed using an abductive strategy. In the first phase of the content analysis, all the text segments in which principals and chief education officers referred to their ideas about the school reform, and means to promote the development, were coded into two exclusive hermeneutic categories. After this, the categories were coded into the two basic-categories using a grounded strategy. The categories resulting from the second phase were:
1. pedagogical reform: perceiving the school reform as an internal pedagogical development in and between the schools and school districts;
2. technical-financial reform: perceiving the core of the reform as reorganizing the school administration, resources and school structures;
3. pedagogical methods: perceiving collaborative learning such as shared meaning making and collaboration within and between the school communities as a means to promote the reform; and . technical-financial methods: perceiving reorganization of resources and structures such as incorporating schools and school districts, as a means to promote the development work. The content analysis was conducted using the ATLAS-ti program. Categories and code frequencies resulting from the content analysis were validated by the research group at the end of each analysis phase (Miles and Huberman, 1994; Yin, 1994). The researchers read the data carefully, and constructed and negotiated categories in detail to achieve stability. In the few cases of disagreement, consensus of final categorization was
reached through a discussion between researchers.
The type of content analysis used can be referred to as relational since it examines the relationships among concepts in qualitative data. To our knowledge, there are few previous empirical studies that have explored principals’ and chief education officers’ perceptions on educational change in this way. Analysis has been conducted as a continuum from qualitative to quantitative procedures, from impressions to categorization and systematization of observations. Quantification of the qualitative data has been carried out by counting the number of text segments devoted to different exclusive categories. Text segments have been used for both coding and measurement to provide complete, reliable and meaningful data. Reporting both qualitative citations and quantification aims at maintaining a high egree of statistical rigor without losing the richness of detail apparent in even more qualitative methods Milne and Adler,1999; Krippendorff, 1980; Weber, 1990).
Results
Principals’ and chief education officers’ approaches to the reform Results indicated that both rincipals’ and chief education officers’ views on the undivided basic education and the means to promote the school development varied. In general both groups had quite positive and convergent views about the main ideas of undivided basic education, though different meanings and interpretations of this existed. However at the same time definitions (“the ideals”) for the reform given by the principals and chief education officers were usually quite non-specific, one-sided, fragmented and narrow. Table I shows that the pedagogical perception of developing undivided basic education was the most often adopted by the principals (56 percent). Principals (65 percent) and chief education officers (43 percent) who dopted this view perceived developing more consistent and understandable learning-paths for pupils as the core of the reform. They also emphasized the importance of constructing collaborative school ultures both in and between the schools as a precondition for the development:
Ensure a consistent learning path for the learner, and, especially, together with different actors in the learning path, emphasize the safety of the learning environment. Aim is to soften the transition points in the school career or even abolish them altogether. Consequently the pupil will learn to act with different kinds of actors from different age groups (Principal). A coherent school path for children. Holistic view on children and teaching. Child is in the main role, not the class or subject teacher. By this I mean that in undivided basic education you should learn to know the child’s conditions and the child as a whole. The [school] staff should consider and plan together what would be the best way to organize teaching and who is going to teach what in which class so that the whole view of the child is not forgotten or left
aside. School exists not for the teaching staff but for the children (Chief education officer).
At the same time the technical-financial perception about the reform was the most dominant category (57 percent) within the group of chief education officers. Within this category the reform was considered primarily as a matter of resources or in terms of incorporating primary- and secondary grade schools. The minority of principals preferred this view (35 percent):
A reasonable use of teaching resources in these times when the amount of lessons and pupils are decreasing (Principal). In my view, the core idea of undivided basic education is to change Finnish school systems by adopting other western school systems [. . .] The undivided basic education can be best promoted in school units where schools are located near each other. This kind of unit can be managed, organized, maintained and so on, more efficiently than two separate units. I do not see undivided basic schools as an implementation of inclusion, but most of all as a standardization of school forms (Chief education officer).
Accordingly, there was considerable variation within and between principals’ and chief education officers’ perceptions on both the aims and the content of the reform. Hence the educational leaders reflected the theory of change in terms of developing undivided basic education from two complementary perspectives. In other words they had different ideas not only on what should change but also on the object of change. This provides a splintered base for constructing district-level coherent shared pedagogical theory upon which new structures of activity and participation can be based.
