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The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of transformational school leadership on teachers’ commitment to change and the effects of organizational and teachers’ factors on teachers’ perception of transformational school leadership in the Chinese urban upper secondary school context.

The paper mainly uses quantitative methods to explore the relationships between different constructs. The author asks: to what extent can transformational school leadership practices in the urban upper secondary schools of a particular Chinese city explain the variation in teachers’ commitment to change during curriculum reform? What are the effects of organizational and teachers’ factors on teachers’ perceptions of transformational school leadership?

The results of multiple regression analysis showed that the effect of transformational school leadership was moderate when transformational school leadership and teachers’ commitment to change were treated as single variables. Four dimensions of transformational leadership practice together explained the moderate effects on four dimensions of teachers’ commitment to change, among which the effect of managing the instructional program was the most prominent. The results of multiple regression analysis also revealed that variables like culture, strategy, environment, and teachers’ age had significant relationships with teachers’ perceptions of transformational school leadership. Culture, environment, strategy, structure, and teachers’ factors such as age and grade taught had moderate effects on different dimensions of teachers’ perceptions of transformational school leadership.

This study is one of the first to explore the effects of transformational school leadership on teachers’ commitment to change in the Chinese urban upper secondary school context. The findings contribute to educational management in China and similar contexts, and this study advances knowledge and furthers the understandings of the transferability of theories to different contexts.

The aim of this study was to understand the relationship between teacher leadership and collective teacher efficacy in Chinese upper secondary schools.

Based on survey answers from 1,074 upper secondary teachers in a Chinese city, path analysis was conducted to understand the relationship.

This study identified that a number of dimensions of teacher leadership (recognition, collegiality, participation and positive environment) had positive relationships with group competence. Meanwhile, the dimensions of developmental focus, participation and positive environment had positive relationships with task analysis. Additionally, when the authors treated collective efficacy as a single variable, the dimensions of developmental focus, congeniality, participation and positive environment had positive relationships with collective efficacy.

This study is to understand the relationship between teacher leadership and collective teacher efficacy in a collective culture and hierarchical education system.

The willingness of teachers to be part of and contribute to education reform is crucial for its success and effectiveness. Based on the motivation theory of Bandura (1986), Leithwood et al. (1999) conceptualized teachers’ motivation as part of educational change and described it using four dimensions including personal goals, context beliefs, personal beliefs, and emotional arousal. They also defined teachers’ commitment to change as teachers’ identification with or desire to be part of the change process. To date, most studies relating to teacher commitment to change have been conducted quantitatively, with comparatively little qualitative investigation into teachers’ lived experiences during a period of curricular reform. The purpose of this paper is to fill this qualitative gap in the literature and describes the realities of Chinese secondary teachers during a period of curricular reform. It investigated how the four dimensions of teachers’ commitment to change interact with one another during the change process, and how internal and external school factors affect teachers’ levels of commitment to change.

In this research, the purposive sampling strategy was used. Age, gender, years of service, and the type of school at which teachers taught were taken into consideration. In all, 23 Chinese teachers with different numbers of years of work experience participated in this study. According to Hargreaves (2005), teachers can be categorized into three groups based on their years of working experience. Teachers with one to five years’ teaching experience are regarded as early career teachers, teachers with six to ten years of teaching as mid-career teachers, and teachers with more than ten years of working experience as experts. The samples all had upper secondary school teaching experience. They were all certified teachers in China. Their years of working experience ranged from 1 to 5, 6 to 10, and more than 11 years. Their teaching subjects included English, literature, math, geography, physics, biology, and chemistry. Semi-structured, open-ended, in-depth interviews were used to collect data. Open-ended interviews were used to give teachers the opportunity to expand and elaborate upon their perception and experience of their commitment to change and describe in detail their experiences in school contexts where their commitment to change was supported or hindered.

The research revealed that teachers in different age groups had different perceptions of teachers’ commitment to change and also that internal and external organizational factors have different effects on their perceptions. This study seeks to contribute to teachers’ professional development in the Chinese school context and may help school administrators across cultures to adopt more appropriate methods for realizing effective change in their schools.

This study seeks an in-depth understanding of Chinese teachers’ motivation to be part of school reform, in particular the motivation process of Chinese teachers with different amounts of teaching experience. It contributes to the understanding of effective education change in China and other similar contexts.

This study aims to investigate the relationships between distributed leadership, teacher academic optimism and teacher organisational commitment with the contextual influence of gender and teaching experience.

This study employed partial least squares structural equation modelling for data analysis. This study has selected 421 teachers from 18 secondary schools in Penang.

Distributed leadership has a positive direct effect on teacher academic optimism and organisational commitment. The relationship between distributed leadership and teacher academic optimism was stronger for male teachers and senior teachers who have more than ten years of teaching experience. However, gender and teaching experience have no significant moderating effects on the relationship between distributed leadership and teacher organisational commitment.

The reason for the non-existent relationship between distributed leadership and teacher organisational commitment across gender and teaching experience remains unknown. In-depth investigation using interview method is required for further exploration.

This study complements and extends prior research on the relationships between distributed leadership, teacher organisational commitment and teacher academic optimism by providing evidence from Malaysia on how they contribute to the organisational conditions of their school.

This study has its originality in investigating the relationships between distributed leadership, teacher organisational commitment and academic optimism with the contextual influence of gender and teaching experience in the non-western society.

