THE COMPETENCY OF BUILDING SCHOOL CULTURE FOCUSED ON INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT AND LEARNING FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF SCHOOL LEADERS

Two central values of educational leadership are students' individual development and students' learning. The necessity of building school culture that is focused on those values requires from school leaders two things: recognizing that the competency of building such culture is important and having such specific competencies. This paper presents the results of the research carried out during the project focused on designing a new model of school heads preparation in Poland that was carried out between 2013 and 2015 with the participation of several thousand of teachers and heads of Polish schools of different types. The first part of that research carried out with the participation of approximately 3000 school heads shows how they value the competency of building school culture focused on learning and development of students. The second part of the presented research, done with the participation of a smaller group of 120 heads, is focused on details of their understanding of specific aspects of such learning/development-focused school culture and competencies of school heads needed to build such culture.