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1.
The pressures and influences experienced by school leaders as school policymakers, during the first responses to COVID-19 pandemic, made their task of interpreting, translating and implementing school guidance both difficult and stressful. During COVID-19 pandemic, school leaders faced challenges to prioritise and balance ever-changing government policy advice with the limitations of school buildings, the welfare of students and staff, and the needs of communities, a task made complicated by the methods of communication used by government. By surveying and interviewing headteachers, senior leaders and governors, this article identifies the reactions and responses of school leaders who construct and enact policy in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. The article addresses the nature of, and factors affecting, pressures school leaders feel in authoring and implementing policy. These pressures are non-trivial and increase tension in already highly stressful work. The report draws on data collected from a randomised, stratified sample of primary and secondary school leaders from across England in early June 2020, during the time of national lockdown and remote learning. Findings suggest quality, quantity and frequency of top-down communication contributed to school leader stress, while horizontal communication and collaboration between school leaders and across school communities supported leaders during rapid change. We recommend that government and the Department of Education strengthen and streamline stressful communication systems while building cooperative communities, mitigating against the challenges identified by school leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic.  相似文献   

2.
Headteachers working under conditions of severe hardship in Africa face tremendous challenges, often exacerbated by a sense of hopelessness and lack of agency to effect improvements within their school. This paper focuses on notions of leadership agency and ‘social justice’ within an African educational context, with a specific focus on the school level, and reports on a small-scale research project involving primary headteachers in Ghana and Tanzania engaging with action research in order to bring about changes which they feel will benefit the quality of pupil learning. The study presents some positive impacts generated by the headteachers’ actions and indicates ways in which these actions illustrate developments in areas of ‘social justice’ related to fairness, equity, recognition, and redistribution. The findings suggest that empowering headteachers through the use of action research can enable them to act creatively and positively to benefit the quality of education offered to the pupils within their schools.  相似文献   

3.
Driven by the country's need to compete in a global economy, the UK government is imposing rapid and relentless educational change on schools. School leaders face the challenge of managing the impact of externally driven change and supporting others' resilience while frequently paying scant attention to their own. Six semi-structured interviews with headteachers and a review of the literature provide an insight into complex relationships which underpin school leaders' emotional resilience. A model is proposed which suggests where attention should be focused to strengthen resilience. Recommendations are made affecting headteachers, school governors, authors of leadership development materials and government policy-makers.  相似文献   

4.
This article argues that engagement with religion is a key challenge for all leaders of schools in twenty-first-century multifaith societies. It outlines the historic and current context of the UK and the Republic of Ireland, and national and European policies that prioritise community cohesion in education. The functional and substantive roles of religion are considered as reflected in education, where they adjudicate power and shape values and behaviours. The article analyses data from nine schools in England, Wales and the Republic of Ireland to provide a snapshot of a range of leaders’ philosophies, policies and practice in relation to religion. The preferential attention and resources given to the dominant community are evident in some cases. It is argued that, irrespective of whether a school is affiliated to a specific religion or not, school leaders have some freedom in positioning religion. Their influence significantly shapes how religion and/or secular values are understood and enacted. The article concludes by suggesting that policy at national and European level that emphasises shared identities and community cohesion masks the differential power and struggles between communities that cannot be resolved by anodyne exhortation. Rather, leaders need to be selected, trained and supported to recognise the centrality of belief in the lives of many of their learners and their families and to engage with the inevitability of ongoing disagreement and struggle.  相似文献   

5.
This paper addresses a wicked problem faced by leaders wanting to be evidence informed in their choices of school improvement priorities and the most productive leadership practices to enact in pursuing those priorities. While local contexts will always be central to these choices, results of research ought to provide useful points of departure. But determining what relevant evidence recommends, local context aside, is far more difficult that the admonition to be ‘evidence informed’ seems to imply and the research community has offered few systematic solutions to the problem. This paper offers one possible solution, the calculation of ‘Power Indices’ using, for the purposes of illustration, evidence about the effects of a selected set of potential school improvement priorities (teachers’ emotions) on student learning, in combination with evidence about the effects on teacher emotions of a selected set of transformational leadership practices. Results argue for the value of a unique line of future research enabling school leaders to make choices about both school improvement priorities and how they might best pursue those priorities that systematically reflect the results of relevant evidence.  相似文献   

6.
There is a widespread policy assumption that school leaders such as headteachers and governors need to have 'raining courses' which are constituted by a growing corpus of Education Management Studies (EMS) if they are to achieve successfully current schooling goals of 'effectiveness', 'quality', 'excellence' and 'value for money' Another body of work which attempts to address these issues in a wider cultural framework and which may be called Critical Leadership Studies (CLS) is regarded as interesting for those studying for higher graduate qualifications but hardly relevant for everyday school busyness. While EMS is constructed as 'practical'and therefore a necessary constituent of the National Professional Qualification for Headteachers and other training courses for school leaders, CLS is constructed as 'academic' and more suitable for the EdD seminar. It will be argued here that both cultural analysis and recent research shows this to be a simplistic and reductionist view with dangerous policy consequences. Critical scholarship in education has much to offer to those meeting the everyday challenges of school leadership. In particular, feminist critical scholarship offers oppositional models to both traditional and market forms of patriarchal school leadership.  相似文献   

