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1.
In this article we discuss students’, teachers’ and school principals’ perceptions of democratic school leadership reforms in Kenya. The article is based on a study that was conducted in two phases. In phase one (conducted between September and December 2007), interviews were undertaken with 12 school principals in which understandings of democratic school leadership were explored. These data were then used to develop a rationale for selecting the case schools. The second phase (conducted between January and April 2008) was an in‐depth case study of two schools. The findings reveal that school principals have made efforts to inculcate democratic school leadership by involving teachers in decision making on school matters. The principals also allow students to participate in matters such as election of prefects and holding class and house meetings. However, most teachers and principals do not support what they referred to as ‘full democracy’ for students and instead prefer what they called ‘partial democracy’ based on historical and cultural factors.  相似文献   

2.
By the year 2000, the management of education in England had lost much of its capacity to ensure the commitment of headteachers and teachers. As market forces engendered competition among schools, the bureaucratic monitoring of schools by agencies of government increased on the grounds that objective and comparable data about schools should be made public so that parents could express a rational choice of school. Levels of stress increased; workloads intensified. Thereafter, a series of ‘softer’ approaches emerged in order to deal with this. They have coalesced around the concept of ‘leadership’, particularly distributed leadership and, more recently, emotional leadership and spiritual leadership. Distributed leadership draws on socio-cultural activity theory; emotional leadership is informed by positive psychology; spiritual leadership by eastern mysticism. Each has its advocates and its critics. At issue, however, is not so much their relative effectiveness but rather it is to relate them to the economic, cultural and political trends which have allowed them to emerge. These ‘soft’ normative leadership approaches have not supplanted a digitally-informed rational bureaucratic form in education; they are supplementing it. The theoretical stance taken falls within the field of critical theory.  相似文献   

3.
Barker argues that in England under New Labour, school leaders and teachers have been ‘bastardised’ and suggests that the situation in 2010, with a general election afforded an opportunity in education policy for the ‘pendulum to swing’. In this article, the key points about ‘bastard Leadership’ are briefly summarised. The article then develops a view of schools as sites of complexity and ‘wickedity’ as an alternative to the linear reductionist approaches of managerialists. These two perspectives present the extremes of a spectrum against which the trajectory of school leadership can be viewed as it emerges from the New Labour years and is now being developed by the Coalition Government. Evidence from ministerial speeches and the Coalition Government's flagship White Paper, The Importance of Teaching, are used to examine key issues of freedom and trust, reducing bureaucracy and increasing autonomy for schools as ways of exploring the extent to which the new government's policies on school leadership are, or are not, moving away from those of their New Labour predecessors.  相似文献   

4.
Using a mixed methods design, the researchers investigated understandings and practices of democracy across Round Square, a worldwide network of 180 schools committed to shared values. An extensive questionnaire received 4020 student and 863 teacher returns; additionally, leaders, students, and parents from five case study schools on different continents were interviewed. All stakeholder groups were found to value democracy highly, but saw its implementation in their schools as challenging and limited. While staff and parents espoused more holistic understandings of democratic practices and cultures, students focused primarily on systems of election and representation. A philosophically informed framework for developing ‘responsible leadership’, and a values-led approach to school improvement, are offered to deepen students’ democratic agency through informed, active, and reflective engagement with people, situations, and curricula.  相似文献   

5.
Rafael Mitchell 《Compare》2019,49(1):98-114
Recent policies in Ethiopia put students at the heart of school improvement through structures for peer leadership and school-level consultation, evaluation and decision-making. This article draws on an ethnographic study of a government school in Tigray, Ethiopia, to explore how the participation and influence of students is achieved and mediated by structures and processes in school. Three key contexts of student participation are explored: positions of peer leadership (monitor, ‘one-to-five’ network leader); public evaluation sessions (gim gima); and the Parent Student Teacher Association (PSTA). Recommendations are made for sharing and strengthening democratic practices and for future research.  相似文献   

6.
A central problem for school leadership in the United States is to create settings in which success for students motivates teachers. Meeting this objective is becoming more difficult as teachers, except the most brilliant, struggle to cope with the diversity of students in a changing socio-economic climate and a context in which there is a ‘policy vacuum’, an unclear articulation of policy issues and choices, and inconsistency in policy initiatives. This is where school leaders must step in. Improvement in classrooms rarely occurs without strong leadership from building and district leaders. The fact that many school leaders in the USA were trained to exhibit authoritative rather than democratic leadership has often led to ‘democratic minimalism’, where the emphasis is on statutory fairness and majority rule, but not on full involvement of affected parties, such as teachers, students, and parents. The issues in contemporary leadership in areas of disadvantage are illustrated through the experience of one Minnesota elementary|spagf|ro|epagf| |spagf|it|epagf|school principal, and the wider implications for school leaders are discussed.  相似文献   

