Learning from the best - school management at schools that are effective in learning

Vignettes and anecdotes are used at the Institute for Teacher Training and School Research, among other things, to address questions of how to manage schools effectively in terms of learning. The research group led by Michael Schratz, Markus Ammann, Niels Anderegg, Alexander Bergmann, Malte Gregorzewski, Werner Mauersberg and Veronika Möltner investigated the question of effective school leadership as part of a project funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung at 28 schools that won the German School Award. The research design is phenomenologically inspired in that it attempts to trace the experiences of "being led". This is the key added value of the study, which, unlike other studies, does not merely describe the tasks of school leaders or competences.

As part of the project, an attempt was made to record the responsive behaviour in schools via school management vignettes and anecdotes with all the actors involved. Learning-effective school leadership, as understood in this project, is based on a broad understanding of learning and thus goes beyond good results in standardised output assessments by also meeting high standards in other relevant school quality areas (e.g. dealing with diversity, teaching quality, responsibility, school climate/school life and extracurricular partners or school as a learning institution). The results were published in the publication Lernseits führen.

In a follow-up project, school leaders at successful schools were asked to reflect on their profession-specific attitude with regard to their leadership in the institutional context of education and teaching. In order to live the different attitudes in the teaching staff as a successful school, a common basis of values is required, which leads to the question: Where do I want to go with my teaching staff and the school? As leaders can only influence this indirectly through collaboration with the stakeholders, over 130 school leaders were asked about their attitudes in this regard. In the analysis of the data, those phenomena are analysed that can provide information about how leadership ethics manifests itself in concrete linguistic actions, profession-specific activities and relationships. The attitudes of school leaders towards current topics such as social well-being and artificial intelligence will also be analysed.