Change in leadership behaviour through online professional development programme: contextualising community based identity cohesion and intentionality

Abstract

School principals play a crucial leadership role by managing four components of their schools’ organizational capacity: teachers’ skills, professional community, technical resources, and program coherence. Though important in most contexts, leadership behaviour is particularly crucial in developing countries such as India where public schools struggle with many problems such as teacher absenteeism, learning difficulties among students, shortage of resources, and the difficulties faced by first-generation learners. In such contexts, conventional professional development programs, which are usually academic knowledge-based and expert-driven—identified in literature as ‘first space’ programs—have been criticized for their effectiveness. ‘Second space’ programs, based on field or experiential knowledge generated from solving the problems faced in practice, are rare, and perhaps can be criticized for their neglect of theory. A program developed in the conceptual 'third space' that dissolves the boundaries between the first and second spaces, giving equal importance to theory and practice, the expert and the novice, and teacher educators and teachers, therefore, seeks to blend academic knowledge and field-based knowledge related to leadership. This thesis uses a mixed method approach to study such a professional development program, developed in India for government elementary school principals, and delivered online, in order to assess its effectiveness in developing school leadership behaviour. Second, the thesis studies the program’s emergent virtual community, given that the broader social context in India is characterized by high context cultural discourse, values hierarchy, and high power distance. Both these aspects are missing in the current literature of third space and online professional development programs in developing countries. The results of structural equation modeling indicate that the program was successful in positively influencing the change-oriented behaviour of school principals. Case study analysis showed that the emergent community exhibited features of a ‘goal oriented community of interest’ based on membership, with interactions among members of an inner circle. The findings also show that schools exhibiting features of learning organizations where boundaries between different groups of teachers were broken and collective learning was promoted reflected higher change in positive perceptions of leadership behaviour.