Early experience of first-time principals in Saudi Arabia

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to explore novice principals’ attempts to make sense of their new organisational roles, challenges and discrepancies. To frame our work, we focused on new comer sense-making perspective of job socialisation. Sense-making is a relevant conceptual perspective through which novice principals come to discover, interpret and respond to their new pluralistic context. Data were drawn from a longitudinal study of novice principals in one of the largest provinces in Saudi Arabia. The analysis focuses on interview data collected from sample of 12 randomly selected newly hired first-time principals after they were selected. We interviewed them before and during the school year. We find that almost all of the novices experienced four main problems of practice – multiple roles, loneliness and isolation, workflow, and legacy and style of former administration. Our conclusions inform the need to focus on the principals’ occupational socialisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Sense-making perspective
• job socialisation
• novice principals
• principal roles
• transition challenges to principalship

Disclosure statement

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