Digital Transformation in Educational Management

Most schools already own some digital tools. What separates the schools where those tools change how the place runs from the ones where they gather dust in a shared drive is often not more hardware, but leadership with a plan behind it.

The week works from DigCompOrg, the European Commission’s framework for digitally competent schools, and SELFIE, the free tool built on it, and uses John Kotter’s eight-step change model to plan how a leader gets a staff room to change. You write one Digital Transformation Action Plan for your own school, or for the part you lead, one section a day.

• Monday — you check your school against DigCompOrg’s seven elements, choose three priorities, and plan how to run SELFIE back at your school.
• Tuesday — you look at what data your school already holds and build a simple dashboard from sample data.
• Wednesday — you write a vision in one sentence and a communication plan for staff, students and parents.
• Thursday — you plan the change: who is in your team, what will resist, a staff training roadmap, and a practised conversation with a hesitant colleague.
• Friday — you anchor the plan in a first 90 days, present it, and get structured feedback.

By Friday you have a written action plan with a change strategy attached, a first-90-days version small enough to start on your first Monday back, and a short list of what you can decide yourself and what you will ask others for. No real student or staff data is needed in the room.

DigCompOrg describes a digitally competent school through seven key elements: leadership and governance practices; teaching and learning practices; professional development; assessment practices; content and curricula; collaboration and networking; and infrastructure. It sets out fifteen sub-elements and 74 descriptors under them. The week uses the seven elements as a common vocabulary: on Monday you rate your school against them from what you already know, and each later day gives a section of your plan to one or two of them.

SELFIE is the tool the European Commission offers for the next step. It asks school leaders, teachers and students how technology is used in their school and produces a report on strengths and gaps. A full SELFIE run needs a coordinator, invitations to staff and students, and time to collect answers, so it cannot be done in a training room. The week therefore teaches you how to read a SELFIE report and how to plan one for your school, and treats running it as a step in your action plan.

Kotter’s model comes from management writing, not from research in schools, and the course uses it that way: as a checklist of eight things leaders often skip — creating urgency, building a guiding group, forming a vision, communicating it, removing obstacles, creating short-term wins, building on them, and anchoring the change in how the school works. It is not walked through in order; each step appears where it fits, and Friday is spent on the last two, which are the ones most plans forget.

The plan can be written for a whole school or for the part of it you lead — a department, a year group, a campus. Some of it you can decide yourself, some needs your deputy or leadership team, and some — budget, devices, a policy — you have to ask your school board, owner or municipality for; the plan template has a place for each. The plan is aligned with the Erasmus+ digital transformation priority and the EU Digital Education Action Plan.

Tools are a means. Dashboards can be built in a spreadsheet chart view or in a tool such as Looker Studio, on paper if you prefer, using a small synthetic data set. Platforms such as Google Workspace for Education or Microsoft 365 Education are discussed as the ecosystems many schools already use, not taught as software.

This course is about leading the change. Classroom digital skills for teachers are covered separately, in Digital Content Creation for the Classroom and The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Personalized Learning.