Empirical Findings on the Career Paths of Aspiring Elementary School Teachers

This is a study about teacher careers to elementary school principals. The aim of this contribution is to reconstruct the strategies guiding aspiring elementary school principals in their careers and to analyse those in order to answer the question: How do elementary school teachers manage to become principals? To obtain qualitative data elementary school teachers and new principals in Schleswig-Holstein were interviewed. An ethnographic approach consisting of observational research in qualification measures for principals enabled further insights. The analysis of the empirical data was accomplished using the documentary method and the theoretical concepts of Bourdieu and Goffman. The different forms and paradigms of inner orientation of the status passage into the position of principals are analysed and condensed into types.