7.
This article reports on the findings from a study into high-performing leadership teams in English primary schools. The schools, in the sample, received ‘outstanding’ Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) grades overall, and for leadership and management, in their most recent school inspection. The evidence suggests that developing a successful primary school leadership team takes time, commitment and continuity. The development of leaders requires a deliberate approach to build individual capacity and team unity. Effective team working takes time to develop and that ‘quick fix’ solutions to inadequate team work are inappropriate.  相似文献   

8.
The paper draws on critical discourse analysis to examine and discuss some of the key developments in the governing of education in Scotland since the election of the Scottish National Party (SNP) government in May 2007. It analyses these developments, drawing on a study of key policy texts and suggests that discourse analysis has much to contribute to the understanding of the governing strategy of the minority SNP administration as reflected in its education policy. We suggest that there is a self-conscious strategy of ‘crafting the narrative’ of government that seeks to discursively re-position ‘smarter Scotland’ alongside small, social democratic states within the wider context of transnational pressures for conformity with global policy agendas. Thus the paper connects to current debates on the relationship between an emergent global education policy ‘field’ and the capacity of ‘local’ contexts to develop and sustain particular, embedded assumptions and practices.  相似文献   

9.
This study explores the meaning and competencies of ‘research leadership’ in the African context and investigates strategies for developing it. Data for the study were gathered through an online survey that targeted recipients of research grants/support from key research funders to selected African institutions. The recipients of these grants were either research leaders or team members. The study employs a mixed methodology approach with empirical data drawn from focus group discussions and online surveys of English-speaking research leaders and research teams whose research work was supported by the selected funding institutions. In line with literature of leadership styles in Africa, our results suggest that preferred research leadership style for African researchers is different in some ways, especially with its attention to the ‘human touch’. Respondents preferred ‘people/relationship orientated’, ‘task­orientated’ and ‘democratic/participative’ styles of leadership, all of which have strong elements of Ubuntu (humaneness). The study also showed that leadership development for many in Africa involves mostly ‘learning by doing’ and informal mentoring, and less formal training opportunities. We explore policy implications of our findings with reference to research leadership development in African institutions, paying particular attention to challenges faced by female research leaders, and stress that research leadership development in Africa must be seen as a long-term and continuous activity and calls for more formal leadership development opportunities to complement the existing informal approaches.  相似文献   

10.
In the unfolding Maltese education scenario of decentralization and school networking, I explore distributed leadership as it occurs at the college level through the leaders’ narrative and performance in an investigation of the power relations among the different-tiered leaders. This article uses data from the case study of a Maltese college consisting of four primary and three secondary schools. Using these data from an ongoing doctoral study, all subjected to narrative and discourse analysis, I adopt the stance of a ‘story teller’, as I craft a narrative from the data to represent a ‘play of voices’. Foucault’s theories of power, governmentality, discourse and subjectivation are used to explore the unfolding of power relations. Analysis reveals a dichotomy between the leaders’ narrative of distributed leadership and their performance of it. There is the presence of a raging battle among the discourses of collegiality and isolationism, through the discourse of distributed leadership, and within the discourse of educational leadership itself. Distributed leadership is a challenge to perform at the college level; with resistance being demonstrated in overt or more subtle ways along the different hierarchies, although power does circulate. This article contributes to educational leadership literature with regard to the power relations among top educational leaders in a networked school setting.  相似文献   

11.
In August 2008, the OECD published Improving School Leadership Volume 1: Policy and Practice and Improving School Leadership Volume 2: Case Studies on System Leadership. The main objectives of these reports were to compare school leadership policy between participating countries and to identify innovative practices and options for policy development. As part of the preparation for the final report, a background report on school leadership in the Republic of Ireland was prepared by the Department of Education and Science in 2007. This report will be analysed in this paper in order to identify the degree to which the background report achieved the objective of capturing the current and emerging issues facing school leaders in Ireland. A critique of the ‘one size fits all’ approach to policy in the area of school leadership detailed in Volume 1 of the OECD report follows. This critique contests that some of the policy recommendations contained in the report are based on a narrow and selective range of supporting evidence. A number of these are a cause of some concern particularly when considered in the context of specific features of the schools in the Republic of Ireland.  相似文献   

