Summary
Titel: The new classroom leadership in dialogic teaching – coaching between management and leadership in primary and lower secondary school.
Theme and aim
The overriding theme of this thesis is to locate the right balance between management and leadership for teachers in the Danish primary and lower secondary school (folkeskolen). The challenge of combining present political demands on technical management and teachers´ desires of humanistic leadership, is here particularly examined in a view on the possibilities that occur when elements of systemic coaching is implemented in a classroom dialogue.
The immediate aim is to illustrate how coaching tools on one side can confirm the results of international educational research, from especially John Hattie and Andreas Helmke, and on the other side, how coaching can qualify the classroom leadership by supplying the teacher with a greater amount of reflective strategies. The long time aim is to make a contribution to an outspread understanding of the term classroom management by adding it a leadership dimension.
The aim arose from my experienced discrepancy in epistemology between the national curriculums intension of teachers giving knowledge to the pupils, and my own conception of learning as a construction by psychic or social systems, as they are described by Rasmussen and Qvortrup in their constructions of Niklas Luhmanns theory of autopoietic systems. This study is therefore concentrated on the following question:



Method
The question is addressed both theoretically and empirically. The main theories are - besides the already mentioned – Moltke & Molly’s views on systemic coaching, Aristoteles’ term fronesis and Ziehe’s description of the modern patterns of youth identity. Within these theoretic mainframes I analyze the key elements of coaching in the classroom, while I simultaneously relate to the alleged evidence of the recent educational research. My concrete method is inspired by Rasmussen’s operative constructivism which is based on his further development of especially Schleiermacher’s and Gadamar’s hermeneutics. In this way of thinking, there is no objective truth, and therefore the contents of this thesis must also be considered as my selected construction among other possible constructions within the horizon of the subject.
Results
The results of this thesis show that the management related part of coaching, where the teacher negotiates the goals and criteria for learning with the pupils in a contract, is in agreement with the results of efficiency in educational research. Furthermore, is the sound judgement and sense of occasion important, when the teacher continuously uses timeouts to adjust the goals of the lessons. Finally, the classroom leadership's ability to use assessment as a diagnostic instrument for noticing visible learning and developing teaching is of great importance.
In the classroom dialogue, mental terms as curiosity, hypothesizes, neutrality and disrespectfulness are shown to help the teacher carry out a more adequate and authentic way of teaching that goes beyond guessing and reproducing what’s on the teacher’s mind. Curiosity, in relation to the subject and the pupils, is an important ingredient in the teacher’s challenge of constantly creating helpful hypothesis for the participants’ engagement in the dialogue. In a successful classroom leadership, the teacher therefore must be neutral in his appearance and include every pupil’s point of view, so that everyone feels secure to speak their mind. An open-minded classroom environment - based on an emphatic and transparent leadership – is likely to supply the teacher with the best opportunities for disturbing the prejudiced minds of the youth as Ziehe sees them.
Perspective
In my opinion, our national curriculum demands other skills than measurable academic knowledge, and therefore it is not sufficient just to provide classroom management in our present schools. If teachers are limited to give knowledge to pupils as a planned epistemology transmission based on evident technologies, it is likely that they fail to promote the immeasurable values that express our characteristic humanistic culture. So to fulfill all the prescribed ends in basic school education, it is necessary to combine management with leadership. One of the ways to do so, is to implement coaching elements in classroom dialogues.