Article InfoSuperintendents, functioning as the local school boards' chief executive officers, play a fundamental role in improving schools. While teachers and principals have been given a prominence in students´ learning outcomes, the perspective of superintendents as instructional leaders is often forgotten. Based on a nationwide survey of Swedish school boards the study investigates the boards' expectations of their superintendents to influence student learning outcomes. The basic research question is: How may superintendents as boundary spanners facilitate school improvement? Boundary spanning is used as a theoretical and methodological framework to explore how superintendents may facilitate the local school system to become a more tightly-coupled system and strengthen the organization´s capacity of school improvement. The study's findings indicate that superintendents have significant opportunities to influence political decisions and school improvement. Superintendents may exert an indirect instructional leadership and thereby tighten the couplings between different hierarchical levels in the school system. In their boundary-spanning roles, superintendents are expected to prioritize managerial assignments, which is a time-consuming task. Because the
This study aims generate new knowledge concerning how principals in primary and secondary education in Sweden conceive of and experience the concepts of 'research basis' and 'proven experience'. The study included in-depth interviews with eight principals. The interviews were analysed, and the results are theoretically founded in the phenomenographic life-world.The results indicate that Swedish principals in primary and secondary schools are poorly prepared for managing schools where the education must be based on research and proven experience. The principals have no education in this area, nor do they have any co-workers who can take the responsibility to implement and/or generate research-based knowledge. An interesting question is: Does education require a specific research concept that differs from the academies definition?
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