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A Study Of Principals Leadership In Vocational Schools

Posted on:2008-10-25Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:J D FuFull Text:PDF
GTID:1117360212491383Subject:Vocational and Technical Education
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Our country is now in a period of accelerating the growth of vocational education, especially that of secondary vocational education. The policy is oriented towards increasing vocational school's decision-making power and towards increasing its capacity in self-managing and self-development. Principals in secondary vocational schools are thus put in a very important position. The principal plays a key role in running a school, whose main responsibility is to facilitate students' success. The leadership of principals can affect the quality of vocational education that millions of people receive, and thus affect the quality of labor force needed in our economic growth, which indicates whether our secondary vocational education succeeds or fails.This dissertation analyzes the political, economic, social environment and the educational policy context, in which secondary vocational education develops. Since over twenty years ago, our country has been in a stable political environment. Economy has grown fast and the step of globalizing has been quickened. The income of citizens has risen quickly both in cities and in the countryside. However, Chinese traditional ideas and stratification of society plays a negative role in the development of secondary vocational education. In the perspective of educational policy, secondary vocational education grew quite fast when the policy was favorable in 1980s and early 1990s. But it encountered a great difficulty in late 1990s while the policy of recruitment and employment changed, and colleges recruited much more students, leading the booming of high schools. Since the national vocational education congress held in 2002, secondary vocational education has been highly valued by the State Council, and its development environment has been improving. In the process of environment changing, the number of secondary vocational schools and that of their enrollments have also been changing rapidly. To some extent it is the result of environment, but it is also closely related to principals' leadership.This dissertation is mainly a qualitative research into the leadership of secondary vocational principals. From the stories of four successful principals, we know their growth, their work and life, and their characteristics in leading a school. We find that they influenced all those people who have some relationship with the development of the school with their power (both position and personal power) . Principals' types of power, their upward, downward and lateral relations, and possible constraints are also analyzed. With regard to these four principals, they had strong power with little constraints, the power which facilitated them a lot leading the school to transform.There is a big difference among the constructs of principals' leadership. Each principal's success is the result of their unique leadership interacting with diversified variables inside and outside of their school. In the process of research, we also find that the principals did not pay special attention to the two important aspects: teaching and moral education. The highest priority was the survival of the school and the acquisition of rare sources including enrollments, capable faculty, money, equipment, land and favorable policies, which were key to the survival and development of the school. The four principals all led the school to reform when they were put into the position of principal. Setting a direction, transformational thinking, shared values, empowerment, motivation, and principals' personal integrity were all important elements in leading a school to success.The analysis of the practice of principals is based on theories of leadership, especially on transformational leadership. Bass thinks that transformational leadership and transactional leadership are different points in the continuum of leadership, which can better explain various leadership phenomena than Burns' idea which embraces that transformational and transactional leadership are opposite and mutually exclusive. However, leadership is too comprehensive and complex for the continuum theory to explain. A new model is proposed in the dissertation, which may explain the relationship among transformational, transactional and laisser-faire leadership.To accelerate the growth of secondary vocational education, the improvement of principals' leadership needs to be accelerated. Following are four possible ways: 1) to set high standard for new principals in all types of secondary schools; 2) to invite applications publicly so that best candidates can be selected; 3) to motivate principals in the development of leadership; 4) to train principals to accelerate the improvement of leadership.
Keywords/Search Tags:secondary vocational schools, principals, leadership
PDF Full Text Request
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