Search results

The professional development of novice teachers is receiving increased attention. Although conflict is regarded as an essential factor affecting the effectiveness of the school professional learning community, it is often hidden unspokenly. This study uncovers the conflict experiences of female novice teachers in an Asian cultural context and investigates how such experiences influence their professional development and emotions.

The case study approach was adopted. Four participants were selected according to specific criteria, and two rounds of semi-structured interviews were conducted in five years to identify the conflicting parties, conflict types, coping strategies and resulting impact.

Longitudinal qualitative data have revealed that female novice English language teaching (ELT) teachers mainly reported conflicts with their female colleagues. Goal, task and relationship conflict are the most common types of conflict encountered, while the strategies of avoiding, dominating and obliging are the most popular. This study also discusses the impacts of such conflict experiences.

This study identifies the influence of culture, particularly a culture of high power distance and an emphasis on “precious harmony”, on novice female teachers' conflict coping and offers insights into how conflict can be utilised to enhance novice teachers' professional development in the school professional learning community.

There is research evidence emerging to show that Chinese principal leadership appears to have a limited effect on the large-scale and deep school changes, but reasons for this have not been well explored. The purpose of this paper is to offer a conceptually framed explanation. By using China as an illustrative case, the authors propose using a macro-institutional framework to examine how principal leadership is mediated institutionally and why the leadership of change is especially difficult for Chinese principals.

In order to facilitate a contextualized understanding, the three institutional pillars developed by Scott's (2001) were used as a macro-institutional framework to explain difficulties confronting principal leadership in China when making deep and sustainable school changes from regulative, normative and cognitive perspectives.

The appeared change inertia and school changes on surface can partially be attributed to the cultural and institutional contexts of Chinese principal leadership. For principals, professional incentives and their change initiatives are institutionally and culturally constrained. Consequently, Chinese principals are left with very limited professional space to focus on making visible and endurable student-centered school changes.

This is a first macro-institutional application to address principal leadership of change from the context of China. The regulative, normative and cognitive aspects are analytically useful to differentiate and manifest the institutional complexity and intricacy which are mediating principal leadership impact on school changes. This also illuminates the exploration of context sensitive leadership research to capture context features and understand context-embedded logics.

The purpose of this paper is to explore what developing moral literacy for leaders in intercultural schools will mean.

Relevant literature on moral literacy, leadership, intercultural schools and social learning is brought together and integrated to develop an understanding of the intricacies of leading for moral literacy.

The foundation for developing moral literacy in intercultural schools requires leaders to become knowledgeable, cultivate moral virtues and develop moral imaginations as well as to possess moral reasoning skills. In intercultural settings these components focus on openly addressing, and indeed exposing, issues of class, culture and equity. The elements which form the basis for improved moral literacy are intimately connected with school life and community through learning. Leaders must simultaneously develop their own and their communities' moral literacy through promoting and structuring community‐wide learning through participatory moral dialogue. This may involve sharing purpose, asking hard questions and exposing and acknowledging identities.

This article attempts to apply moral literacy to leading in intercultural schools and suggests that learning holds the key to moral development.

The purpose of this paper is to review English-language publications about school principalship in China published between 1998 and 2013 and to present an overview of the authorship, topics, methodologies and key findings of these publications.

The methodology includes an exhaustive review of journal articles and book chapters about Chinese school principalship published in the English language. In total, 39 articles and 17 book chapters are identified for the 1998-2013 period. Qualitative analysis is conducted to determine the basic patterns of authorship, topics, methods and key findings. The changes or continuities in these patterns during the study period are also discerned.

The paper identifies several continuous and discontinuous patterns in each of the review categories and provides a better understanding of on-going research into the practice of school principalship in China. The results also suggest areas that require deeper exploration.

This paper explores the landscape of school principalship in China as reflected in the international literature and indicates the ways that this landscape has changed or remained the same over the years. As such, the paper contributes to the thin knowledge base concerning school principalship in China and sheds light on the enduring local-global tension in the evolution of education systems.