Study On The Mechanism Of Principals' Instructional Leadership In China's Primary And Secondary School

Principals' instructional leadership is one of the core topics in the study of education reform.With an increasing disorder in the external environment and internal organization in China's primary or secondary school teaching system,principals' instructional leadership has been lost in the dilemma between high requirements of the times(from "personal-special-administration" management to "collective-integrated-professional" leadership)and poor support in reality(excessive intervention by external agents and ineffective participation of internal teachers),which makes principals' instructional leadership of primary or secondary school unprecedentedly complicated.The successful attempts made by researchers at home and abroad using complexity theory to instruct their studies on educational issues have great methodological significance,which means that complexity theory contributes to breaking the barriers between disciplines and schools,so as to dynamically connect theoretical elements and practical elements in a more comprehensive way.From the perspective of complexity theory,adopting a research method of the combination of theoretical research and case studies and taking the mechanism of principals' instructional leadership in Chinese primary or secondary school as the breakthrough point,this dissertation attempts to answer the basic question of “how do Chinese primary or secondary school principals instruct teaching”.Based on the interactive analysis of the complexity theory and practice cases,it is found that the basic mode of the primary or secondary school teaching system is composed of continuous dynamic generating and frequent reorganization.The motivation of the dynamic generating of the teaching system comes from the interaction between order force(basic order,structural order,generative order)and disorder force(disorder from external environment and within the system)in the organization.There are several aspects of the generating mechanism of teaching system in primary or secondary schools: as regard to teaching and learning,the teaching system obtains order and energy from the environment while accepts disorder,and outputs services,products and disorder through the interaction of the four subsystems including internal structure system,political system,leadership team,cultural system and the disorder elements;feedback from environment on services and products will affect the continuous input of the environment to the system,thus constituting a feedback loop between the system and the environment;in addition to products and services,the dynamic process of the system simultaneously generates internal elements and their interrelationship and it also produces disorder,which therefore constitutes the recursive loop-back of the internal system;the disorder in the environment and the disorder continuously generated from the system constitute the motivation for frequent reorganization.In a word,the teaching system keeps in the endless feedback loops among four combinations including system and the environment,whole and part within the system,stability of the system(pause state)and adaptability(frequent reorganization).The dynamic existence of the teaching system needs to maintain a dynamic balance between diversity and unity,as excessive diversity will enhance the dispersion of the system,excessive uniformity will cause entropy increase of the system due to lack of adaptability and creativity.Above two extreme cases both can cause inefficiency and even elimination of the system.In the dynamic process of the primary or secondary school teaching system,the core roles of the head-teachers' leadership team include that enriching the system's self-organizational attributes as a core team;promoting the self-organization in the subsystems as the role of hetero-organization;creating a dynamic link of system integrity as a control center.The process mechanism of the principal's teaching leadership consists of three aspects: principals,by conducting the process of their leadership that compose of some key sequential behaviors,their personality/concepts/sequential behaviors,finally translate into their followers' corresponding personality/concepts/sequential behaviors;the leadership process involved by principals,their leadership behaviors,and their followers not only generates the order of instructional leadership,but also applies the relevant resources at school and from the environment to the teaching activities,which are thereby embedded into school's the whole teaching system;the effectiveness of the leadership process and the growth of the followers will in return feed back to the principals' personal characteristics,so the feedback loop within the principal's instructional leadership process is formed.However,due to the uncertainty from external environment,the system itself,and rotation of principals,the function of the principal's instructional leadership has certain limitations and cannot fully overcome disordered intrusions.The ideal mode of principals' instructional leadership mechanism needs the sequential behaviors of principal's instructional leadership to maintain a moderate proportion between self-organization and hetero-organization,which is specifically manifested in the dynamic balance of the relationship of the five pairs,including openness-autonomy(system and environment),centralization-empowerment(dominator and subordinator),realizing the development to teacher-realizing the development of issue(Leading and leadership members),authority-intimacy(leaders and followers),and unity-diversity(stability and innovation).The practice of the principal's instructional leadership mechanism can be implemented and improved through the effective combination of two measures,which respectively refers to the optimization of the external administration leadership mechanism in education through establishing multiple co-governance and the staff's open attitude and continuous learning of the principal's instructional leadership mechanism in school.