Categories of learning-oriented leadership: a potential contribution to the school context

Abstract

This paper presents knowledge about learning-oriented leadership as part of managers’ daily work. The aim is to contribute findings from an empirical study in the software communication industry and discuss their potential contribution to leadership in the school context. Through an empirical and learning-theory-based analysis of managerial acts of influence, learning-oriented leadership is suggested as an analytical concept. In the educational leadership literature concerning instructional, pedagogic or learner-centred leadership, the interpretation of each concept is shifting and thus unstable. The studying of a non-school empirical context contributes to an analytical separation of the pedagogical leadership task from the pedagogical core task, which may be useful when returning to the school context. The learning-oriented categorisation of managerial acts of influence presents different routes for managers–including school principals–to intervene in their employees’ learning and competence on both individual and collective levels. Here, we offer an alternative suggestion for how to understand what principals do to influence the work in their organisations.