Networked Leadership Roles for School Leaders' Work with Schools' Digitalization

A Comparative Investigation

Abstract

School leaders are responsible for creating the right conditions for schools and, through dialogue, understanding schools' needs and prerequisites, distributing resources, and following up on the schools' development. School leaders are also important for supporting schools in realizing a top-down policy. One example of such policy is the digitalization policy aimed at implementing digital technologies in teaching, where strong school leaders is necessary. Thus, leadership is a crucial ingredient for a good digitalization process in schools. However, there is little written about school leaders' practice. Further, school leaders' practice may contain more networked leadership despite the fact that they often assumed a top-down leadership role, which would be especially clear when viewed through a networked learning perspective. Further, different countries have different school systems where the school leaders may be referred to by different names in their roles for supporting the schools.
A common area in need of support is the digitalization of schools. Students may not get the skills they need in the future as challenges to ensure the advancement is enacted continue to broaden. Thus, it may be interesting to delve deeper into the structures of countries that may differ in general structure for school systems. In conjunction with a networked collaboration between the University of Brazil and Mid Sweden University, connections between the school systems in both countries will be made in this paper to distinguish parts of their leadership strategy for the digitalization of schools. Leadership within schools is closely connected to the pedagogical implementation of technologies. In one dimension of school leadership related to digitalization, there exists a notable aspect known as the networked dimension, which is intricately linked to assessment policies and roles associated with ICT. Given the assumption for the networked dimension, this paper is written for two primary purposes. The first purpose is to investigate the networked leadership dimension according to various leadership roles for school leaders' digitalization work. The second purpose is to prepare a comparative study of the school systems of Brazil and Sweden by reviewing literature that analyses these regions.
Thus, in this short paper, we assume that school leaders' practice when compared across two countries different in size from a networked leadership perspective may comprise a research gap, indicating the relevancy of a literature review investigation of this gap.