Abstract:

Aware of the importance of leadership in improving schools and of the chances that today’s pre-service teachers have of exercising it formally and informally, the aim of this study is to find out how these pre-service teachers perceive principalship and educational leadership before and after working on the subject as part of the course on Management and Innovation in Educational Contexts. To this end we worked with a sample of 81 students enrolled in two of the groups comprising the Degree in Primary Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alicante. They all completed two questionnaires (pretest and posttest) containing identical questions, three open and one closed. In order to understand the issue in all its complexity, we followed a mixed-method approach and carried out both content and descriptive analyses. It can be deduced from the results that, initially, most participants defined leadership as the role played by the person occupying the position of school principal, mainly involving bureaucratic and administrative tasks. Their idea of leadership was completely individualist and related to decision-making power. However, once they had worked on the subject, there was an increase in the number of definitions closer to the idea of instructional leadership or leadership for learning. This was evident from the new definitions, which contained terms such as innovation, change and educational improvement. Nevertheless, this change in their perceptions included little in the way of definitions approaching the concept of distributed leadership. Paradoxically, and despite the fact that there was also a slight change in the metaphors suggested, the leadership model underlying the vast majority of them was still individualist and administrative, focusing on management and emphasizing the heroic qualities of the person responsible for it. Although at first most of the students rejected the idea of applying for the post of principal in the course of their career, there was a positive change in their attitude once they had studied the subject. In conclusion, the study of principalship and leadership has the ability to change conceptions and attitudes towards the subject, which suggests that work should continue in this area. Indeed, it might be a good idea to go into the issue in greater depth given that, although changes consistent with the reality of leadership and school management in the current literature are explicit, implicitly the classical leadership models continue to predominate.

Keywords:

Principalship, educational leadership, metaphors, changing conceptions, mixed research methodology.