Onderwijsorganisatie en Management
Lecture 0: Course description
Our course focuses on evidence-based administration, meaning that we will mostly focus on what is
relevant in terms of being or becoming an effective school.
Course organization
Lectures → basic concepts/background information will be explained
and we will also discuss these concepts in relation to their usefulness
for schools.
Practicals → attention to the assignment that we have to write.
Examination
In order to complete the course, you are assessed by means of a school
improvement plan including an in-depth academic underpinning of the
choices you made for the plan. The reason for this assignment is that you
need to actively process the study materials and material provided by the
lectures. You have to tackle a rather open problem, but you can use your
creativity in doing so. Your professional skills are enhanced as well. The
assignment will have to be done in groups of 3 students.
Case – Allestree Woodlands school
The improvement plan needs to be made for a real case, which
is Allestree Woodlands (secondary) school in Derby. The
reason for choosing an English school is because the course is
provided in English and also there are international students in
the course. Moreover, we think it’s instructive to think of
school improvement in an international context.
Information about the school
There are 3 relevant sources of information about the school:
• School website → Provides you with relevant
information about the school (e.g. what do they
value, what is their vision on education, school
policies, curriculum, school team, reaction on report
of English educational inspectors, etc.)
• Ofsted report and its website → Allestree Woodlands
was visited by the inspectors. Unfortunately for the
school Ofsted assessed that the school is in need for
improvement in several domains. In previous
inspections their rating was good, thus apparently
their educational quality has deteriorated and the
context is far from optimal.
• Website provided by the UK government which provides a lot of information (i.e. detailed
information on student outcomes; also for specific groups of students, information on
, absence and pupil population, information on the
school itself regarding its workforce and finances).
Moreover, you can compare the school
characteristics and information on students to
other schools, to local averages and national
averages. This information is relevant for your
problem analysis because it allows you to interpret
school data. It also allows you to search for other
schools that perform better and look at what they
are doing.
*Due to COVID-19, there is no data for 2020, meaning that data of 2018 or 2019 had to be used.
Characteristics of the school plan
When writing the plan and theoretical underpinning, we strongly advise you to use the information
in the lectures as well as in the mandatory articles. Of course, you can also use additional sources.
You have to decide which information is relevant for the school and thus for your plan. The main
focus should be on the implementation of an intervention within an organization; what pre-
conditions are needed in order to be able to implement innovation, who is involved, what
responsibilities does everyone have, what knowledge and skills do they desired changes assume, are
these competencies already available in the organization and how can you make use of them, what
kind of educational structures or culture that are already available in this context might facilitate or
impede successful implementation?
Also, the role of the context is crucial. You will not write a one-size-fits-all plan, but a plan that really
takes into account the contextual factors that are relevant in the school improvement processes.
Such context factors will be discussed in the lectures and study material; e.g. the article of Reezigt &
Creemers (2005) provides an overview of relevant issues.
The plan should pay ample attention to what is needed within the organization to make innovations
successful and sustainable. So, there’s a shift ion focus from the class towards the school
organization.
Practicals (voluntary)
The assignment is rather open, because based on the
information available you are requested to come up with a
plan for a rather complex problem for which there isn’t an
easy solution. Therefore, additional support and option for
peer feedback is provided during 2 practicals (February 22
and March 8). You have to prepare for practicals (look at
picture on the right →)
*SIP = School Improvement Plan
In March, there is an option to meet with the lecturer to ask
questions and get feedback on issues that you raise yourself.
Deadlines
Just email if you can’t find a group, don’t worry. Deadline for the
assignment is April the 2nd, supplement means who had mainly work
on which part.
,Lecture 1: Introduction: Evidence-based educational administration:
promise or fad?
This lecture is about whether we should work evidence-based and problems when working evidence-
based.
Literature of this lecture
Mandatory:
• Kowalski, T. (2009). Need to Address Evidence-Based Practice in Educational
Administration. Educational Administration Quarterly, 45(3), 351-374.
doi:10.1177/0013161X09333623
• Gerry J. Reezigt & Bert P. M. Creemers (2005) A comprehensive framework for effective
school improvement, School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 16:4, 407-424,DOI:
10.1080/09243450500235200
Optional:
• Hechuan Sun , Bert P. M. Creemers & Rob de Jong (2007) Contextual factors and effective
school improvement, School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 18:1, 93-122,DOI:
10.1080/09243450601058287
Pitfalls in educational administration
If you talk to policy-makers and some other people
in education, you hardly find someone who says we
shouldn’t work evidence-based, because there is
more or less consensus that we should use the
knowledge that is out there in the field to base our
actions on. But still we see that a lot of this research
information/evidence is not used in education yet.
