Research shows that leadership is crucial for professional learning, often highlighting principals' or middle leaders' leading practices. However, in leading, professions with differing roles work together. With a decentring perspective on leadership, we shift the focus from the individual principal or middle leader to joint leading practices. Based on a practice theoretical perspective, this article explores how educational leadership unfolds in shared leading practices in a Swedish case where professional learning is led by principals, middle leaders, and an external development leader. The findings visualise a web of practices focusing on understanding roles, changing structures and changing content for professional learning. The shared leading practices are enabled by shared ideas, different positions, and common arenas for communication, but constrained by simplified assumptions and exclusion of teachers. In this web, single dilemmas are handled in different practices from differing perspectives, with changes in plans for professional learning as an outcome. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Denna artikel beskriver ett ULF-projekt där sjuförskollärare på övningsförskolor har lett och spelat in professionsseminarier med lärarstudenter. På högskolan har förskollärarna utforskat inspelningarna tillsammans med tre forskare. Syftet har varit att förbättra kvaliteten och likvärdigheten i seminarier där ett teoretiskt analysredskap med tre dimensioner av praktiskt yrkeskunnande användes. I projektet har bland annat förändringar i ledarskapet av seminarierna undersökts. Resultatet synliggör förändringar i ägarskap av analysredskapet, tillit till det egna professionella omdömet och professionellt mod att undersöka egna tillkortakommanden. Förändringarna har påverkat kvaliteten i seminarierna.

This article explores external facilitation for school improvement; more specifically, it examines the practical work of external facilitators. It is based on a Swedish case in which facilitators at the Swedish National Agency for Education support low-performing schools. The article aims to develop knowledge about how external facilitators in their practical work both promote and prevent developed understanding and improvement capacity. Based on observations and documents, facilitators’ endeavours and critical situations in their work to support school improvement are identified. The findings show five different endeavours to promote development of understanding and improvement capacity. However, they also show how taking ownership, simplification, and model focus, three of five identified recurring critical situations, prevent such development. The conclusion is that there are several aspects for external facilitators to balance to promote school improvement and turn around low-performing schools. When planning for external facilitation, it is important to consider how the facilitators’ practical work can be adapted to the local contexts of those who are facilitated in order to promote their ownership of the processes. Without balance and adaptation, external facilitation can lead to deprofessionalisation instead of development of improvement capacity. © The Author(s) 2024

This article presents an action research project conducted in a Swedish compulsory school. In the project the participants explored ways of identifying actions to improve in the practices of a professional learning community in order to develop teaching. This is important for participants in such communities, since the outcome of developed teaching is challenging to achieve. The exploration is guided by practice theories and is based on three practices: teachers’ peer observations of teaching, teachers’ plan-ning of these observations, and teachers’ and a researcher’s joint conversations based on the observations. By identifying actions in these practices and the relations between them, the findings show that how participating teachers formulated the direction of peer observations influenced the feedback that colleagues gave during observation practices, which in turn influenced both the input to and outcome of the conversations that followed these observa-tions. The study not only shows that this happened, but also how and why it happened, as well as how it can be visualised. Overall, the findings clearly demonstrate what promoted and what pre-vented the teachers’ professional learning and what needed to be improved. © 2023 The Author(s).

Teachers’ professional learning is closely connected to and dependent on different leading practices. Teachers professional learning is regarded as a key factor in successful school development, and development leaders at different levels are assigned to provide for and support such learning. However, the connection between leading and learning needs to be further explored. In this article, we focus specifically on development leaders’ leading practice when leading professional learning. Based on the theory of practice architectures, the study explores the interplay between development leaders and teacher leaders in a professional development programme, where the leading and learning practices of the different leaders meet. The findings show that development leaders’ leading practice is characterised by responsiveness to ideas of successful leading, to experiences and observations of leading practices, to teacher leaders’ understanding and to their own leading practices. Through these types of responsiveness, a formative aspect of leading unfolds where the interplay between development leaders’ leading and teacher leaders’ learning practices appears. We refer to this as learning leading. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This article nuances an ongoing discussion among researchers about external researchers in emancipatory action research in the educational field. It examines opportunities and challenges for emancipatory action research for participants in top-down and bottom-up initiated action research projects with external researchers. An analysis based on variables for studying critical emancipatory action research highlights four central questions in both projects: whose choice, improvement for what, whose voice and improvement for whom. An external researcher could empower the understanding of the participants involved in terms of what to improve, contribute to all voices being heard, and strengthen improvements in those who were not in position of power in both top-down and bottom-up initiated action research. However, in the top-down initiative, the external researcher could not emancipate the participants in relation to the question whose choice it is to conduct action research, unlike in the bottom-up initiative. The findings indicate that involving external researchers in action research aiming for emancipation or not is not the relevant question. Instead, the question of relevance is what is required from external researchers in order to contribute to emancipation, a central question for all participants, for developing meaningful collaboration between school organisations and universities. © 2022 The Author(s).