März, Virginie
[UCL]
Frenay, Mariane
[UCL]
Lauwers, Ingrid
Patiño, Isabel
Marín, Eduardo
Over the last 20 years, leadership practices have been widely studied in western countries. Empirical evidence has shown the important impact of effective school leaders on student achievement and on a range of different working conditions (Hallinger & Huber, 2012; Leithwood, Patten, & Jantzi, 2010, and more specifically on teacher motivation (Avidov-Ungar, Friedman, & Olshtain, 2014; Sun & Leithwood, 2015). It is only recently that leadership and leadership professional development are becoming a concern in developing countries as well, especially in the Latin American region (Avalos, 2011; Weinstein & Hernandez, 2016). Weinstein, Azar, and Flessa (2018), for instance, state that: “This focus on professional development is happening in a context of a change in the conceptualization of the school leaders’ role, in which the administrative dimension, dominant in a not-so-distant past, is diminished while an emphasis on educational and pedagogical dimensions grows and school leaders are required to lead school improvement processes in the institutions that they lead” (p. 227). This study is part of a bigger longitudinal research project regarding leadership development through the implementation of professional learning communities. We will present the results of our first study, which aims to better understand the current situation of leadership as well as teacher motivation in Ecuadorian schools (T0 measurement). More specifically, we aim to respond to the following research questions: RQ1: How do school leaders perceive their leadership role? RQ2: How do teachers perceive the role of school leaders? RQ3: What types of teacher motivation can be distinguished in Ecuadorian schools? RQ4: What kind of link does exist between the perceived leadership role and teacher motivation? At an empirical level, this study aims to contribute to the need for more educational research within the Ecuadorian context. At a theoretical level, we want to contribute to the conceptualization of leadership in Ecuadorian schools. Although during the last 10 years the Ministry of Education has considered to redefine the role of the school leaders, with a focus on more distributed approaches, there is “little research on school management and its impact on the positive transformation of schools” (Rodríguez, 2017, p. 81). We want to contribute to a cross-cultural adaptation and validation of existing (mostly Western) leadership concepts.


Bibliographic reference |
März, Virginie ; Frenay, Mariane ; Lauwers, Ingrid ; Patiño, Isabel ; Marín, Eduardo. Towards a distributed model of school leadership in Ecuador: A cross-cultural validation study.Conferencia Internacional de Investigación Educativa (ASEFIE) (Cuenca, Ecuador, du 25/11/2019 au 29/11/2019). |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/225305 |