Doubting leadership: principals shaping a school doubting process within a national curriculum reform

ABSTRACT

Success of curriculum reforms calls for both collaborative learning and unlearning processes. Focusing on the latter, school doubting process, an innovative term, is used in this paper as an active framework for organisational unlearning through which educators question their existing mind-sets and unfreeze old approaches to teaching and learning. This qualitative study explores how high school principals shape a school doubting process during the implementation of a national curriculum reform. The study analyses qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 22 Israeli high school principals who have implemented a national curriculum reform from all school districts. The findings indicate two major themes and sub-themes: (1) Nurturing a collective unlearning culture: (a) restructuring school thinking; and (b) creating safe time and space for school doubting; (2) Building school capacity: (a) creating collective opportunities for knowledge and skill development; and (b) encouraging shared responsibility for innovation.

KEYWORDS:

• School doubting
• principals
• doubting leadership
• unlearning
• curriculum reforms

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sherry Ganon-Shilon

Sherry Ganon-Shilon, PhD, Postdoctoral fellow, Faculty of Psychology and Education, the Open University of Israel. Sherry's research interests include Principals' and Teachers' Sense-Making Processes in Policy Implementation, Leadership in Educational Reform, and Principal Professionalism.

Chen Schechter

Chen Schechter, PhD, Professor, leadership, organizational development and policy in education, School of Education, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Chen is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Educational Administration. He heads the MOFET National Institute for Research and Development in Education. Chen's research interests include leadership development/preparation, educational change/reform in accountability systems, learning from success, collaborative learning strategies, and systems thinking leadership.