Browsing by Author "Kotonen, Emilia"

The purpose of this study is to research the views of kindergarten Directors on pedagogical leadership, the realisation of pedagogical leadership and the challenges of pedagogical lea-dership in everyday life. Pedagogical leadership is a broad concept, and its implementation in everyday life is challenging from time to time. There is a lot of professional discussion about the adequacy of time resources and how the pedagogical leadership is perceived in early childhood education organizations. The pedagogical leadership of the kindergarten Di-rector is relevant to children's learning and well-being. The Director's work is not merely about recording the numbers, but rather more about developing of the work and activities of a kindergarten. The study data was collected with an electronic questionnaire delivered through social me-dia during the autumn of 2019. The survey was shared in a Facebook group called Early Childhood Education Teachers. Nearly all the respondents were Directors of different size kindergartens from the Helsinki metropolitan area. The analysis of the responses was car-ried out by gathering the results into themes. The analysis began by summarising and simp-lifying the received answers. Colour codes were used to tag responses, which helped to find similarities between the responses. After summarising and simplifying the responses, the in-formation was searched for concept keywords that were then charted into a table. During the charting the trending concepts were given common themes. Pedagogical leadership was felt to be about the implementation of Early Childhood Educati-on Plan and making it familiar to people. Pedagogical leadership was also seen to be about having dialogs about the objectives, design and evaluation of pedagogics. Pedagogic lea-dership is also about having the presence of the Director in the unit, providing support to employees, decision-making on a wider scale and visioning of the operations. Pedagogical leadership was achieved in practice through discussions and effective structures, such as meetings and maintaining a pedagogical perspective. The met challenges in pedagogical leadership were related to HR- management topics, such as employee turnover, different levels of competence and substitute arrangements. There were also challenges felt in the time and workload management of Directors. There was a lot of work in relation to the time available.