Translations of new public management: a decentred approach to school governance in four OECD countries

Despite the prevalence of corporate and performative models of school governance within and across different education systems, there are various cases of uneven, hybrid expressions of New Public Management (NPM) that reveal the contingency of global patterns of rule. Adopting a ‘decentred approach’ to governance (Bevir, M. 2010. “Rethinking Governmentality: Towards Genealogies of Governance.” European Journal of Social Theory 13 (4): 423–441), this paper compares the development of NPM in four OECD countries: Australia, England, Spain, and Switzerland. A focus of the paper is how certain policy instruments are created and sustained within highly differentiated geo-political settings and through different multi-scalar actors and authorities yet modified to reflect established traditions and practices

Recurrence quantification analysis as a methodological innovation for school improvement research

School improvement and educational change can be facilitated by learning through reflection, as this allows teachers to discover ways to develop and adapt to change. Higher levels of engagement in reflection have been found to be beneficial, but it is unclear from which everyday routine in engagement in reflection higher levels arise, and thus whether occasions to make knowledge explicit should be organized with a certain constancy. In this study, we therefore used a conceptualization of teacher learning through reflection as a situated and dynamic process in which available environmental information, learning activities, and professional practices are interconnected, and co-develop. Seventeen Dutch Vocational Education and Training teachers participated over a period of 5 months. We explored the use of daily and monthly logs as measurement instruments and Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA) as the analysis technique applied to the time-series generated from the daily logs. The findings indicated that teachers who make information from their working environment explicit more are also able to make new insights explicit more. The routine with which teachers make information explicit was found to be mostly unrelated to making new insights explicit. To reach their levels of engagement in reflection, some teachers organized opportunities to reflect with determined intervals, others seemed to recognize those opportunities as the working environment provided them, and some used a combination thereof. Moreover, the use of daily and monthly logs seemed to fit better to some participants than others. Only sometimes does organizing constancy in engagement in reflection seem to relate to the levels thereof. This study provides an example of how logs and RQA can be adopted to tap into professional learning as a dynamic and situated process in support of school improvement and educational change

Schulentwicklungsforschung

Schulentwicklungsforschung hat sich in der zweiten Hälfte des letzten Jahrhunderts als eine zentrale Forschungsperspektive herausgebildet. Im Zentrum steht die Einzelschule als pädagogische Handlungseinheit und die Frage, wie schulische Akteure die Qualität ihrer Schule weiterentwickeln können, so dass das Handeln der Akteure professionalisiert und das Lernen der Schüler*innen verbessert werden kann. Organisationstheoretische sowie mehrebenenanalytische Konzepte bilden die Basis der Erforschung von Schulentwicklung. Im Beitrag werden wichtige historische Entwicklungs- und aktuelle Forschungslinien herausgearbeitet und offene Forschungsfragen diskutiert