Li, Lin
(2022)
Teacher leadership: an investigation of early-career teacher leadership development of public schools in Northwest China, Gansu Province.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
The strong advocacy and the quest for teacher leadership in the twenty-first century bear the premise that teacher leadership is an important ingredient in teacher professional development, student performance, and school effectiveness (Bush, 2016; Katzenmeyer and Moller, 2009; Wang and Ho, 2019). There is a paucity of the investigation of teacher leadership of young and early-career teachers, especially in Asian context where educational systems are highly centralised (Bush and Ng, 2019; Szeto, 2020). This study is to investigate teacher leadership development of early-career teachers in general and specifically on factors that facilitate as well as factors that impede teacher leadership development in public schools of Northwest China, Gansu Province. This study was underpinned by the constructivist theory (Lambert, 1998; 2003), distributed leadership theory (Muijs and Harris, 2006), and the social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1997) through an ecological lens (Bronfenbrenner, 2005).
Informed by the pragmatic research paradigm, this study has adopted an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design to answer the research questions and address the research gaps. Evidence shows that teacher leadership development of early-career teachers is a continuum, evolving from classrooms, groups, to school levels, orchestrated by the interplay of school culture, teacher leadership readiness, and leadership strategies or skills. School culture plays a significant and strong predictor of teacher leadership readiness of early-career teachers for their leadership development, especially from the perspectives of professional development and recognition. Early-career teachers practised more instructional leadership in their classrooms because of the cultural characteristics such as power distance, power relationship, and authority openness. The centrality of early-career teacher leadership development is capacity building and gaining recognition, which is the ‘professional expertition’ proposed in this study.
| Item Type: |
Thesis (University of Nottingham only)
(PhD)
|
| Supervisors: |
Ng, Ashley Yoon Mooi |
| Keywords: |
teacher leadership, early-career teachers, school culture, teacher leadership readiness, professional learning and development |
| Subjects: |
L Education > L Education (General) |
| Faculties/Schools: |
University of Nottingham, Malaysia > Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences > School of Education |
| Item ID: |
67497 |
| Depositing User: |
Li, Lin
|
| Date Deposited: |
26 Feb 2022 04:40 |
| Last Modified: |
26 Feb 2024 04:30 |
| URI: |
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/67497 |
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