Abstract:

Chinese Secondary school principals create a positive, supportive learning culture with trust among teachers, students, parents, and staff are essential for the school leaders to develop a sustainable school improvement. This study is to explore the role of secondary school principals who promote learning-centered leadership and teachers' trust in fostering their learning in schools. Specifically, the authors aim to investigate the nature of learning-centered leadership to teachers' trust and professional learning in school. Also, the study navigates how learning-centered leadership practices influence teacher trust and professional learning and how the school principal builds a trust culture to establish a productive learning environment for teachers to foster student achievement. The study is employed a qualitative research study through document analysis, observation, memos, and experience reflection. In the social-cultural context, the school principal could reaffirm the efficacy of school-level leadership to build a safe, trust, collaborative, critical ability, empathy, supportive learning culture in the school setting. However, the top-down authoritative leadership rob teachers' motivation and limit the school sustainable professional learning, school program implementation, and students' creativity. The study suggests that learning-centered leadership and teacher leaders could generate in mainland China, and the study explores the nature of education in the educational core values of trust, caring, disposition, and self-conscience in the literature.

Keywords:

China, trust, leadership, school principal, teacher, student, parent, teacher learning.