The role of ICT for school leadership and management activities: an international comparison

PurposeInformation and communication technologies (ICT) has an increasing impact on schools. School leaders play a key role in this context as drivers of innovation including those related to ICT. Against this background, the study presented in this article focuses on school leadership and management activities with ICT and related challenges. It sought to analyze how frequently German school principals use ICT compared to principals in other countries, what distinct clusters of German principals could be identified in terms of ICT usage and how principals viewed ICT in schools and related challenges.Design/methodology/approachA mixed-methods approach was chosen, using quantitative data from both the international comparative large-scale assessment study ICILS 2018 and the explorative qualitative data from Germany. For the international comparison, the school principal data sets of the 12 international participants of the International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) 2018 were taken into account: Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Kazakhstan, Republic of Korea, Luxembourg, Portugal, Uruguay and the United States. To look beyond averaged frequencies, a latent class analysis (LCA) was conducted to identify possible clusters of school leaders with distinct usage patterns of ICT for leadership and management activities.FindingsThe results indicate that, in general, German principals use ICT for leadership and management activities on a similar level as their international colleagues. However, they seem to communicate with education authorities significantly more often than their international colleagues, whereas representative activities (presentations, home page) are rather infrequent. The qualitative data point to significant barriers to fully harnessing the potential of using ICT for leadership, management and school improvement such as lack of competencies and lack of adequate support.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that focuses on school leadership and management activities using ICT with such a data set. The results provide insights into how German principals use ICT to lead and manage their schools compared to their international counterparts. The qualitative data offers additional insights into possible reasons hindering a more effective use of ICT.

Pengembangan Pendidikan Formal: Studi Kebijakan Kepemimpinan Kiai di Pondok Pesantren Tarbiyatul Ummah Muaro Jambi

This research is based on a strong tendency in pesantren to consolidate institutional organizations, particularly on aspects of leadership and management. This research uses descriptive qualitative methods by reviewing the kiai leadership policy in the development of formal education at SMP IT Pondok Pesantren Tarbiyatul Ummah Muaro Jambi. The results showed that kiai policy in the development of formal education was carried out by adjusting the conditions of boarding schools and considering various ideas / suggestions to be mutually agreed upon. While in formulating its policy, kiai involves all administrators of educational institutions and gives authority to implement policies that have been decided. The implementation of the policy is socialized through meetings with institutions to strengthen the flow of information on the policies to be implemented.

Leadership, Vision, and Values in a Time of Change and Crisis

This chapter analyses the principles and practices of effective leadership and management in times of complex change. It presents an illustrative case study of a UK research-intensive university's strategic response to global and national changes in the higher education sector as they intersected with a profound and unexpected crisis – the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter explores emergent possibilities for practising leadership that respects the culture(s) of the academic and professional collective of a research-intensive university, while considering some of the lived contradictions and kinds of emotional labour experienced during this time of great pressure. The authors propose a new cross-cutting articulation of ‘leadership in academia' based on seven key principles as a means of bringing faculty members and professional staff into new collaborative spaces. Their conclusion highlights the importance of establishing a culture of consent to cooperation to enable institutions to navigate disagreements over policy decisions.

Implementation of Work from Home Institutional of Indonesian Migrant Workers Protection Agency (BP2MI) in the Second Year of the Covid-19 Pandemic towards Society 5.0

The Covid-19 outbreak has affected changes in various sectors of life. With this change, of course, every organization needs new strategies, scenarios and leadership and management patterns to overcome all the uncertainties that occur in the Covid-19 pandemic. Government agencies are required to adapt according to dynamic conditions, and must be sensitive to the dynamics of changes that occur including how the implementation of work from home is carried out. For this reason, this research was carried out with the aim to find out how the implementation of work from home of the Indonesian Migrant Workers Protection Agency (BP2MI) institution in the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic. The research approach used in this research is qualitative methods. The data was obtained through interviews, observations and documentation.