12.
This article reports a 3-year case study of a primary school in England, in which a recently appointed principal attempted to build ‘collegial professional autonomy’ (Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 2 , 2015, 20) within a push to improve students’ progress and attainment. The research examined the tensions between staff who embraced the principal's agenda for collegially agreed change, and whose students’ academic progress and performance improved over a 3-year consecutive period when measured in terms of students’ entry-level attainment and socio-economic factors, and staff who asserted their right to ‘individual professional autonomy’ and whose students’ academic progress and attainment declined. The research: (i) challenges claims that reform necessarily results in school cultures of compliancy, de-professionalisation and the technicisation of teaching; (ii) raises issues concerning the pedagogical leadership of principals in a devolved, ‘self-governing’ school system; and (iii) questions teachers’ entitlements to individual professional autonomy where this is associated with students’ continuing academic underperformance.  相似文献   

13.
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14.
The Teachers of Promise study has followed the work histories of 57 primary and secondary teachers who had been identified at the beginning of their third year of teaching as having the potential to make a significant contribution to the profession. Using data from surveys and interviews, this paper reports on what sustained or inhibited their initial commitment to and enthusiasm for ‘making a difference’, six years later, both in the classroom and in broader school leadership roles. Satisfaction with their day-to-day experiences in their schools was a particularly strong driver of teachers’ career decisions over time. Thirty-four teachers responded to survey items that were used to identify three different groups of teachers: a group of 10 primary school teachers with the highest levels of job satisfaction who were ‘fulfilling their promise’; a group of 21 primary and secondary teachers who were ‘persevering and coping’; and three teachers who were ‘detached and disengaged’. The group with the highest levels of job satisfaction taught in primary schools where they felt respected and valued, and supported to develop their teaching and leadership expertise. School leadership practices and school cultures in the other two groups diminished teachers’ overall job satisfaction and contribution to collective knowledge building in their schools. Almost all of the teachers had retained their commitment to students, to their current schools and to teaching as a career, including those with lower levels of satisfaction. Although these teachers reported ‘collegial’ relationships with their peers, individualistic school cultures, most often in secondary schools, impacted on their opportunities to learn with and from their colleagues. Few secondary school teachers felt appreciated, and included in school decision-making or had found it possible to combine high standards of classroom teaching with management responsibilities. The study indicates that while most promising teachers were still satisfied with teaching after nine years, relatively few were in schools where they were able to make the impact that had been predicted for them early in their careers.  相似文献   

15.
Teacher leadership lies at the heart of school improvement. Leadership development among beginning teachers, however, is often neglected. This paper examines the role of principal–teacher interactions in the leadership development of a group of beginning teachers. Using a case study design, interviews were conducted and documentary evidence was collected. The results showed that the beginning teachers were able to take up leadership roles in schools both formally and informally. Development of teacher leadership requires constructive and regular communication with teachers and encouragement of their continuing professional development. Three types of effects on principal–teacher interactions in developing teacher leadership were identified: ‘inspirational’, ‘empowering’ and ‘allowing’. These interaction patterns contribute to the international knowledge on teacher leadership development in schools. Implications for school leadership are discussed.  相似文献   

16.
Abstract

Building on the author’s previous work on Australian national cinema and schooling, this article explores the representation of the female primary school teacher in the television mini-series entitled Marion (Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1974). Using narrative analysis, it argues that this representation is disruptive of patriarchal gender relations, demonstrating ‘hyper-linear history’ where an exemplary relationship is created between the disrupted gender relations in school leadership in Australia caused by the Second World War and the ongoing disruption of gender relations occasioned by the second-wave women’s movement in the 1970s. This mini-series shows how history, gender and representation are mobilised to create a unique cinematic historical argument about the gendered nature of Australian primary school teaching. Finally, the article reflects briefly on the situatedness of this reading out of the Global South.  相似文献   

