Practices and problems of school leadership in secondary schools of metekel zone: benishangul gumuz region

Abstract

The major purpose of this research was to assess the practices and problems of secondary school leadership to see how it is practiced. The extent to which the school leadership influences all stakeholders and get them actively engage in all school activities to provide quality education for the pupils was given due emphasis. Proposing possible solutions which will help the schools to improve their practice was also the concern of this study. Hence, four basic questions were formulated to assess practices of school leadership and identify the major problems. To conduct this research descriptive research design was employed. Mixed research methods were employed giving more emphasis to quantitative one to conduct this research. The study was delimited to Metekel zone secondary schools of the zone. For collecting necessary data for this research, 9 principals, 9 PTA coordinators and 45 department heads of the sample secondary schools were included using purposive sampling technique and 118 teachers were selected as respondents by using lottery method of simple random sampling technique. The researcher used questionnaires to gather data from department head and teacher respondents. To collect qualitative data from principals and PTA coordinators semi structured interview guide was used. In addition, important documents related the practices of school leadership were also analyzed. The data collected using close-ended questions of the questionnaire were analyzed mainly using quantitative data analysis method. In doing so, frequency and percentage were used. Chi-square test was used to test weather significant statistical difference was observed or not between responses of two respondent groups. But the responses obtained through interview and results of document analysis were analyzed qualitatively for the sake of validating and triangulating the quantitatively analyzed data. Accordingly, the findings of the research indicated that school leadership practices in secondary schools of the study area were poor. Lack of trends of setting common school vision and values, under qualification level of school principals, weak relationship of parents and the school, lack of commitment, lack of basic leadership skill of principals, principals poor engagement in enhancing organizational related resources such as poor laboratory, library and plasma service, weak support of parents to follow up their student learning were some of the main findings . Therefore, creating school vision and values, to develop risk taking culture, develop mechanism of evaluating student progress and leadership effectiveness consistently, promote quality instruction and innovative teaching method, taking feedback from all stakeholders, create strong relationship with parents, to work hard to fulfill educational equipment are recommended by the researcher for secondary schools of the study area to be done