Large-scale change and survival of school principals in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Turkey possess one of the most vibrant educational systems in the World. This study specifically aims at revealing Turkish school principals’ perceptions about the large-scale changes imposed by the Ministry of Education and the strategies they follow for coping with these changes. The study was designed as a generic qualitative study. Twenty principals from different schools at different levels were identified through snowball sampling and semi-structured interviews were conducted with each of them. The decoupling between change interventions and the needed change, inappropriate change implementation process, the passive role of the school principals in the design phase of change interventions are some of the major challenges that school principals encounter. The passivity of the principals during design phase put them into a state of reluctant activeness to find out resources, create readiness and adopt a mediating role between top authority and the teachers in order to implement the imposed changes.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational change
• change leadership
• imposed policies
• school principals
• education reform
• Turkey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Yasar Kondakci is a professor in Educational Administration and Planing at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. His research focuses on educational change, social justice and higher education. Yasar Kondakci is the section editor of Research in Educational Administration & Leadership and the associate editor of Educational Administration: Theory and Practice.

Deniz Orucu is an assistant professor in educational administration at Baskent University. Her research interests are refugee schools, multicultural education, educational leadership, theoretical underpinnings of EMAL, classroom management, educational policy and qualitative research methodology.

Ebru Oguz works as an associate professor at the Department of Educational Science, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Turkey. Her research field includes leadership, classroom management and school management and she is interested in professional development and social justice.

Kadir Beycioglu is an associate professor of educational administration at Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir, Turkey. He has published articles and books nationally and internationally. Dr Beycioglu is editing two journals and sitting in the editorial board of many national/international journals. He also has many professional duties.