Further investigation showed that there was also variation in means used to promote the school development, both within and between the principals and the chief education officers groups (see Table II). Table II shows that both principals (80 percent) and chief education officers (59 percent) prioritized pedagogical methods in promoting the reform. Curriculum work, facilitating teachers’ active agency and promoting collaboration in and between the school communities were identified as the means to acilitate the school development by these principals and chief education officers:
Generate change in the way people think. Clarify that teaching is regulated by the municipal level curriculum and not the way things have been done for decades. Create a functional holistic learning path from first grade to getting the certificate from the ninth grade. Increase interaction between different teacher groups (Principal).
The aim [of undivided basic education] is to develop the teaching in one place, tighten and foster teachers’ collaboration, and make special education and social support for the pupils more effective. One principal would be able to better manage both staff and development of teaching methods (Chief education officer). However, at the same time the technical-financial means to promote the change were
emphasized more in the group of chief education officers (41 percent) than among the principals (20 percent). In this category the emphasis was mainly on resources and the technical aspects of developing undivided basic education, such as reconstructing the local net of schools:
At the moment the most crucial thing for the development are the decisions about the facilities and their planning. In spring we have to start drafting how the new model is managed so we can make a budget and make decisions about the attendance of the offices in the new school, where now there are only classes from 1 to 6, we have to hire all the subject teachers in the school. We must invest in the planning and implementation of recruitment . . .
(Principal).
Execution of the municipal level curriculum in schools. Starting the [new school] unit X in autumn 2006. Evaluation of the local net of schools becomes topical in 2006, and the changes in management and school network are possible (Chief education officer).
To sum up, there was variation on both within and between principals’ and chief educations officers’ perceptions on how to promote the reform. Thus not only different kinds of views on what should change (theory of change) existed, but also views how to implement the reform (theory of changing) occurred among educational leaders. As a whole, results indicated that building understanding across levels gets
confused, due to different perceptions about the school reform. Moreover the variation is reflected in reform implementation strategies perceived by the principals and chief educational officers, thus it also multiplies the variety of perceived methods to promote the reform.
Discussion
The results showed that there was variation in principals’ and chief education officers’ approaches to developing undivided basic education. Both groups had quite positive and convergent views about the core aim of the reform, which provides a good base for the reform implementation. However, while pedagogy was emphasized most often as a core of developing undivided basic education by the principals, the chief education officers viewed technical and financial factors more often as a core of the reform. A reason why pedagogy was more often referred to as a core of the reform by principals
than by chief education officers may be that the professional horizon in which they operate is slightly different, though complementary. For instance chief education officers are expected to construct a structural frame for schooling in the district in addition to pedagogical issues. They are also responsible for holding to the budget set by the local council. Principals on the other hand are more involved with the pedagogical practices of their school on a daily basis and hence have a different kind of professional horizon. Accordingly chief education officers often face the kind of accountability demands in their work that may lead them to interpret the reform as yet another government’s way of forcing them to cut down on the expenses of education by making “managerial” reorganizations.
This suggests that despite common ground in terms of the aims perceived by the principals and chief educational officers, there is also a need to construct a more coherent and shared theory of change (Fullan, 2001) both within and between the groups to promote a sustainable (Hargreaves and Fink, 2004; Earley et al., 2002) reform process. This calls for shared meaning making both on district- and school level not only on the aims of the reform but also on what should change. Going to scale, especially in theory-based change, is affected by the degree of consistency in the value basis and beliefs, but it also requires attention on the normative and procedural structures of the district-wide context (McLaughlin and Mitra, 2001). Otherwise there is a danger that the reform is reduced to a series of reactions and counter-reactions instead of proactive and sustainable school development work.
Inconsistent leadership that does not take all the levels of the system into account may be reflected in pupils’ learning paths, for instance causing unpredictable changes in class-structures or, on the pedagogical side, teachers’ uncertainty of what instructional choices to make.
Further investigation of chief education officers’ and principals’ perceived means to bring undivided basic education about showed that pedagogical means to promote the reform were emphasized most often both by the principals and chief education officers.
