Search results
1 – 10 of 687Paula Kwan and Yuet-man Benjamin Li
The purpose of this paper is to understand the dilemmas facing Hong Kong vice-principals in discharging their roles and to further explore their engagement in informal mentoring…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to understand the dilemmas facing Hong Kong vice-principals in discharging their roles and to further explore their engagement in informal mentoring as a coping mechanism in the absence of a structured professional development program.
Design/methodology/approach
The qualitative study was conducted in the form of in-depth face-to-face, loosely structured individual interviews with ten informants from a variety of personal and school backgrounds, contributing to a set of data that unveiled the basic themes.
Findings
Three dilemmas facing Hong Kong vice-principals were identified: juggling administrative work with teaching, standing by management or siding with peer teachers, and forced innovation vs omnipresent conservatism. The findings also suggested that the informants tended toward external resources intentionally with a view to gaining emotional support as well as professional stimulation. They also engaged in informal mentoring, which took the form of observing principals’ behaviors, joining support groups organized by school governing bodies, and enrolling in academic programs offered by universities and/or professional bodies, as a way to resolve the dilemmas.
Research limitations/implications
Informal mentoring has been identified as an effective approach for Hong Kong vice-principals to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to overcome workplace challenges and the feelings of loneliness experienced upon changing their role. The findings point to the importance of formalizing mentoring in vice-principal development programs.
Originality/value
This study is the first of its kind to explore the impact of informal mentoring on vice-principals in Hong Kong where both dual-career track systems and a structured mentoring programs are missing.
Details
Keywords
Heather M. Rintoul and Richard Kennelly
In Ontario Canada, being a vice principal is not considered a career goal. Rather, school principals are drawn from the ranks of practising vice principals. Potential…
Abstract
In Ontario Canada, being a vice principal is not considered a career goal. Rather, school principals are drawn from the ranks of practising vice principals. Potential administrators must first pass the principal qualification program and spend several successful years in the interim position of vice principal (known as assistant principal, deputy principal, and assistant headmaster in other countries) before applying for the principalship itself. The current system appears to be replete with inherent challenges both for vice principals and the educational stakeholders they serve. Administrator training is based on a quantitative paradigm, but the vice principal role is highly qualitative in nature, requiring strong interpersonal skills to address conflict for which no training is provided. The current system addresses the dual role of management and leadership but from the perspective of the principal, not the vice principal. Training also favors management over leadership, yet hiring processes for vice principals place a high value on demonstrated leadership. Facility with ethical decision-making is central to the vice principal role yet absent from qualification programs. Qualification programs use classroom-based learning with no “in-role” field experience. Mentoring systems designed to provide new vice principals with help are inadequate for supporting daily tasks. As a consequence, newly appointed vice principals find themselves in a role for which they have not been trained.
The purpose of this paper is to examine first the job responsibilities undertaken by vice‐principals and second to investigate the respective contribution of each job…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine first the job responsibilities undertaken by vice‐principals and second to investigate the respective contribution of each job responsibility in preparing them for the principalship. Because new principals are drawn predominantly from the ranks of vice‐principals in Hong Kong, it is important to examine whether their current experience adequately prepares vice‐principals to take up this senior position.
Design/methodology/approach
All vice‐principals in Hong Kong secondary schools were sent a questionnaire that asked for the extent of their involvement in various activities and their adequacy of preparation for the principalship. A sequential regression analysis was used to examine the effect of various job dimensions on the vice‐principals' perceived preparedness, over and above the effect of their demographic variables.
Findings
Seven job responsibility dimensions pertaining to the role of vice‐principals were identified. It was found that respondents spend most of their time on staff management and the least on resource management. Among the seven job dimensions, only strategic direction and policy environment were found to have an effect on their perceived preparation for the principalship.
Research limitations/implications
The findings reflect that vice‐principals take their staff management and resource management responsibilities lightly as they do not perceive their extensive experience gained in staff management as an asset or their inadequate experience in resource management as a deficiency in preparing them for the principalship. As these two dimensions are the core elements of school‐based management, they deserve the attention of policy‐makers. In addition, policy‐makers should address the development of vice‐principals in the dimension of strategic direction and policy environment.