17.
This case study research found that the relational leadership and organisational culture at a public primary school situated in a high poverty location in South Australia was built upon the strength of the inter-relationships between the teachers, teachers and leadership, and between teachers and students. Supported by what we called ‘dynamic inter-relationships’ and a ‘commitment to ongoing growth’ manifesting as key themes across the qualitative survey data generated by the school’s participants, we found the individual strengths of staff served the ‘on-going formation of organisational life’. Cognisant of these disclosed relational underpinnings, the research provided recommendations to the school’s leadership team about how they could best progress their educational reform agenda. The findings affirmed an Appreciative Inquiry inspired approach designed for the research was ‘fit for purpose’ as it generated extensive qualitative data from the teachers and leaders, offering opportunity for deep interpretive analysis using hermeneutic methodology of the school’s relational leadership and organisational culture. The research findings were subsequently confirmed by the teachers and leaders through a dialogic presentation of the research findings as an accurate representation of the culture of their school.  相似文献   

18.
ABSTRACT

This article explores how a school’s decision to become co-operative affects its engagement relationships with students and parents. The findings stem from a wider study exploring approaches to engagement in a recently converted co-operative academy, a large secondary school in a northern English city. The article surfaces the possibilities and tensions that occur as the school seeks to reposition itself in the English education marketplace, with a co-operative model that explicitly sets out to promote mutualisation, not privatisation; ‘we’ rather than ‘me’. The process of becoming co-operative is examined by exploring the underlying purposes of the school’s engagement with students and parents and the relationships that emerge as a result. The study surfaces the issues faced as a co-operative school seeks to enact thicker, ‘collective forms’ of democratic engagement against a backdrop of English education policy based on individualistic notions of democracy as freedom of choice. The findings point to the need for a different policy understanding of school engagement, an understanding that suggests engagement is about the process of developing more equitable, collaborative relationships with stakeholders and rests on the repositioning of students, parents and community members – from ‘choosers’ and ‘consumers’ to a collective public in education.  相似文献   

19.
Responding to Thrupp's [2003. “The School Leadership Literature in Managerialist Times: Exploring the Problem of Textual Apologism.” School Leadership & Management: Formerly School Organisation 23 (2): 169] call for writers on school leadership to offer ‘analyses which provide more critical messages about social inequality and neoliberal and managerialist policies’ we use Foucault's [2000. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Power, edited by J. D. Faubion, 326–348. London: Penguin Books] theory of power to ask what lessons we might learn from the literature on school leadership for equity. We begin by offering a definition of neoliberalism; new managerialism; leadership and equity, with the aim of revealing the relationship between the macropolitical discourse of neoliberalism and the actions of school leaders in the micropolitical arena of schools. In so doing, we examine some of the literature on school leadership for equity that post-dates Thrupp's [2003. “The School Leadership Literature in Managerialist Times: Exploring the Problem of Textual Apologism.” School Leadership & Management: Formerly School Organisation 23 (2): 149–172] analysis, seeking evidence of critical engagement with/resistance to neoliberal policy. We identify three approaches to leadership for equity that have been used to enhance equity in schools internationally: (i) critical reflection; (ii) the cultivation of a ‘common vision’ of equity and (iii) ‘transforming dialogue’. We consider if such initiatives avoid the hegemonic trap of neoliberalism, which captures and disarms would be opponents of new managerial policy. We conclude by arguing that, in spite of the dominance of neoliberalism, head teachers have the power to speak up, and speak out, against social injustice.  相似文献   

20.
Spain is, together with Portugal, the only OECD country where school principals are democratically elected from the teaching staff of each primary and secondary school by a School Council, where all members of the school community are represented. While this unique feature of the Spanish system entails many promises in terms of deep democracy and, equally important, the potential legitimacy of change promoted by school leaders, the reality seems to be somewhat less romantic. This paper explores the limitations and constraints faced by school principals in Spain to actually perform their role as school leaders in primary and secondary schools. Based on a major study that we carried out for the National Institute for Quality and Evaluation (INCE) in 2002, involving more than 20,000 questionnaires and 30 Focus Groups (with teachers, principals, school inspectors, administrators, education experts and parents), the paper deals with the impact of leadership on school improvement and change, especially as far as teaching and learning processes are concerned. Despite their democratic legitimacy, or perhaps precisely because of its unexpected effects, the elected principal in Spain faces constraints which de facto position himself or herself between a practice of permanent transaction with colleagues and the mounting pressure of transformation and accountability coming from outside the school. Results from this research suggest that such constraints are determining that the practice of school leadership in Spain is management and maintenance-oriented rather than change-oriented, thus casting doubts about the very model of school leadership.  相似文献   

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