I am Peter Van Iseghem and work as an educational advisor at Catholic Education Flanders.
My main focus is on leadership and leadership development.
I am a member of the staff group that organises the training for novice school leaders in Flanders. I teach personal leadership there in the three training years. I also support school leaders and pedagogical supervisors in rolling out shared educational leadership.
The concept we developed (leadership for learning) has already taken me to many countries (the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, Poland, Vietnam, and Rwanda).
Leadership for Learning
Workshop
Over the past three years, from an Erasmus + project, we designed the concept of leadership for learning. The main objective of the project was to support school teams in their policy to realise higher levels of integrated leadership resulting in creating opportunities to realise sustainable innovation that affects teachers’ professional learning and learners’ achievement.
This concept is in line with the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) describing integrated leadership as a balanced combination of distributed leadership and instructional leadership and it is also in line with recent scientific evidence about leadership concepts.
Leadership for learning integrates 4 concepts of leadership Instructional, transformational, distributed, and situational leadership. This concept has a pronounced focus on all staff members: formal and informal leaders and it has a positive impact on the learning process of students and teacher learning.
A positive learning climate: fulfilling the basic needs for autonomy, belongingness and competence. With this concept, we are trying to provide an answer to societal educational challenges (complexity of leadership in an educational context, great pressure on school leaders, (flat) career and professionalization of teachers and school leaders,…)
We have grouped the important elements on which leadership for learning focuses into what characterizes effective school leadership. From these effective characteristics for school leadership, we finally formulated 5 building blocks for leadership for learning.
- Building a trustful school culture and relationships
- developing and sustaining a vision for learning
- focusing on educational program, learning and instruction
- nurturing professional learning communities
- Recognizing and celebrating success and innovation
For each of the 5 building blocks, we have formulated a number of leadership practices.
In addition, we also developed tools and presented good practices from different countries. Finally, we also designed a self-scan reflection tool that focuses on your school’s practices from the concept of leadership for learning.
During the workshop, we explore the new concept in an interactive way and also look at the scientific basis. Then we would like to outline with the workshop participants the leadership practices, the set of tools, and the inspiring practical examples. We will also learn about the self-scanning tool, which was specially developed for this purpose.