Originality/value
The paper, using a quantitative methodology, is the first to investigate the link between job responsibility dimensions and preparation for the principalship as perceived by vice‐principals.
Details
Keywords
Jeanne Ho, Trivina Kang and Imran Shaari
The purpose of this paper is to examine leading from the middle, which is consistent with calls to distribute leadership, while expanding the direction of influence, from the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine leading from the middle, which is consistent with calls to distribute leadership, while expanding the direction of influence, from the normal top-down to include a bottom-up or lateral direction. The paper proposes that the position of the vice-principal enables the role incumbent to lead from the middle as a boundary spanner. The research question was what leadership from the middle looks like for vice-principals.
Design/methodology/approach
The study consisted of interviews of 28 vice-principals and 10 principals. A mixed case and theme-oriented strategy was adapted, with member checking with each vice-principal.
Findings
The findings indicate that in leading from the middle, vice-principals play boundary spanning roles of connecting, translating and brokering: (1) connecting between organisational levels, (2) translating between vision/direction and actualisation, (3) connecting between middle managers and (4) brokering and translating between the ministry and the school.
Originality/value
Leading from the middle is a nascent concept which is worth exploring, given the complexity of educational systems with multiple ecological levels, and the need for leadership to create coherence between the levels.
Details
Keywords
Linda J. Searby and Denise Armstrong
The purpose of this paper is to introduce readers to the special issue on “middle space” education leaders (those individuals who are second-in-command in schools). The special…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to introduce readers to the special issue on “middle space” education leaders (those individuals who are second-in-command in schools). The special issue contains papers pertaining to mentoring those preparing for and aspiring to the assistant school leader role, as well as papers on programs that support new assistant principals/vice-principals through mentoring and coaching. The authors provide background on middle space leadership and mentoring from existing research literature, introduce the international papers selected for the issue, and identify unifying themes across the papers.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors provide highlights of relevant research literature on the importance of mentoring for school leaders in general, but also specifically address the need for mentoring for middle space leaders from the scant literature that exists on the topic. After reviewing the relevant literature, the authors provide an overview of the seven papers that were chosen for the issue through a rigorous peer-review process.
Findings
The co-editors of this special issue identify common themes that emerged from the papers chosen for the issue. In general, authors note that middle space leaders have unique mentoring and coaching needs, and there are few formal programs that address their needs. However, there is a growing awareness of the need to support assistant principals through structured mentoring programs, as well as preparing and mentoring those who aspire to the position.
Research limitations/implications
The seven papers chosen for the special issue represent a variety of research methodologies. A limitation is that the majority of the studies are qualitative, with small sample populations. However, even with small sample sizes, commonalities can be seen across the studies and across international contexts.
Practical implications
This review summarizes the issues facing middle space leaders in education and how they can be effectively addressed. The global audience that can benefit from engaging with the papers in this special issue includes educational leadership faculty, educational governing bodies, policymakers, school district central office personnel, senior principals, and assistant principals themselves.
Originality/value
This paper and the seven that follow extend the scant research literature in the realm of middle space leaders in education. They provide unique insights – from different international contexts including the USA, Canada, Hong Kong, and New Zealand – into the need for and potential benefits of mentoring and coaching aspiring and new middle space leaders.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to explore informal contexts of teachers' workplace professional learning and inform educational researchers, teacher educators, administrators and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore informal contexts of teachers' workplace professional learning and inform educational researchers, teacher educators, administrators and teachers about ways in which teachers learn to improve their practice. By questioning how teachers learn on‐the‐job to be better teachers and how school cultures position them as learners, this study seeks to generates hypotheses about relationships between the nature of workplace professional learning and its content and informal contexts.
Design/methodology/approach
An ethnographic design based on a grounded theory generates analytic categories from interviews, participants' reflective journals and field notes through comparison of learning environments in three contrasting schools in two countries – Lithuania and the USA. Discourse analysis is employed to analyze three cases of the schools' informal learning contexts in order to better understand how teachers learned through everyday interactions.
