EDUC44020 Leading School Development-SPR

Academic Year 2021/2022

All leadership endeavour within the school community and beyond, should contribute to individual and collective capacity to lead, thus building professional community as well as forging leadership trajectories for members of the entire school community, students as well as adults. The core of this module revolves around School Self Evaluation as a policy and practice and will interrogate both through the lens of the tensions between accountability and professional responsibility, As part of this focus, an integral element of the module, and its assignment will be an emphasis on evidence informed decision making at the level of the school, what constitutes evidence, and the decision-making processes engaged in to identify priorities.

Participants will be required to undertake an investigation of the identification of priorities, School Improvement Planning and the strategies adopted for implementation, particularly the allocation of resources, human and other, particularly how such initiatives are arrived at, planned for, a timeframe agreed, implemented, monitored and evaluated. A further integral element of this focus will be the extent to which such endeavours enhance professional responsibility, as well as capacities to lead, while rekindling school vision, as well renewing commitment to building sustainable community and leadership praxis.


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Curricular information is subject to change

Learning Outcomes:

Through engagement with the content and processes of this module, participants will be enabled to:

1. Increase awareness, understanding and capacities to interrogate of policies that promote school self- evaluation, and to situate these within international discourses of reform and theories of educational change.
2. Revisit, and re-evaluate and be more articulate about tensions between being accountable and being professionally responsible: including values, visions and their lived realities, sensitive to school contexts and cultures.
3. Through individual discussion, deliberation and the completion of research on a school innovation, have enhanced greater awareness, understanding of, and capacities to influence individual and school capacity to generate reform impetus, while building leadership capacities in identifiable ways that give meaning and impetus to school vision, values and practice, while increasing capacity for leadership praxis

Indicative Module Content:

Module content is structured around carefully selected readings intended to scaffold the learning with an emphasis on research informed practice for the purposes of cultivating a more sustained and sustainable leadership praxis.

Key themes in this module include::

 Leading change
 Accountable and responsible School Self evaluation
 Developing partnerships both within and beyond the school
 System leadership and school contexts
 National and international policy.
 Building institutional capacity.
 Cultivating sustained and sustainable leadership praxis.

Indicative Tests:
Sugrue, C. (2015) School Leadership in Context: National Policies, International Influences in C. Sugrue (Ed.) Unmasking School Leadership: A Longitudinal Life History of School Leaders (pp.25-45) Doedrecht: Springer

Solbrrekke, T. and Sugrue, C. (2011) Professional Responsibility – Back to the Future in Dyrdal, Solbrekke and Sugrue (Eds.) Professional Responsibility: new Horizons of Praxis. London: Routledge.

DES current policy will be core text in this module.

Sugrue, C., & Solbrekke, T. D. (2020). Rekindling education as praxis: The promise of deliberative leadership. In T. D. Solbrekke & C. Sugrue (Eds.), Leading Higher Education As and For Public Good Rekindling Education as Praxis (pp. 159-176). London & New York Routledge

Student Effort Hours: 
Student Effort Type Hours
Lectures

30
Small Group

30
Conversation Class

10
Autonomous Student Learning

90
Total

160
Approaches to Teaching and Learning:
Blended [70% face-to-face/classroom; 30% online engagement].

The module workload for this module is in line with ECTS norms i.e. 225 hours student workload in total. This workload will comprise participation in a weekly 90 minute participative, interactive discussions in small groups and in plenary sessions, where opportunities will be provided to chair, report and contributed to focused deliberations on selected module readings. Students will be expected to engage in specified asynchronous work between sessions, with an emphasis on sustained engagement with intensity over time.


 
Requirements, Exclusions and Recommendations

Not applicable to this module.


Module Requisites and Incompatibles
Not applicable to this module.
 
Assessment Strategy  
Description Timing Open Book Exam Component Scale Must Pass Component % of Final Grade
Assignment: A single assignment, of 5,000 words, documenting an innovation in a school other than the authors own, with a focus on evidence, analysis and possible lessons learned for building leadership capacity Unspecified n/a Graded Yes

100

Carry forward of passed components
Yes
 
Resit In Terminal Exam
Summer No
Please see Student Jargon Buster for more information about remediation types and timing. 
Feedback Strategy/Strategies

• Feedback individually to students, post-assessment

How will my Feedback be Delivered?

Feedback will be provided to each student according to criteria provided in advance