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THREE STUDIES
Role of School Principal
Role of School Committee
Change in Probolinggo District
Elizabeth Sweeting, Muhlisoh, Furaidah, and Supriyono Koes
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Study 1. Role of the School Principal
School principals have two roles, first providing instructional leadership to their teachers and second, providing management leadership. The education reforms of school based management (SBM) and school committees, introduced as part of decentralization, give school principals greater opportunities to implement more fully the various functions of these two roles. This study explored how far school principals were implementing the various functions of these roles. Data was collected from a variety of respondents during visits to schools, including many where changes were known to have taken place, and the research used both qualitative and quantitative methods.
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Many of the sampled school principals have taken up the opportunities offered by SBM to adjust their behaviour to meet the new situation in their school and community, and to implement changes. They recognized that they need to be a colleague rather than a boss with their teachers and collaborate more closely with them and the community in school affairs.
This included conducting a number of key management tasks such as visiting classrooms to encourage and support the implementation of active teaching learning methods (PAKEM), holding informal meetings with teachers to stimulate, discuss and share innovations, and appreciating and supporting the work done for the school by the community through the school committee.
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Open and accountable management involving a variety of stakeholders, including the teachers and community working together to plan school finances and develop the school program. The school plan and budget are displayed openly for everyone to see.
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Some of the reported changed behaviours of school principals included
(i) open management - being transparent, accountable and inclusive about plans, finances and the school program with both teachers and the community,
(ii) creating and managing a friendly, positive learning atmosphere in the school, and
(iii) being open to and supportive of innovations.
On the other hand, school principals were more restrained in such behaviours as delegating responsibility for the implementation of school program activities to others, visiting and monitoring their teachers classrooms for any length of time, or holding formal meetings with school committee or parents more frequently than monthly or every three months.
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The school principal undertaking classroom supervision to encourage and support the implementation of PAKEM. He is sitting helping the children
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The principal encourages the teachers to create and friendly and positive learning environment in the school.
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The more adventurous school principals were at the stage where they and some of their teachers were able to develop their own innovations, becoming the schools that other teachers and school principals visited in their search for ideas. These more progressive school principals also used a variety of strategies to both encourage their teachers to innovate and to disseminate innovations to others within the school.
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As well as identifying limited funds as a constraint to improved practice, some school principals candidly noted their own need for self-improvement. Moreover, the more perceptive school principals acknowledged that their teachers also faced constraints to changing their classroom behaviour, and rather than declaring them non-responsive to change, and made positive attempts to assist them overcome their fear about the impact of change on themselves and their pupils.
A major concern of school principals and their staff, was the unknown impact that using PAKEM methods would have on pupil's performance on the end of primary school examinations (UAS) which remain largely multiple-choice in nature and test the recall of facts. In conclusion, school principals would appear to be more comfortable in the role of management leader than of instructional leader.
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The principal supports teachers' innovations. In this case a parent is helping the teacher in class
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Self perceptions of the school principal's role focused more on the former and some considered that "teaching was the business of the teachers". For their part, teachers and school committee members saw the role of the school principal in relation to their own role within the school. In this, teachers focused on their need to be supported by the school principal in their classroom work. For their part, committee members listed those functions which were part of the school principal's assigned role during committee meetings, namely: "facilitator, motivator, advisor, initiator, mediator and a partner".
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