Findings
Within each case, the findings illuminate three facets of school culture that provide or fail to provide opportunities for teacher learning in informal contexts: school leadership, teachers' professional relationships, and their individual stances as learners.
Research limitations/implications
The limitations of the paper derive from its focus on school cultures as learning organizations producing detailed thick descriptions, which are culturally specific and may not necessarily be transferable to other schools.
Practical implications
The implications underline that teachers and teacher educators could enhance teachers' professional learning by contributing to building and sustaining the opportunities necessary to maintain professional growth at teachers' workplaces.
Originality/value
The value of the paper is in: defining specific cultural features in schools that create or fail to create opportunities for teachers to learn informally; showing how teachers use these opportunities for their learning; calling for re‐evaluation of professional development systems to include informal learning as an important path for professional growth.
Details
Keywords
J. John Lennon and Richard Teare
The paper aims to profile the Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes (WHATT) theme issue “Dark tourism – visitation, understanding and education; a reconciliation of theory and…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to profile the Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes (WHATT) theme issue “Dark tourism – visitation, understanding and education; a reconciliation of theory and practice?” by drawing on reflections from the theme editor and theme issue outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses structured questions to enable the theme editor to reflect on the rationale for the theme issue question and the outcomes.
Findings
It was observed that visitors to dark tourism sites are often motivated by respect and remembrance and that this motivation is frequently reported by the practitioners who manage these sites.
Practical implications
The paper presents dark tourism site educational guidelines for practitioners.
Originality/value
This paper provides a rich array of insights from practitioners involved in managing museums and related educational programmes, conceptual development and applied academic research.
Details
Keywords
Chun Sing Maxwell Ho and Thomas Wing Yan Man
This study investigates teachers' perceptions of how school conditions influence their motivation for opportunity recognition. It uses discovery theory as a theoretical lens to…
Abstract
Purpose
This study investigates teachers' perceptions of how school conditions influence their motivation for opportunity recognition. It uses discovery theory as a theoretical lens to understand the dynamics of entrepreneurial teachers' knowledge and alertness in responding to school conditions.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a multi-case study approach, in-depth interviews were conducted with participants in three schools highlighting similarities and differences in their conditions of empowering entrepreneurial teachers to discover opportunities.
Findings
The results indicate that four school conditions facilitate entrepreneurial teachers to discover opportunities, namely, a rigorous working environment, a trusting and opened culture, extensive communication networks and rewarding work conditions.
Originality/value
These findings further underscore the use of discovery theory in educational contexts showing that entrepreneurial teachers are in an active mode of searching for opportunities. Specific ways through which teachers can better recognize opportunities for school improvement are included.
Details
Keywords
Bruce G. Barnett, Alan R. Shoho and Nathern S.A. Okilwa
When assistant principals experience positive mentoring and professional development, they can obtain valuable knowledge and leadership skills from these learning opportunities…
Abstract
Purpose
When assistant principals experience positive mentoring and professional development, they can obtain valuable knowledge and leadership skills from these learning opportunities. To better understand the formal and informal mechanisms assistant principals use to expand their knowledge and skills, the purpose of this paper is to examine important advice mentors provided for them and the professional learning activities that prepare them for their school leadership roles.
Design/methodology/approach
Semi-structured interviews with 69 elementary, middle, and high school assistant principals were conducted. Questions focused on the advice mentors have provided and significant learning experiences that have aided in their growth as school leaders.
Findings
Results reveal that assistant principals greatly appreciate insights from mentors about how to enhance decision-making skills, improve people and communication skills, reflect on their personal qualities and capabilities, and clarify their values and beliefs. Their preferred means for professional growth is to work with former and current administrators they trust and respect.
Originality/value
This study goes beyond examining the structural and procedural aspects of mentoring by describing highly valued advice provided by mentors affecting assistant principals’ professional development and growth. For mentoring to be effective, this study suggests that mentors should provide opportunities for assistant principals to develop their decision-making, people, and communication skills as well to clarify their personal capabilities, values, and beliefs.
Details