This report provides results from the establishment of a new collaborative working group of threecoll eagues from the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland who sought to conduct a study on leadership learning across three respective systems. The study titled “Leadership Learning in Initial Teacher Education (LLITE)” began on 1st September 2018. Leadership in this study refers to “the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives”
(Yukl, 2013, p.23). An important distinction is made between leadership and learning and learning for leadership (i.e., preparation for an imminent or future leadership role). Leadership learning is concerned with developing the professional knowledge and skills to make sense of the leadership that newly qualified and early career teachers will experience and see enacted in schools. It also aims to enable teachers to develop the leadership knowledge and skills necessary to practise leadership within their classrooms and in the wider school community as part of their collaborative professional
practice .(Hargreaves and O’Connor, 2017; King and Stevenson, 2017).
The study aimed to explore the extent to which leadership learning is embedded within the initial teacher education curricula and featured in national policies of the participating systems (i.e., Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland). The specific objectives are:
● to examine current models and approaches of leadership learning for teachers adopted in
each of the systems;
● to review curricula within initial teacher education programmes with a view to identifying
opportunities to further strengthen leadership learning for (pre-service) teachers;
● to provide a seminar for academic staff, school partners and initial teacher education
students in each of the participating systems to engender further debate and innovative
practice in relation to leadership learning; and
● to prepare a position paper for the policy, practice and academic communities and a planning
and delivery resource for teacher educators.