ABSTRACT
In leadership development programmes, case-based instruction is a widely used strategy for the professional development of school leaders, especially for the training of problem-solving skills and in contributions to work in groups, but hardly any studies have reported on the problem-solving work in groups of school leaders when case-based instruction is utilised as a strategy. In this chapter, I report on collaboration-oriented case-based instruction facilitated by instructors/researchers within a school leadership programme for Norwegian school leaders in which groups of principals do problem-solving work: working on a problem situation concerning school practices presented to them by a case. The setting studied may be seen as experimental, and video data constituted the basis for my analysis. My main finding is that case-based instruction is useful as a strategy for problem-solving training in teams of principals. The principals managed to activate and make representations of the case relevant in their work and to identify, frame and examine the challenges at hand. However, they strived to consecutively include these findings in their problem-solving trajectory, which resulted in them arriving on an open-ended resolution and direction, meaning that the course of action was not kept in an acceptable frame.