7.
ABSTRACT

This is a comparative study, drawing on data obtained from interviews conducted with headteachers, that compares the roles of Swedish and British headteachers as pedagogical leaders. For its analytical framework the study uses the qualitative research approach known as phenomenography and, in the context of the guiding legal documents related to education, examines the study's findings as frame factors and as tight and loosely coupled systems. Based on interviews with the study's subjects (five Swedish and five English headteachers), discernible differences were noted between Swedish and English headteachers in their roles as pedagogical leaders. Both groups are responsible for the administration and management of the school but, compared to the Swedish headteachers, their English counterparts have greater personal responsibility for the school's overall performance and are more focused on providing leadership in teaching and learning. In contrast, the Swedish headteachers had a greater separation of the two roles, with the headteacher taking responsibility for administration and leaving responsibility for teaching and learning to the teachers.  相似文献   

8.
This paper draws upon interviews with eight headteachers in ‘Northern LEA’, and examines (a) how the heads perceived their role in relation to the current period of rapid educational change, and (b) how they sought to cope with the increasingly difficult demands which they faced. The consequences of the current situation are considered in relation to a qualitative understanding of ‘high performance’ which recognises the situational complexity of the school as an organisation.

The heads made use of many sources of support; the most important were a network of informal contacts with other headteachers and an increase in the involvement of senior management team colleagues in the stresses and responsibilities of management. The paper concludes that despite the efforts of the heads themselves, the consequences of resource cuts and the Education Reform Act 1988 are likely to make the achievement and management of high performance increasingly difficult.  相似文献   

9.
Wing-Wah Law 《Compare》2013,43(3):295-322
Since the 1980s, numerous studies have demonstrated the influences of culture and gender on leadership, including school leadership. Such studies have been criticised, however, for being dominated by Anglo-American paradigms and frameworks and for under-exploring the roles of culture and gender on leadership in non-Western societies. With reference to China, this paper focuses on the relationship between gender and school leadership and explores gender differences between Chinese male and female school leaders in their leadership orientations. The study adopted a mixed methodology of a questionnaire survey and individual interviews to solicit Chinese school leaders' views in 2008. The study finds mixed patterns of gender differences in Chinese school leadership, including stereotypical, non-stereotypical and no differences. This paper argues that these patterns can be interpreted as resulting from the dynamic interplay among traditional Chinese culture, contemporary political context and organisational settings into which Chinese school leaders are socialised and in which their leadership styles and behaviours are shaped and leadership is exercised.  相似文献   

10.
Internationally, Intercultural Understanding (ICU) is increasingly prevalent in the field of education. The recent evidence base includes a growing academic literature and examples of specified education policy and curricula. In regards to leveraging ICU, research suggests a multi-level and longitudinal approach is needed to ensure effective and sustainable school change. Significant gaps exist in the literature about the contextual factors across all school levels that facilitate or impede the development of ICU. These gaps include research and action pertaining to school leadership. This paper draws from interviews and visual data generated in a large Australian study and focuses on the centrality of a single architectural feature of the school, the school foyer, and how principals grapple with the (re)design of these spaces to assert themselves as interculturally capable schools. Discourses of educational leadership have historically relied on well-worn leadership models of operational practices rather than explicitly framing an understanding of diversity to support intercultural capabilities. During a period of mandated Australian curriculum reform and assessment, this paper offers another way of ‘Doing Diversity’ of interest to policy makers and school leadership keen to embed ICU in their schools while highlighting the significant role school leaders have in progressing ICU.  相似文献   

11.
ABSTRACT

This paper explores how doing headship may be considered as a form of policy narration. A key role of the headteacher as policy narrator is to tell/sell a story about their school to themselves, their staff and the outside world of parents, inspectors and other stakeholders. The accounts they construct will depend to some extent on their perspectives, commitments and personal-professional identities as well as an interplay between national priorities and situated contexts. They will also depend on who they are speaking to and what they take to be a ‘professional’ response in relation to their policy work in school. Drawing on in-depth interviews with two experienced English primary school headteachers, Hazel and George, and Lakoff and Johnson’s claim [1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press] that metaphors are not just linguistic devices, but technologies of reasoning and understanding, this paper explores the ways in which headteachers deploy different tropes to explain what it is that they do. Metaphors of leadership explored include headship as branding, persuasion and not dropping the ball as well as fighting and parenting although there is an absence of any direct political critique in these two accounts.  相似文献   

