CGS Brown Bag Lecture Series

Marsha Modeste, Penn State

In 2014, the Danish Ministry of Education launched a set of policy reforms with the overarching aim of improving the quality of its public schools. Through the reforms, the Ministry sought to augment external legitimacy from a range of communities; including, international organizations like the OECD, and Danish parents. While specific to the Danish context, these reforms are not unlike the education reforms other nations, particularly Western nations like the US, have implemented in recent years. Furthermore, the Ministry has coupled these reforms with changing expectations for the focus and nature of the work that school leaders, teachers, pædagogs, and other staff take up in Danish primary and lower secondary schools.

In this talk, Modeste will present some preliminary findings on the differences and similarities between Denmark and the US in the area of teacher and staff leadership using the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL), an online formative assessment and multi-rater evaluation of leadership practices distributed in schools. This analysis takes a comparative approach and, through factor analysis, examines the relationship between teacher and staff leadership practice and the professional learning occurring within and across Danish and US schools.