**4. The concept of school culture**

their current environment. To Counts [22], a progressive educator in the 1930s, the purpose of school was to equip individuals with necessary skills to participate in the social life of their community and to change their social order as desired. Adler [24] had an idealistic and egitarian vision that all education should centrally prepare students so that they could earn a good

Rotherham and Willingham [25] states that the *new* in the twenty-first century is the extent to which economic and social changes require that collective and individual success depend on having adaptable skills. A starting point for exploring potential educational future is to identify the key variables of the development of twenty-first century educational policy and leadership [26]. If we intend to establish equitable and effective public education systems, skills that have previously been limited and reserved for a few, will become universal. Schools must be more deliberate in teaching skills like critical thinking, collaboration and problem solving. Another crucial prerequisite is a deliberative and future-focused school leadership.

A hallmark of good educational leaders is how they succeed in developing strategic visions for their institutions [10]. Then they can act as role models for students and teachers and contribute to an effective and attractive environment that is conducive to learning. A challenge for every school leader is to maintain the balance between pursuing long-term development goals and adapting them to a rapidly changing reality. The values to which the school community has committed itself should prove to be viable. Reform policies can only be coherently integrated into the life of schools and classrooms if a capacity building approach for professional school leadership pays attention to topics like; reducing complexity, coordination, learning context, energization, connections for learning and system-wide change. The knowledge, skills and commitment of teachers as well as the quality of school leadership, are important factors in achieving high quality educational outcomes. The ability to inspire students as

role models has an undoubtedly positive impact on young people's future [27, 28, 29].

For this reason, it is essential to ensure that those recruited to teaching and school leadership posts are well suited for their professional practice and provide a high standard of initial education and continuing professional development for teaching staff at all levels [30]. This will contribute to enhancing the status and attractiveness of the educational profession [8]. Counts [22] argues that school leaders, by increasing their courage, intelligence and vision

Twenty-first century school leaders need to recognize and concretize given goals and negotiate different interests, needs and requirements in the school organization. When school leaders design and construct the content of a development process in a dialog with students and teachers, the opportunity for organizational learning and sustainable school development will increase [8]. School leadership linked to the achievement of learning in organizations will play an important role for development and change of the school organization's culture. Organizational learning in schools is essential for continuous development and renewal from

living, enjoy full lives and participate and contribute to a democratic society.

**3. Active and visible leadership**

44 Open and Equal Access for Learning in School Management

might become a social force of magnitude.

The explicit concept of culture reflects the norms and values of an individual group. Norms are a mutual sense of what is "right or wrong". Values identify what is "good and bad" in relation to the ideals shared by a group of people [5]. According to Parsons [32], culture is a system with its own logic, finding its objective reality in the interactively and coordinated subjective representations of actors and their ability to deal with what helps them to construct and use the rules that help them with their operations. Human behavior has multiple systems of influence, ranging from biological and psychological factors to social, environmental and cultural values [33].

Sträng [14] argues that schools are complex establishments whose activities are affected by the shared role of the school as an organization as well as a social institution. Berg [34] has a neo rationalistic view on schools as institutions, established within society by an affinity group in order to fulfill particular interests. The school organization is additionally under the pressure of formal and informal control mechanisms, codified and manifested in the local school culture [8].

Explaining the concept of a school culture is difficult, although there is a general agreement that a satisfactory definition of culture should be attainable within the framework of an elaborated theory of social action [35]. Hodgkinson [13] argues that the individual experience of value can never repeat itself but the larger culture itself changes and transvalues values all the time, which makes organizations always culturally determined. The interaction between overlapping systems will have a significant effect on individuals. Understanding these interactions will provide a better understanding of factors that might lead to development and to failure, for example, in a process of changing school leadership. At the same time, the different systems are not mainly interacting toward or opposed to a certain goal, but overlap and intertwine in complex dynamic and contingent relationships [13]. The school leader may continuously renew and modify the strategies of collective involvement and choice from teachers and students, inextricably interwoven with values.

Simultaneous studies of multiple levels from different perspectives clarify questions of decisions and enforcement in complex organizations. An important part of school leadership is to facilitate shared understandings about the school organization and its activities and goals that can undergird a sense of common purpose and vision with the education [11]. Cultural analysis provides a brief basis of knowledge that is useful for the school leader's capability of decision making and developing a new kind of leadership. Schools are sites for ongoing organization, in addition to being institutions with the core business of teaching. The improvement of student learning cannot be an exclusive task for students and teachers but a shared responsibility even for the school leaders. In a formal learning environment, the training or learning department sets the goal and objectives, while informal learning means the learners themselves sets the goal and objectives [36]. Informal student learning is often defined as mainly spontaneous and incidental. It may occur as individual reflections on teaching or interactions with other students in the classroom or in school hallways, cafeteria and other places for learning and training [37].

One can say they function as a kind of "black box", in search of better understanding of educational processes [46]. The interpretation of the letters can lead to different understandings of what actually happens and provide important knowledge of the values and motivations

The School Leader as Ideal Type: How to Reconcile Max Weber with the Concept of School Culture

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.71197

47

Research of this kind cannot and should perhaps not even be value free, but it is helpful to have the values brought out explicitly [47]. Paying attention to factors like structural form, word choice and phrasing, the students described implicitly how they positioned themselves as learners. In some letters, the students indicted learning without explicitly stating it as such, for example, by saying, "I like to be doing, I am finding. I love to learn". Statements such as these showed that the students positioned themselves in a learning process more than taking active steps to learning [37]. Critics have argued that writers create the lives they write about [48]. Common to all perspectives on auto ethnographic strategies for research is the assumption that people enter into conversations with certain goals. Even when they cooperate to provide information for mutual understanding, they attempt to attain certain personal goals. The current educational goals did not seem to make the students planned communicators, merely spontaneous writers with a more or less clear sense of what they wished to obtain [49]. The opportunity for students to write an open letter to their teachers and the school leader about their experiences of learning perceives rather as the trading of resources of attention, concern,

Qualitative research methods traditionally contain coding and particular data analysis strategies [43]. To achieve empirical soundness a systematic process of interpretation and representation exposed the statements from the letters in three categories of students' self-perceived attitudes and opportunities for learning. The categories were security*, teaching, motivation and meaningfulness*. The analysis identified denotative and connotative meanings with connections of larger structures, forged out of the empirical material [8, 49, 51] When describing their experiences, the students expressed both emotional and analytical qualities, from "emotional learners" [37] to a higher degree of reflecting on teachers' role for students' learning over time. The relations with teachers responded in turn with the students' different types of social and professional need. According to Ref. [52] the interpretation of narratives will tend to reflect values connected to the cultural contexts where they appear. Autoethnographic researchers must anticipate how the expressed emotions may be subjective in data coding.

First grade students looked at security as mainly a personal matter. In their letters, they express the good feeling of waking up in the morning without anxiety and go to school without being unwelcome or unwanted. They describe the importance of feeling comfortable before meeting other students, teachers, environments and lessons. It is important to be yourself and talk to

among students in secondary school and their approach to learning.

support and other personal needs in an effort to achieve their goals [50].

**6. Results**

**7. Security**

everyone in the school without fear.

Contemporary research notes that school leadership is second only to teaching in schoolrelated factors in its impact on student learning, according to evidence compiled and analyzed by the authors [12]. Changing a school's solid cast and loosening up fixed patterns of relations between actors on different levels demand much work on a long-term basis. A natural first step is to identify the concept of the local school culture and its impact in relation to the school's internal governance and the degree of self-renewal capacity [38].