So, what is the reason we all think it’s important to
use a lot of evidence/research data in all the daily choices we make and at the same time we hardly
use them in practice? One of the main reasons of course is that if you are an educational
administrator or school leader, you often have a lot of things to do regularly (e.g. fill in reports, give
interviews, prepare things for school board, etc.). But that is only part of their daily practice. A lot of
their daily practice involves that they have to solve all kinds of problems (e.g. if a teacher is ill,
complaining parents, etc.); so those things that come up during the day in their job. And because of
that daily pressure on school leaders it is sometimes quite difficult to reflect and take a step back and
to think what I’m doing right now, is that the most effective way to do it?
If you look at the literature, there are also some other arguments why it is often quite difficult for
school administrators to use evidence in their daily practice:
1. There is often obsolete knowledge gained in (initial) training. In The Netherlands, but also
applies to many other countries, you become a school administrator after you work as a
teacher or team leader for many years and then somehow in the second half of your career
you make the step towards becoming a school leader. Sometimes you get a short training for
it, but quite often the training that you have got in the past is some while ago. And of course,
there are some advancements/progress in what we know of what are some effective
, practices. So, sometimes school leaders simply aren’t aware of what is a more effective
activity compared to other activities that they are doing.
2. We have a lot of traditions. Sometimes they are long-standing and quite often they are never
proven. One of the things in Dutch education is that if you talk to members of a school board
or to school administrators about performance-based pay (i.e. well-performing teachers are
paid more than teachers who perform less well), without a few exceptions you will hear from
those school board members or school administrators that it isn’t a very effective way of
stimulating teachers. Their argument quite often is that it doesn’t work that way; a good
teacher is not stimulated by money and if some other teachers sees that a colleague gets a
better salary it doesn’t really stimulate them to work better or to try to copy some of the
things that the better-paid teacher does. And indeed, if we look at the literature, there is not
that much evidence that performance-based systems work. But it seems, especially in some
of the states in the US, but also in Israel for example, there are some examples of that
performance-based systems may work. But because we have that tradition/believe that it
doesn’t work, we aren’t even open for maybe specific forms of performance-based systems
that we might use to improve the functioning of teachers.
3. Patterns gained from experience. We all have some experience and quite often that
experience is very valuable because it provides us with a lot of context-specific information
on the school or in the context in which we are working. And I will argue later on that it is
also very important that school administrators rely on that experience in judging all kind of
evidence that they get from the outside world. But at the same time, sometimes those
experiences somehow mislead us. We all know e.g. that in Dutch primary education the
teachers quite often have a very good sense of what competences of specific students are
before they before they enter secondary education, but in some cases if we use an objective
test it is different from the experience/judgement of that particular teacher. That may have
to do with prejudice, but it’s quite often the case that the teacher has 25-30 children in his
classroom and some of those children more prominent than other children. For some of the
children it is quite easy for the teacher to get an adequate picture of what the talents of that
student are, but for some of the children that might be more difficult. So then we can use
more objective data to fill in that gap that we cannot capture by our own experience.
4. Sometimes teachers are inclined to use a method that they are more skilled in or that more
or less fits their own framework. I once saw a study where there was a declining enrolment
of students in the school and they got some very interesting reactions from several school
members. For example the school leader thought it was mainly a marketing problem; that
the school wasn’t able to transmit the values and advantages of the school to parents and
students, so they would have to make a better perspective and be more active towards
parents and students in transmitting knowledge about the school. But teachers didn’t think
of it as a marketing problem. They thought we have declining student enrolment because the
facilities in our school are less than in some other schools, so in fact we should get more
money or better equipment in our classrooms to make education more interesting to our
students. If we do so, all kinds of students and parents will decide to come to our school
instead of other schools. That is at least one example of how the framework or your direct
work context might influence how you look at certain problems. And you could see that as
how your own framework/reference influences how you perceive certain problems.
5. Sometimes books are based on all kind of knowledge on educational administration, but they
often only highlight certain features of that very broad field of educational administration.
What we saw in a study that we did in primary education in Northern provinces of The
Netherlands a few years ago, was that some schools for example used Covey’s 7 habits of