A reason why both groups emphasized pedagogical means to promote the reform is that in Finland principals and chief education officers often have similar educational backgrounds (Kanervio and Risku, 2009). Yet another less obvious reason for this may be that pedagogy is ultimately seen as “someone else’s” territory. For example, chief education officers may assume that principals and teachers who are closer to the pedagogical practices take a greater responsibility for achieving the goal of the reform.
This in turn may result in the responsibility of pedagogical innovations being “drained down” in the system: from chief education officer to principal, from principal to the professional community, and finally from the teacher community to the responsibility of a single teacher. Paradoxically this may hinder the possibilities for constructing a coherent, shared pedagogical theory that is identified as a central precondition for successful school reform by many scholars (e.g. Fullan, 2003b; The Hay Group, 1999; Anderson and Togneri, 2005). Although both principals and chief education officers emphasized pedagogy as a tool to promote the school development there was also variation both within and between the groups. Moreover principals’ and chief education officers’ perceptions on how the change can be brought about were more vague than their perceptions about the aims of the reform. This verifies Fullan’s (2001) argument, that educational leaders and administrators are often explicit about what
should change while the ideas of how the change should be brought about are vague and implicit (Anderson and Togneri, 2005). A reason for this is that the development processes are often multilayered, complex and implicit, and hence harder to identify and put into words. This on the other hand causes problem in translating the aims into the sub-goals and into school practices, especially if there is no time and if no constant effort is put into negotiating about the pedagogical implications or constructing the map of change in the context of application during the development work (Earley et al.,
2002; Resnick and Glennan, 2002).
To conclude, the lack of alignment within and between principals’ and chief educational officers’ perceived theory of change as well as changing in terms of developing undivided basic education provides challenge for district level collaboration in reform implementation. These gaps in the perceptions within and between the groups also easily lead to misunderstandings and destructive frictions in district level development work, which may compromise the reform implementation.
The implications for leadership of school development Principals and chief education officers are leaders in a pedagogical and cultural change (see Fullan, 2002) in their districts and schools at the same time they have financial responsibility for schooling (Fink and Resnick, 2001). Hence they need to balance financial-technical realities and pedagogical development in order to carry out their
work as educational leaders successfully. Consequently in successful implementation of school reforms both of these elements need to be considered and constructively aligned (Biggs, 1999). This means making pedagogically driven financial-technical decisions at the local level as well as keeping in mind financial-technical factors while developing pedagogy in schools. In order to keep this balance, skills and the will to create original solutions and contextual innovations are needed at all levels of school
administration (Lewis and Murphy, 2008). This calls not only for a systemic approach to school development, but also for provision of sufficient support to achieve these efforts (e.g. Porter, 1994). For example, in encouraging leaders in their efforts to create a learning culture, work tasks must be prioritized in order to make time for learning in the community (Schein, 1985; Resnick and Glennan, 2002).
Therefore more efficient means for guiding meaningful collaborative learning between the different levels of the comprehensive school system and going to scale need to be developed. This is especially true in a decentralized educational system, such as in Finland, where major responsibility for school reforms and educational innovations are at the local level and in schools. In this situation, opportunities and support for building a shared working theory in the context and for taking both the general aims (based on educational theory and research) and the context-dependent, local factors into account, is crucial. To be able to do this, principals and chief education officers along with other members of professional community (Desimone, 2002) should take time to negotiate and construct a meaningful and shared conception of the reform and the means to promote the change in their own contexts. However, this requires that more attention is paid to creating activating and collaborative learning environments not only for pupils and teachers, but also for educational leaders at all levels of school administration.
Notes
1. Within the Finnish comprehensive school system all the comprehensive school teachers must have a Master’s degree either in educational sciences or some other domain such as mathematics or biology, with compulsory additional studies (35 credits) in educational science. The class teachers who typically work in grades (0)-1-6 (primary school) must have an MA degree in educational science, with the main subject being applied educational sciences or educational psychology. Subject teachers, who typically teach in the grades 7-9 (lower secondary school), usually have an MA in another subject with an additional compulsory one year of study in educational science.
2. In Finland municipalities vary in their size, on average around 12,000 people, and they can be divided into three categories from city municipalities of over 15,000 inhabitants (23,3 percent), to country municipalities with low inhabitant density and populations under 4,000 in their centre (65.7 percent) (Aho et al., 2006; Kanervio and Risku, 2009).
