Developing teaching through instructional leadership

This paper present a development project where three different designs aimed at promoting instructional leadership have been tested. Forty-two schools within upper secondary education participated. All three designs promoted reflective dialogues about teaching between leaders and teachers based upon data collected by the teachers. The designs differed in a number of ways in proportion to the number of participants, the way of retrieving the data that the reflective dialogues were based upon and the dialogic tools used. The qualitative evaluation show the leaders and teachers alike were mostly pleased with the project and its implication on the instructional leadership capacity of the school. However, the quantitative assessment was more varied indicating that not every design fits with every organization. Thus, it is quite important to evaluate the readiness of the school before taking on a very complex project like this, aiming at developing teaching through instructional leadership.