This study scrutinised Shanghai junior high school teachers’ emotions and emotion management strategies in relation to teachers’ work settings and content. A mixed-methods approach was applied to collect data via field observations, interviews, and a quantitative survey. The aim of this study was two-fold. Firstly, it aimed to identify the typical work settings in which teachers experienced work-related emotions. Secondly, it aimed to reveal teachers’ priority work in school and how it affected teachers’ choices of emotion management strategies.

The data were analysed through the lens of emotional labour theories and professional agency theories. Findings showed that classroom teaching and the professional learning community activities were two typical settings in which the teachers experienced the most intensive emotions. Most Shanghai teachers managed their momentary emotions by either genuinely expressing their emotions that matched their roles and the scenario, or by purposely suppressing emotions to meet social and organisational expectations. Furthermore, most teachers adopted the long-term mood regulation strategy by aligning their emotions with long-term goal achievement in the future. As professional agents, the Shanghai teachers did not only manage their own emotions at work using these two strategies, but also managed students’ emotions as part of the moral education.

Understanding the relationship between distributed leadership and teachers commitment to change in the Chinese urban primary school context was the purpose of this study.

Quantitative research method is used in this study. For ensuring comprehensiveness, this research employed a random sampling method. This study took place in Chinese urban primary schools. A total of 350 questionnaires were circulated, 318 questionnaires were returned, and 291 questionnaires were valid, with a response rate of 90.9 per cent and a validity rate of 91.5 per cent.

The results of path analysis indicated that various dimensions of distributed leadership, including collaboration and cooperation, responsibility and accountability, and values and beliefs, had significant effects on group competence. Collaboration and cooperation and decision making had significant relationships with task analysis. Collaboration and cooperation, responsibility and accountability, and values and beliefs had significant effects on collective teacher efficacy as a single variable.

These findings contribute to the understanding of educational management in the Chinese context and advance knowledge about distributed leadership theories in an East Asian context.

Principal leadership is an important external environmental factor that affects and alleviates teachers' job burnout. The purpose of this paper is to explore the deep internal mechanisms of the influence of principal transformational leadership on teacher job burnout in the context of Chinese teachers.

A cluster sampling method was used to conduct a questionnaire survey on 990 elementary school teachers in 14 primary schools in Beijing. This study uses a structural equation model to analyze the chain intermediary effect of social-emotional competence and the student-teacher relationship between transformational leadership and teachers' job burnout.

The results reveal that transformational leadership has a significant negative predictive effect on teachers' job burnout; this kind of leadership affects teachers' job burnout through a chain intermediary effect of social and emotional competence and student-teacher relationship.

This research has discovered that teacher burnout is the result of the interaction of external environmental and individual internal factors. Transformational leadership, as an external environmental factor, positively predicts the internal social-emotional competence of the teacher, and then the teacher's internal social-emotional competence positively predicts the external student-teacher relationship. Finally, the teacher-student relationship of the external environment negatively predicts the job burnout of internal individual teachers.

This paper aims to conclude and provide a review of the current literature on a commitment to change (C2C). Detailed research is provided on the operationalization and conceptualization of C2C.

The review is conducted based on 55 research papers published in different journals at different times in the past on C2C.

A complete framework from previous to latest literature has been depicted in the current paper on a C2C with their citation in the one study. Gaps that had not been addressed by previous authors are also highlighted to facilitate future researchers in regards to C2C. Especially in the context of quantitative studies gaps are highlighted in previous literature of C2C.

Future researchers can study the highlighted gaps with regards to C2C. Further it provides researchers a brief summary of 55 researches on C2C.

In the 1980s, the Chinese government undertook a major structural reform in education by which upper secondary education was converted from predominantly general education to an equal mix of general education and vocational/technical education. A critical examination is provided of the rationale for and implementation strategies of the reform, framed in a broader context of the development of secondary education in the past four decades. It points out that, although the reform was justified in largely economic terms, there is actually little empirical support for the economic assumptions; the development of vocational/technical education is prompted more by a desire to reduce the social demand for higher education and to use education as a social stratification device. The reform reflects changing perspectives of the Chinese leadership on the role of education in national development; and it can be seen as the outcome of the most recent episode of continuing social and political conflicts in the Chinese state that began in the 1950s.

Building on my earlier work (Dang, 2007, 2008), this chapter provides an updated review of the private tutoring phenomenon in Vietnam including the reasons, scale, intensity, form, cost, and legality of these classes. In particular, this chapter offers a comparative analysis of the trends in private tutoring between 1998 and 2006 using all available data.

This chapter analyzes data from different sources, including (i) the 2006 Vietnam Household Living Standards Measurement Survey (VHLSS), (ii) the 1997–1998 Vietnam Living Standards Measurement Survey (VLSS), (iii) the 2008 Vietnam Household Testing Survey (VHTS), and (iv) local press in Vietnam. Quantitative methods are used.

Several (micro-)correlates are examined that are found to be strongly correlated with student attendance at tutoring, including household income, household heads’ education and residence areas, student current grade level, ethnicity, and household sizes. In particular, I focus on the last three variables that received little attention in the previous literature on the determinants of tutoring.

This chapter provides an updated and systematic review of the private tutoring phenomenon in Vietnam. Findings are highly relevant to the ongoing debates on private tutoring among all stakeholders in Vietnam, as well as policymakers/researchers in other countries. Suggestions are proposed on current gaps in the literature for future research.