TITLE:
Understanding School Leaders’ Characteristics and Estimating the Future
AUTHORS:
Ali Sabanci, Ahmet Şahin, Gamze Kasalak
KEYWORDS:
Leadership; School Leader; Characteristics of Leaders; Leadership in Future
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Leadership,
Vol.2 No.3,
August
23,
2013
ABSTRACT: Responsiveness to the rapidly changing
environment and a set of circumstances might be a key argument for educational
leaders. We addressed the following specific questions: 1) What are your school
leader’s weak characteristics as a school leader? 2) What are your school
leader’s strong characteristics as school leaders? And 3) according to you,
what kind of characteristics your school leader will need in the forthcoming
twenty-five years as a school leader? The purpose of the study is to determine
the strong and weak characteristics of current school leaders and trying to
estimate and draw an overview about characteristics of future school leaders
depending on the views of teachers. The study was conducted by qualitative
interviewing. The study group in the research was determined by two types of
purposeful sampling: 1) convenience sampling and 2) maximum variation sampling.
The study group consisted of 56 teachers from various European countries. In
the analysis, NVivo 10 was used and the data were analyzed by content analysis
technique. The results illustrated that weak, strong and estimated
characteristics as they were stated by the respondents were consistent in that
they provided three kinds of data including weak and strong the characteristics
of current school leaders, estimated future characteristics and a picture of
the criteria to evaluate leadership Educating people undoubtedly will be based
on “human relations”, “face to face” and “in the classrooms teaching” while
technology and its all kinds of derivatives are presumed only to be the means
to reach the goals.