The Norwegian Perspective on School Leadership and Collaborative Teacher Professional Learning Communities

• In Event: School Leadership of Teacher Professional Development as Contested Practice Globally: Roles of Professional Learning Networks

Abstract

The results from an OECD white paper examining congruency and typologies of leadership in the countries participating in TALIS 2018 indicate that Norway represents a strikingly different typology of schools than most English speaking countries (Bowers, 2020). At the principal/school level, Bowers found that the principals’ perception of their school fit within three different typologies: CB1 (high leadership for learning), CB2 (moderate leadership for learning, low feedback routines), and CB3 (low leadership for learning, low mentoring/induction routines). While the USA had a majority of schools in CB1 leadership for learning, Norway was almost evenly split between CB2 (low feedback) and CB3 (low mentoring). In the following, I will discuss and contextualize these results in light of the Norwegian experience.

It has been hypothesized that the TALIS questionnaire is biased for countries outside of where the majority of research on school leadership conducted (such as the USA) (Bowers, 2020). This underscores the need for interpretation where contextual and cultural idiosyncrasies are considered. The Norwegian profile indicates that two school types (CB2 and CB3) are equally common, indicating that Norway has a large degree of variability in how schools are run. This is true as, legislation and regulations, including the national curriculum, form a binding framework, but local authorities, schools, and teachers are relatively autonomous in their implementation.

Overall, both feedback and mentoring may be considered as part of the same paradigm, where teacher autonomy and self-efficacy is highly valued. If autonomy is understood as the absence of direction, one may interpret the results in light of schools/principals who consider their teachers to be self-propelled in the sense that they, regardless of experience, are capable of running their classrooms largely uninterrupted (Tolo et al., 2020). Such an interpretation fits when diving deeper into the Norwegian school culture. Although national initiatives regarding instructional leadership have intensified over the last decade, the autonomous teacher has a strong standing in Norwegian culture, reflected both in legislative laws and in the way feedback is provided. For example, Meyer et al (2019) found that Norwegian leaders tended to behave more passively with respect to advocating their perspective, inquiring into their teachers’ thinking and planning for improvement than their New Zealand colleagues. The study observed a ‘culture of niceness’ (Elmore, 2007) in which beliefs were inquired into only on a surface-level and a lack of a deeper, critical discussion stood in the way of effective problem-solving consequently hindering the improvement of teaching and learning.

Norway is a country where receiving feedback from other teachers is common (Carlsten et al., 2014). However, the quality of feedback varies and is often in line with the ‘culture of niceness’ (Havnes, 2009; Kvam, 2018). Thus, even though feedback exists, it is not necessarily conducive to learning and professional development. Although professional learning communities have been part of the national initiatives, reports find that PLC/PLNs tend to be the least efficient (Lødding et al., 2018) as leaders and teachers alike are unsure how to address real issues while still considered ‘nice’.

Author

• Ide Katrine Birkeland, BI Norwegian Business School