EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP - HOW HEADTEACHERS OF POLISH SCHOOLS UNDERSTAND LEADERSHIP

The last decade seems to be the period of growing interest in educational leadership. Numerous authors claim that educational management theory and practice need to rethink managerial approaches and take into account the issue of leadership in order to understand properly the nature of educational organizations. They also claim that there is a need for a definition of educational leadership different from the existing attempts in general management theory. Such educationally specific understanding of leadership has to take into account basic educational values as founding stones of such understanding of leadership. The proposed paper tries to describe attempts to transfer the paradigms of leadership from general management theory to educational field as well as gives a proposal of educationally specific definition of leadership, describing its main characteristics and showing educational specificity built around core educational values such as learning and development. The main aim of the paper is to present the results of the research that was carried out with participation of randomly selected group of active school heads from more than 200 Polish schools. It was carried out in 2013 using the method of interview. The research was focused on school heads' understanding of educational leadership. The results show how different are those understandings and raise the question: how can they be changed in order to support educational changes and reforms focused on transformation of educational systems into more democratic ones. The main problem that can be seen is the dominant existence of managerial thinking about educational management and leadership among those taking part in the research that can be an important obstacle in the attempts of school leadership transformation and the reform of Polish schools.