A Study On Principal Leadership In Middle Schools

Nowadays every national government has been paying highly attention to education owing to its functions .The implementation of the education functions depend on the school effectiveness level. Whether the research evidence or common sense has told us that the principal and his or her leadership level have a vital influence on school development. However, today's principal leadership is facing unprecedented challenges. The relevant researches show that education leadership research especially the principal's leadership research in the western world keep in the same step with the general leadership research, and the relevant research achievements have widely been used in pre and post educational leadership (including principal's leadership) development. However, the field of domestic principal's leadership has gradually been paid attention and some achievements have been obtained, but these researches seem very fragmented and not enough in breadth and depth comparing with the western research, it is needed to be enriched and regulated in the field of research methods.This dissertation insists on comprehending the concept of leadership from the level of organization and accepts the framework of organizational leadership should be model of five dimensions learning including structural leadership, human leadership, political leadership, teaching-learning leadership and cultural leadership from Bolman, Sergiovanni and Yan-xiang Zheng. On this theoretical foundation this dissertation comprehensively uses the research methods such as questionnaire survey, deep interview and case analysis to investigate and analyze the situation of school principals' leadership in our nation. Though we should be gratified with some principals for their outstanding performance, simultaneously the research results shows that domestic school principals' leadership has such obvious questions as one-sided strong structural leadership, obviously vulnerable teaching-learning leadership and cultural leadership, the great need of improving political leadership and humanity leadership as well as the difficulty of exerting the power of the five alternative combination from the perspective of the actual needs. The root cause research shows that middle school leadership issues perform on school principals from the appearance, yet the root cause is not primarily the school principals but our principal management systems existing much serious defects and vulnerability as well as the subsequent practices of more experience imitation than professional guide.Finally, this dissertation offers suggestions to improve middle school principals' leadership respectively from the three perspectives of profession, system and subject on the basis of issue investigation and root causes analysis. From the perspective of major, we should place the professional role of school principal on educational leader, and educational leadership is the core professional standard for principals. From the perspective of system, the professional standards and qualification system of the principals should be set up in the pre-entry period, and we should reform the principal's selection mechanism and perfect the principal occupation term system in the entry period. we should perfect the systems of duty, training, evaluation and motivation etc.. we should set up healthy work termination system in the principal retirement period. From the perspective of subject, school principals should accurately grasp the meaning of leadership to upgrade the level of education al leadership at multi-levels and in multi paths. Administrators should strive to improve the educational leadership level to realize the professionalization of educational administration, Researchers and trainers should really become the supporters of the principal professional development and leaders of leadership practice improvement.