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Facilitative school leadership and teacher empowerment: Teacher's perspectives

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Abstract

In recent years, facilitative forms of leadership and teacher empowerment for the democratic restructuring of schools have been emphasized. However, no published studies seem to have examined teachers' perspectives of both facilitative school leadership and empowerment. This article describes the everyday strategies and personal characteristics of exemplary principals practicing facilitative leadership in shared-governance schools and how these principals influenced teacher empowerment. The date were drawn from a qualitative study of teachers in 11 schools in Georgia. An openended questionnaire was designed to provide teachers the opportunity to identify and describe in detail the characteristics of principals that enhanced their sense of empowerment and what being empowered means to teachers. Inductive analyses of the data generated seven major strategies, one set of personal characteristics identified with facilitative leadership, and two major dimensions of teacher empowerment: affective and professional. This article emphasizes the meanings teachers identified with empowerment.

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  1. University of Georgia, Geogia, USA

    Joseph Blase & Jo Blase

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  1. Joseph Blase
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Blase, J., Blase, J. Facilitative school leadership and teacher empowerment: Teacher's perspectives. Social Psychology of Education 1, 117–145 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02334729

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