Unpacking the effects of culture on school leadership and teacher learning in China

By Shengnan Liu, Philip Hallinger. 2020

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Teacher professional learning plays a critical role in education reform by enabling teachers to refine their professional skills and keep up with changing content knowledge, pedagogy, and trends in schooling. This study examines how and under what conditions principal instructional leadership contributes to teachers’ professional learning in mainland China. Data collected from 1194 teachers in 64 primary and middle schools in mainland China were analyzed using structural equation modeling and bootstrapping tests. The research tested a moderated mediation model of instructional leadership effects on teacher professional learning in which teacher self-efficacy was included as the mediator and power distance orientation of teachers as the moderator. The results reaffirmed the partial mediation model, finding significant direct and indirect effects of principal instructional leadership on teacher professional learning. Further model testing found that the individual power distance orientation of teachers acted as a significant moderator of principal instructional leadership effects on both teacher self-efficacy and professional learning. When teachers perceived lower power distance in relations with their principals, the effects of principal instructional leadership were stronger than for counterparts who perceived high power distance. Implications for understanding the contextualized nature of school leadership during an era of cultural change are discussed.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c12470c097fcbd72eb50dd5bb315d9e02af305ae

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In Education

1. A. Kılınç
2. Mahmut Polatcan
3. M. Bellibaş
4. S. Gümüş
5. Ö. Çoban
6. N. Özdemir
7. Alex J. Bowers
8. Fatih Bektas

Citations in the corpus

• The Moderation Role of Transformational Leadership in the Effect of Instructional Leadership on Teacher Professional Learning and Instructional Practice: An Integrated Leadership Perspective (2021, background): “This type of learning, by nature, falls short of meeting the individual needs of teachers and limits teacher autonomy to choose the content of such activities (Shengnan & Hallinger, 2021; Thoonen et al., 2012).”
• Trust in principals, leaders’ focus on instruction, teacher collaboration, and teacher self-efficacy: testing a multilevel mediation model (2020, background): “…that principals’ focus on creating a vision and goals for student learning, mentoring teachers and students for success, and encouraging teacher professional development can enhance teachers’ sense of self-efficacy (e.g. Çalık et al., 2012; McGuigan and Hoy, 2006; Shengnan and Hallinger, 2020).”
• The effects of distributed leadership on teacher professional learning: mediating roles of teacher trust in principal and teacher motivation (2020, background): “Therefore, the proposed link between teacher professional learning and advanced student outcomes has also attracted a substantial amount of research attention in recent years (e.g. Lai, Li, and Gong 2016; Leithwood and Jantzi 2006; Shengnan and Hallinger 2020; Tran and Le 2018).”
• Authentic leadership and teachers’ voice behaviour: The mediating role of psychological empowerment and moderating role of interpersonal trust (2020, background): “Chinese culture is a typical kind of eastern culture influenced by Confucian doctrine (Shengnan and Hallinger, 2020).”