Understanding School Leaders’ Characteristics and Estimating the Future

Abstract

Responsiveness to the rapidly changing environment and a set of circumstances might be a key argument for educational leaders. We addressed the following specific questions: 1) What are your school leader’s weak characteristics as a school leader? 2) What are your school leader’s strong characteristics as school leaders? And 3) according to you, what kind of characteristics your school leader will need in the forthcoming twenty-five years as a school leader? The purpose of the study is to determine the strong and weak characteristics of current school leaders and trying to estimate and draw an overview about characteristics of future school leaders depending on the views of teachers. The study was conducted by qualitative interviewing. The study group in the research was determined by two types of purposeful sampling: 1) convenience sampling and 2) maximum variation sampling. The study group consisted of 56 teachers from various European countries. In the analysis, NVivo 10 was used and the data were analyzed by content analysis technique. The results illustrated that weak, strong and estimated characteristics as they were stated by the respondents were consistent in that they provided three kinds of data including weak and strong the characteristics of current school leaders, estimated future characteristics and a picture of the criteria to evaluate leadership Educating people undoubtedly will be based on “human relations”, “face to face” and “in the classrooms teaching” while technology and its all kinds of derivatives are presumed only to be the means to reach the goals.