Sessions
Duration: 60 minutes. (Speech 30 minutes, discussion 20 minutes, results by a moderator 10 min)
Session A. The impact of a principal in strengthening school culture.
Speaker: Suzanna Hitrec
Moderator: Ian Bauckham
School culture reflects the heart, the soul and the spirit of a school. It is ‘that something’ in the air and in the people what makes a difference between schools. Culture is built by people and their actions. Principals manage processes and lead people. They shape school culture by everything they do, subconsciously or strategically. After a school gets a new principal, visible changes can soon be noticed in development and some later in the behaviour of staff, teachers and students.
Session B. The democratic and emotional aspects of school leadership and the improvement of teaching and learning outcomes.
Speaker: Josef Huber
Moderator: Ciaran McCormack
Education needs to be governed by a vision of the society in which we would like to live, and in which we would like to see our children grow up … The fundamental principles and values of the organisation - democracy and democratic culture, rule of law and the respect for human rights and human dignity - need to be reflected not only in education policy, but they need to influence the day-to-day practice of education in the classrooms across the continent … They need to inspire a culture of living democracy in all its aspects intellectual, democratic, emotional, caring …
Session C. Good practices A: Promoting cooperation in schools. (panel discussion)
Speakers: Ari Pokka, Toomas Kruusimägi, Androulla Othonos - Zachariou
Moderator: Jean-Luc Garcia
Recent years have seen considerable efforts in many countries to improve the quality of schooling. Targets are set, new approaches to curricula, assessment, teaching and management are introduced, but still there remains widespread dissatisfaction with progress. Meanwhile researchers continue to pursue better understandings of how improvement can be achieved...
Session D: Community and parental involvement in building the school of the future.
Speaker: Panayiotis Stavrinides
Moderator: Manuel Perello
Recent findings from empirical studies show that the school processes can no longer be addressed within the narrow scope of students’ acquiring new information on a number of academic subjects. Even though this remains one dimension of educational practice - and outcome - the community of educators, psychologists, and policy makers are now seeing school - and education in general - from a much wider perspective... Read more ...
Session E. Distributed leadership: The role of school principals in a European perspective.
Speaker: Andreas Kythreotis
Moderator: Roy Tedscoe
The distribution of leadership among different people or groups at the school level is another key policy strategy for improving school leadership. The evidence shows that different staff in school and school boards participates in different ways in the roles and responsibilities and they can make difference to school outcomes.
Session F. Good practices B: School culture and teacher leadership. (panel discussion)
Speakers: Jaume Prat, Solveig Dahl, Georgia Pashiardi
Moderator: Antonello Giannelli
Often, one of the biggest challenges for school leaders is to establish partnerships outside the schools, to become engaged in activities beyond their schools, to reach out to their immediate environment, to articulate connections and to strengthen collaborations between the school and the outside world; in short, to build strategic alliances...
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Workshops
Duration: 60 minutes (15 minutes introduction by the Workshop leader, 35 minutes work in teams and 10 minutes results by the moderator of the workshop).
Workshop 1: Could the cooperation among the stakeholders contribute to improve student social behaviour?
Workshop Leader: Ton Duif
Moderator: Jukka Kuittinen
Cooperation between schools and stakeholders is absolute necessary to improve learning outcomes for students. Children live their lives in three areas: family, neighborhood or district and the school. Therefore it is important that parents, community and school must work together to achieve an attractive and challenging learning environment for children.
Workshop 2: How school leaders deal successfully with conflicts?
Workshop Leader: Nives Pockar
Moderator: Jens Nielsen
Nowadays we live in the world of conflicts; there are conflicts between the school students themselves, between students and teachers, between teachers, between students and school management, teachers and the school management, between parents and teachers, between parents and between the leadership and other employees as well as all listed above...
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Workshop 3: How do you make sure that all students achieve their talents and abilities?
Workshop Leader: Margret Roessler
Moderator: Lars Flodin
The theme of this workshop is focussing on the individual learner with both all his/her abilities, gifts, talents and learning disabilities or failings. The diversity of individual learning dispositions and ambitions has to be met by the school.
School can make available a variety of differentiated offers for all students in several areas. Three of them are proposed to be discussed in this workshop
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Workshop 4: How can we make the job of the school leader more attractive?
Workshop Leader: Burkhard Mielke
Moderator: Jean-Louis Buannic
In times where school leadership is more important than ever before, there is a deep crisis with less and less people showing up for leadership and at the same time many active school heads retire earlier for health reasons and as flight from the stress of leading school. This has to do with the dramatically changed conditions of school leadership and school realty today...
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Workshop 5: What is the impact of values based education on school improvement?
Workshop Leaders: Neil Hawkes and Jane Cross
Moderator: Jorgen Christiansen
This workshop will be interactive and engaging. It will stimulate discussion and be challenging. It will draw on the experience of the success of numerous Values-based Schools throughout the world.
Workshop 6: How do we reach a balance between students’ academic achievement and their personal development?
Workshop Leader: Panayiotis Antoniou
Moderator: Jan Morsink
In several countries there is a growing emphasis on other types of goals apart from the traditional cognitive goals of education in schools. Particularly, schools have to deal with objectives in the field of societal and democratic values, social skills, attitudes and also personal competences such as critical reflection.
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