Leadership Learning in Initial Teacher Education (LLITE)

This report provides results from the establishment of a new collaborative working group of three colleagues 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).