On these pages the research group »Research on Teachers and Teacher Education« informs about current and finished research projects.
Project
Mapping the Formal and Real Structures of Educational Administration (REFORM)
Due to the legal and administrative embedding of schools and education, educational administration is a critical interface between policy and educational institutions. Although there is growing scientific interest in educational administration, little is known about its structures to date.
The research project "REFORM – Mapping the Formal and Real Structures of Educational Administration", located at the University of Konstanz and funded by the Robert Bosch Foundation, addresses this gap.
It is based on the organisational-theoretical distinction between formal-institutional structures (e.g., laws, regulations, and organisational charts) and informal-organisational structures (e.g., verbal agreements). With regard to the constitutional education mandate and the associated equality of opportunity requirement, this dichotomy, the project argues, must be supplemented by a third level specific to educational administration: real structures (e.g., routinised internal coordination processes, internal guidelines, and formalised responsibilities). These structures are opaque and thus informal to those outside the organisation, yet formalized and internally binding.
In line with this differentiation, the three-year project consists of two modules. The first module aims to capture the formal-institutional structure through document analyses and expert interviews. Building on this, Module II analyses the real organisational structures by adapting system-mapping procedures established in cognitive psychology. Due to the German federal states' sovereignty in education (Art. 7, para. 1, GG), the project examines two states as case studies. The data collection instruments for Module II are developed exploratively for each federal state.
Dr. Julia Hugo holds the project lead (PI).
Publications
Presentations
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