Principal’s Role in Supporting Teacher Collaborative Learning

Teacher collaborative learning remains one of the fundamental professional development methods that help teachers improve their professional skills and competencies. Consequently, responsible institutions as well as scholars and experts encourage and instruct teachers to partake in collaborative learning activities as much as possible. Nevertheless, teacher collaborative learning does not happen per se. Due to various factors and circumstances, teachers have to be counselled, encouraged, and supported for taking part in such activities. This responsibility and competence is usually entrusted to school principals. This research shows that principals play a major role in this process by fostering organizational learning, collaborative culture, creating a trustworthy environment, making structural arrangements, and securing infrastructural facilities. It also shows that collaborative learning in the research context takes place in a limited number of formats, mainly in the activities of professional communities and mentoring pairs, and principals have to apply various leadership approaches for protecting and advancing the collaborative climate in the schools they run. This article, which presents only one portion of a doctoral research, is based on the data collected from 518 teachers and eight principals of 24 schools in Kosovo. The sequential-explanatory mixed-method approach was utilized to collect the data. Descriptive and inferential statistics were employed to analyze the quantitative data and the qualitative ones were explored through the thematic analysis.

Good School Governance: An Approach to Principal’s Decision-Making Quality in Indonesian Vocational School

The purpose of this research is to examine the model of good school governance and to establish the correlation between good school governance and the principal’s decision making in Indonesian vocational school contexts. The samples of the present quantitative descriptive study are the vocational school principals, vice-principals, and teachers by considering the representation of all provinces in Indonesia. The data were gathered from a structured questionnaire survey of 838 respondents. The factor analysis was applied to bring out the latent variables representing the attributes, and later, the causality between these variables was established using structural equation modeling (SEM). The result of confirmatory factor analysis shown that good school governance was constructed by six principles, namely; transparency, accountability, responsibility, autonomy, fairness, and participation. Supported by empirical evidence, good school governance has have impacted positively on the quality of the principal’s decision making. The research has affirmed that good school governance facilitates the participation of teachers and educational staff in the decision-making process. Moreover, good school governance improves a decision-making quality through the empowerment of teachers, the delegation of authority, and encouragement of shared decision-making.

The Role of School Administrators in Organizational Learning Processes

This study aims to determine the perceptions of school administrators about the roles they played in the organizational learning process. In this qualitative research, interviews were conducted with 30 school administrators in Ankara, Turkey. The content obtained through interviews in a semi-structured form was analyzed descriptively and evaluated within the context of organizational learning processes. The roles of school administrators on organizational learning were discussed in three different categories: the existence or production of knowledge, the sharing or interpretation of knowledge, and the integration or institutionalization of knowledge. This study advances existing research literature by focusing on organizational learning processes.

The Roles and Responsibilities of School Administrators during the Emergency Remote Teaching Process in Covid-19 Pandemic

When Covid 19 pandemic started, schools in Turkey, as in many parts of the World, were closed and then emergency remote teaching started. The purpose of this study is to explain the roles and responsibilities of school administrators related to emergency remote teaching after schools were closed. In order to reveal the purpose above, this research was carried out in qualitative research design. 105 school administrators from different regions of Turkey and different school levels participated the study. The data were collected through a Google Drive form with open-ended questions. The collected data were analyzed with content and descriptive analyses. The findings showed that the roles and responsibilities of the school administrators regarding emergency remote teaching included planning the process, starting online classes, opening different social media accounts, managing the online program, solving the adaptation problems of students and teachers, monitoring the actions taken and motivating teachers, students, parents; communication and finally it has been seen that they are in the act of transition to and maintaining digital management. During the Covid 19 pandemic, school administrators have mostly done “communication”. There were also changes in the communication styles of school administrators and social media tools were used effectively. The intensive use of technology in this period has caused changes in management processes and managers have mostly talked about digital management. The exhausting aspects of digital management are expressed as well as the facilitating ones. Since emergency remote teaching is not a common case in the K-12 Turkish education system, the roles and responsibilities of school administrators during such emergency periods have not been studied in national context yet. Therefore, what school administrators did in relation to remote teaching during this Covid 19 period was explored.

The Investigation of the Relations Between Paternalistic Leadership, Organizational Creativity and Organizational Dissent

The aim of the research is to find out the relationship between the paternalistic leadership behaviours of public primary school principals and teachers’ organizational creativity and organizational dissent perception levels according to the perceptions of primary school teachers. Correlational survey method was utilized in the research. The sample of the research consists of 1059 teachers working in public primary schools selected by methods of stratified sampling method in Mardin city center and 8 districts of Mardin during 2016-2017 academic year. The data of the research were obtained by using the “Headmasters’ Paternalistic Leadership Behaviours Scale”, “Organizational Creativity Scale” and “Organizational Dissent Scale”. The data analysis revealed the following findings: There was a positive and significant correlation between the paternalistic leadership behaviours of primary school administrators and teachers’ perceptions toward organizational creativity and organizational dissent and paternalistic leadership behaviors of primary school administrators were found to be a significant predictor of teachers’ perceptions toward organizational creativity and organizational dissent. The headmasters should exhibit benevolent leadership behaviours that enchance the teachers organizational creativity perceptions, such as endeavouring to create a family milieu in school, being tolerant of teachers and supporting teachers to take the initiative.