ABSTRACT
Principals play a key role in the delivery of quality instruction. Because the principal serves as the educational leader of the school, it is imperative that they have a working knowledge of effective instructional strategies and understand the needs of their students, teachers and communities. Every principal must be anchored in the school system whose roles and responsibilities change the school significantly. Republic Act No. 9155, Chapter 1, Section 7, Letter E, Paragraph 3 states that consistent with the national educational policies, plans and standards, the school heads shall have the Authority, Responsibility and Accountability (AuRA) in managing all affairs in the school. Thus, the success and failure of a school depends on the kind of school principal it has. Principal then in the context of SBM requires a paradigm shift in leadership towards a meaningful implementation of programs in the educational system.
This phenomenological and case study of Filipino leaders aimed to describe on the Leadership Epiphanies: Role, Tacit knowledge and Leadership Dimension of a Secondary Principal in the National Capital Region, aimed to describe the different role performed, body knowledge and incidents of the principals as school leaders. It answers the following questions: (1). What roles do principals performed in transforming the culture of the school? (2.) What body of tacit knowledge do principals gain from their leadership epiphanies? (3.) What critical incidents encountered by the principal respondents in professional career, personal attitudes, and leadership style?
This study employed pure qualitative research methods. The qualitative study, semi-structured interviews were used to gather data as these have been found useful to generate phenomenological data. Transcribes field texts were subjected to phenomenological reduction with the researcher interpreting data from the key informant perspective.
The different roles, like skillful leader, transformer, evaluator, communication, social skills, aesthetic appreciation and emotional intelligence are essential in carrying out their leadership epiphany.
Key Words: epiphany, principal, roles, tacit knowledge
Introduction
In today’s climate of heightened expectations, principals are in the hot seat to improve teaching and learning. They need to perform varied roles as educational visionaries; instructional and curriculum leaders; assessment experts; disciplinarians; community builders; public relations experts; budget analysts; facility managers; special program administrators; and expert overseers of legal, contractual, and policy mandates and initiatives. They are expected to broker the often-conflicting interests of parents, teachers, students, district officials, unions, and state and federal agencies, and they need to be sensitive to the widening range of student needs. Although that job description sounds overwhelming, at least it signals that the field has begun to give overdue recognition to the indispensable role of and mounting demands on principals (DeVita, as cited in Davis, Darling-Hammond, LaPointe, & Meyerson, 2015). This assessment of the importance of principals is echoed repeatedly by educators, researchers focused on leadership, and organizations concerned with ensuring that all students have access to high-quality schools.
A principal can impact the lives of anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand students during a year” (Schmidt-Davis & Bottoms, 2011). But—and this is key to understanding how a good principal supports high levels of teaching and learning— “it is neither teachers alone nor principals alone who improve schools, but teachers and principals working together” (Schmidt-Davis & Bottoms, 2011). Principals are increasingly expected to lead their schools within a framework of collaboration and shared decision making with teachers and other staff members.
For more than a decade, the Wallace Foundation has sponsored rigorous research on school leadership. In a recent report, the foundation highlighted an important message from the research: “A particularly noteworthy finding is the empirical link between school leadership and improved student achievement” (Wallace Foundation, 2011). The foundation said about this link: Education research shows that most school variables, considered separately, have at most small effects on learning. The real payoff comes when individual variables combine to reach critical mass. Creating the conditions under which that can occur is the job of the principal. (Wallace Foundation, 2011).
Researchers Louis, Leithwood, Wahlstrom, and Anderson (2010) concurred with this assessment and drew from findings of a research project that spanned six years: In developing a starting point for this six-year study, they claimed, based on a preliminary review of research, that leadership is second only to classroom instruction as an influence on student learning. After six additional years of research, they are even more
Confident about this claim. To date, they have not found a single case of a school improving its student achievement record in the absence of talented leadership. Why is leadership crucial? One explanation is that leaders have the potential to unleash latent capacities in organizations.
Leadership is second only to classroom instruction among all school-related factors that contribute to what students learn at school. While evidence about leadership effects on student learning can be confusing to interpret, much of the existing research actually underestimates its effects. The total (direct and indirect) effects of leadership on student learning account for about a quarter of total school effects. This evidence supports the present widespread interest in improving leadership as a key to the successful implementation of large-scale reform. Leadership effects are usually largest where and when they are needed most.... While the evidence shows small but significant effects of leadership actions on student learning across the spectrum of schools, existing research also shows that demonstrated effects of successful leadership are considerably greater in schools that are in more difficult circumstances. Indeed, there are virtually no documented instances of troubled schools being turned around without intervention by a powerful leader. Many other factors may contribute to such turnarounds, but leadership is the catalyst. (Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2014).
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