Understanding China's School Leadership

Daming Feng Understanding China’s School Leadership Interpreting the Terminology Understanding China’s School Leadership Daming Feng Understanding China’s School Leadership Interpreting the Terminology Daming Feng Faculty of Education East China Normal University Shanghai, China ISBN 978-981-15-0555-3 ISBN 978-981-15-0749-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0749-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adap- tation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Preface “China, with its geographical, historical, cultural, and political distance from the West, long has been a black box upon which we readily paste labels communist, non-Western, developing country but whose internal logic remains a mystery to us”. (Cohen, 2010) In this global era and also with China’s rapid developing economy over these decades, the international education community has a growing interest in understanding how school leadership works in China’s context. Understanding China’s School Leadership: Interpreting the Terminology1 is a book on school leadership in China’s context, but is not the school leadership book in the conventional sense and with common formats. This book primarily focuses on the key terms2 widely accepted and high-frequency used in school leadership practice in China, which may be a bit difficult to understand for outsiders. It is not a book based on an empirical study, in which a specific issue of China’s school leadership is concerned. Rather, it seeks to provide a broader, but nuanced and accurate picture with ample information about current status of China’s school leadership by attempting to explore a set of key terms and explicate the real meaning of them so as to assist readers to have access to China’s school leadership terminology system, which would be likely to help international audience to understand the fundamental characteristics of China’s school leadership practice, and even to gain insight into the internal dynamic and hidden logic of school leadership practice in China’s context. 1The term of “China’s school leadership”, instead of “Chinese school leadership”, is deliberately used so that the scope of this book is confined to the school leadership in mainland China. Namely, the school leadership in Chinese communities out of the mainland will be excluded. 2Chinese does not have an alphabet but uses a logographic system (Hanzi) for its written language. Symbols usually represent the words themselves in Chinese—words are not made up of various letters as in English. Because of this difference, a Chinese term made up of a few words may present as a sentence some times after the term is translated into English. On this account, each term in this book is expressed by Pinyin (spelled-out sounds) with meaning of the term in English. For instance: DA-QI-WAN-CHENG [Great talent takes time to mature]. v vi Preface Tab. I Key leadership practices set by the MOE 1. Planning school development 2. Creating a culture fostering student development 3. Leading the curriculum and instruction 4. Guiding and facilitating teacher development 5. Optimizing internal management 6. Accommodating the external environment Framework of the Book Given the aims and format of the book, all selected terms need to be couched within a framework which was composed of several categories of key practices of school leadership. To build the framework for this book, it was, perhaps, not very difficult for us to borrow an existing one from Western literature. Christopher Day and his colleagues, for example, had identified and outlined four categories of key leadership practices in a recent published book (Day, et al. 2011:17–30). Also, we can borrow the “six key areas for the role of the headteacher” set out in 2004 by Department for Education and Skills, the United Kingdom (DfES, 2004), or the “five professional practices to the role of the principal” from Australian Professional Standard for Principals (AITSL, 2011) as the framework of this book. However, some Western scholars had recently challenged the appropriateness of such borrowing in non-Western contexts (Dimmock and Walker, 2005; Walker, et al., 2012; Bush, 2014.) and argued that “it is highly suspicious of Western ideas, theories and frameworks applied to non-Western settings as means of understanding leadership”. (Dimmock and Walker, 2005, p. 2) For the author of this book took a similar view to these Western scholars, he decided to build a framework as far as possible to fit for the policy context and practical logic of China’s leadership practice. To this end, it seemed to the authors that one of possible alternatives was based on two policy documents, The Professional Standards for Principals of Compulsory Education Schools3 (MOE, 2013) and The Professional Standards for Principals of Senior High Schools (MOE, 2015) issued by the Ministry of Education (MOE) of China, which set out the professional standards for compulsory education school and senior high school principals in six key non-hierarchical leadership practices (see Tab. I). Obviously, the professional standards implied the fundamental expectations of Chinese government for school principals since the MOE pointed out in above-mentioned documents that the standards would serve as one of major bases in the future to develop the qualification standards, training standards, and appraisal standards for compulsory education school and senior high school principals (MOE, 2013, 2015). Hence, it seems reasonable that these six 3The nine-year compulsory education of China encompasses primary and junior secondary education. Therefore, the compulsory education schools usually refer to primary schools and junior high schools. Preface vii categories of leadership practices are employed as the framework of this book. Besides, it could be also essential for the audience who has little background knowledge of education in China to obtain synthetic information about China’s school leadership and the specific policy for management of school headship. With this in mind, “China’s school leadership: an overview” and “The policy regarding principal management” were included in the framework of this book. Methodology for the Terms Selection and Interpretation To select the critical key terms which are paramount to understand school leadership in China, the terms explored in this book were not picked up in a random manner. Rather, the terms selection was based on literature review, questionnaire surveys, and interviews. At the stage of literature review, sources consisting of the laws on education, policy documents of Chinese central government and local education authorities, strategic plans as well as rulebooks and other practical texts from schools, journal articles, conference papers and research reports about the best practices of school leadership, and books of introducing or analyzing successful school leadership cases, particularly those authored by school principals were extensively examined. From the literature review, the high-frequency used terms with high influence on school development and leadership practice were identified. Most of the terms that preliminarily identified would be examined again in the practical context of school leadership by large-sized questionnaire surveys on school leaders and teachers as well as by the interviews with school principals and directors of county/district-level education bureau4 to verify significance of the terms in China’s school leadership context. After the stage of questionnaire survey and interview, the key terms that would be couched within the framework of this book were selected. For the terms interpretation, these key terms were examined in relation to their own origin and development based on relevant literature review. Meanwhile, the real

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