12.
With increasing pressures from growing demand and for higher quality on secondary schools, headteachers play a crucial role in creating successful school environments. Within Uganda, and across many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, headteachers are not adequately prepared for their roles, and few professional development opportunities exist to provide them with the skills they need. This article reports on a study that assessed headteachers’ efficacy in the areas of leadership, management, instructional supervision, and community relations. One of the policy arguments for educators’ professional development is to create a coherent, cost-effective, and scaleable training program, which often results in a “one-size-fits-all” training. However, the findings from this study suggest the need for designing training to target gaps in specific skill domains and to give attention to the differing roles and responsibilities of head and deputy headteachers, the school size and resources, gender, and the location of the population that the school serves. In effect, training should be contextualized and targeted.  相似文献   

13.
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   

14.
Leaders within education must weigh a number of fundamentals as they engage the needs of the stakeholders they represent within the political, social and economic context they operate within. Leaders must consider the unique needs and capabilities of individuals who might not possess similar abilities or talents to those of the majority. In this paper, we explore the capability approach as a frame to consider such contextual fundamentals in inclusive education leadership. In order to examine how educational leaders address the diverse needs of the groups they serve, we interviewed five central office educational administrators in the USA with the responsibility for leading programming for students with special needs. Using a human capabilities frame, we developed targeted questions to determine whether school leaders uphold the tenets of this theoretical foundation within their district's practices in an era of tight fiscal management and accountability. Findings indicate that those leaders whose districts had the highest level of inclusion for most students, including students with significant disabilities, most closely align with the capability approach. Recommendations for continued research and implications for both practice and policy are included.  相似文献   

15.
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   

16.
State and federal policy constitutes a significant component of the educational environment. School leaders stand at the intersection of policy and practice in attempting to implement systemic school reform. This report begins with a brief overview of (1) recent federal policy alignment initiatives, (2) the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) grants program, and (3) the general policy environment in North Carolina. We then draw on evaluation data from North Carolina schools receiving CSRD grants to suggest that initial school efforts are marked by two significant absences, chiefly, the absence of comprehensive design perspectives to guide improvement efforts and the absence of critical analysis during application of improvement models. We close by offering suggestions for school leaders engaged in systemic reform efforts.  相似文献   

17.
Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on how best the appraisal of headteachers can be effected. It presents an analysis of the findings of a study which compared self‐appraisals of their managerial peformance by a sample of primary headteachers (n=36), with appraisals of these headteachers by their teaching staff. Respondents completed the 100‐item Management Performance Profile (MPP) Questionnaire and the resulting profiles of the headteachers'performance in 10 managerial categories, were compared. In addition, data were generated on headteachers' perceptions of their personal and professional identity, using a semi‐structured interview schedule. The findings are that there is a high level of concordance between perceptions by headteachers and teachers of the managerial priorities of the primary headteacher. However, two groups of schools are identified, in which there are significant differences between evaluations of the headteachers' managerial performance. Interview data is used to illuminate the analysis and discussion of these differences. The conclusion is that staff participation in headteacher performance review has much to offer and that the MPP questionnaire is a tool of value in this respect.  相似文献   

18.
In this paper, I draw on a study of school leaders’ experiences of inspection to argue that repeated changes to school inspection policy in England constitute a post-panoptic regime. Thinking with and against Foucault, I elaborate post-panopticism, here characterised by: subjects’ visibility; ‘fuzzy’ norms; the exposure of subjects’ failure to comply; the disruption of identity-constituting fabrications; its dependence on external ‘experts’; and its neo-conservative devalorisation of the interests of the socio-economically disadvantaged. The paper argues that post-panopticism depends on subjects having become disciplined through panopticism, whose apparatus it employs, and reveals the state’s explicit exercise of power.  相似文献   

19.
Reflecting post-bureaucratic organisation theory, education reformers intended charter schools to empower school-level leaders, most typically principals, with autonomy to pursue clear, student-centred missions. Yet little research explores whether charter school principals have more power than traditional public school counterparts. We summarise the limited literature addressing the issue. Second, we present findings from interviews with nine charter leaders from six US states who have experience in leading both charter and traditional public schools, a unique data set. Both prior research and our findings suggest that generally, leaders feel more likely to be held accountable for results in charter schools than in traditional public schools. Furthermore, without oversight from school boards and central office administrators, charter leaders report having more power over budget and personnel, and more ability to collaborate with teachers. At the same time, standalone charter leaders report needing business support and training, while those from charter management organizations feel free to focus on academic success.  相似文献   

20.
ABSTRACT

The role of school principals is an evolving one, calling them to become agents of change, focusing on educational leadership as they take the schools forward. All this is happening in a context that is becoming more challenging and stressful as school leaders try to juggle the state-mandated accountability devices. In relation to the Italian context, this paper analyses the growing penetration of accountability systems in school management and the implications for leadership practices. The results of a research project conducted with school leaders show that accountability systems can provide an opportunity for school improvement if school leaders defuse their potential bureaucracy, consistently integrating them into their practices of leadership, respecting the organisational idea of the school as professional learning community. An authentic educational leadership is a fundamental condition for governing the risks and contradictions that accountability systems bring with them in the complex reality of schools.  相似文献   

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