METAPHORS AS A RESOURCE FOR DISCOVERING THE LEADERSHIP MODELS THAT FUTURE TEACHERS ASSOCIATE WITH THE JOB OF PRINCIPAL

The starting point for this study is the acknowledgement that metaphors are not only a literary resource but can also be used as a cognitive instrument to evaluate behaviour. The aim is to employ this resource to discover, interpret and assess the leadership models that future teachers associate with the job of principal. This involved the participation of 113 students on the Pre-School Education and Primary Education degree courses taught in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alicante. A qualitative method of research was chosen for the purposes of understanding the great many shades of meaning found when interpreting what the participants had said. In particular, and bearing in mind Hsieh and Shannon’s (2005) classification of content analysis approaches, we used direct content analysis (based on predefined theoretical ideas) to identify leadership models in the metaphors proposed by participants. A summative content analysis was also used, with which frequencies (the number of times participants refer to a given leadership model in their metaphors) have been taken into account to complement information of a narrative nature. The analysis process was carried out with the help of Aquad 7 software. The questionnaire comprised ten open questions designed to identify leadership models, what they had been taught about them, and the motivations that would lead teachers in training to occupy the post of principal in the course of their future careers. This research focuses on just one of these questions, in which participants were asked to think of a metaphor that for them represented the figure of the principal. It can be deduced from the results that the majority of participants tend to suggest metaphors that associate the principal with a managerial leadership model of an individualist character. This means that they considered the basis of leadership focuses on administrative functions, allowing the proper development of other areas in the school, from a point of view of the principal as a source of individual power and authority. They also relate albeit to a lesser extent the principal with an instructional leadership model and with a more relational one, concerned with the well-being of the members of the community. Both of them from an individualist point of view as in the case of managerial leadership. These opinions, which may have been conditioned by previous educational experience, lead us to believe that there is a need for teacher training centres to work towards making this view more complete and bring it into line with more social, distributed leadership models.