Roman Dorczak

Author raises the issue of specificity of educational leadership trying to show that such specificity has to be based on central value of educational organizations. In educational context such central value should be individual human development. Paper describes different ways of understanding leadership and educational leadership present in literature and gives some postulates how educational leadership can be defi ned, proposing to call such type of leadership a developmental leadership. A description of such type of leadership and conditions of its introduction to education are the main aims of the paper.

Background. The leadership concept seems to be one of the most promising for attempting to understand and develop the nature of management in the public sector and especially in the sphere of educational organizations such as schools. It is also gradually becoming one of the important issues in recent reforms of educational systems. The problem is that there are different paradigms of thinking about leadership and that they lead to quite different practical applications. In that context it is essential to develop knowledge about ways of thinking and understanding of leadership concepts among those involved in educational management as this can be a crucial factor contributing to the effectiveness of reforms introduced into that domain of the public sector.
Research aims. The main aim of the presented research was to identify ways Polish school head teachers think about leadership and compare it with the results of a different study carried out on an international group of students involved in special courses on educational leadership especially designed to develop a new understanding of leadership.
Method. Research was based on Avery’s (2004) typology of four types of leadership: (a) classical, (b) transactional, (c) visionary and (d) organic. Author used a questionnaire designed using descriptions of four types of leadership that consisted of 15 questions concerning different aspects of leadership in schools as organizations. The research group consisted of 120 randomly selected groups of school head teachers from different types of Polish schools located all over the country.
Key findings. Analysis of the collected data shows that the classical paradigm of thinking about leadership is the most frequently practiced among Polish school head teachers and the organic paradigm the least frequent. A comparison of the Polish group results with the international study shows the opposite results. It was also interesting that quite a big group of participants of the Polish study answered in such a complex way that their thinking was classified as “mixed paradigm”.

Specificity of educational management — individual development as a core value
Paper tries to show the specificity of management in education as a separate domain. It postulates to built that specifi city finding core values that help to distinguish management in education form other types of management. It then points out at human individual development as core educational value that can be taken as the basis in the process of building the understanding of management in education as specific domain. Main part of the paper describes three different ways of understanding development in developmental and educational psychology and practical consequences for educational management that are connected with those different understandings.

Cooperation of schools and social services in process of coping with difficult situations

Paper show the importance of cooperation in dealing with difficult situations schools face. Presented research carried out with participation of 20 secondary schools shows types of difficult situations schools face, kind of social services schools cooperate with in dealing with those situations and also tries to describe different types of cooperation