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The Role of Prototypicality in Educational Leadership

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The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management Discourse

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Abstract

Educational leadership studies often portray schools as homogeneous professional communities that automatically and willingly endorse the leadership of school principals. For this reason, leadership preparation programs usually include a static set of administrative, technical, and financial skills necessary to operate schools and prompt followers (in-school stakeholders) to engage in actions toward predetermined goals. However, schools are not usually homogeneous communities, but rather they involve informal social groups who potentially have different expectations about the traits and behaviors of school principals. This also suggests that there can be different evaluations about the leadership of the same school principal. In other words, competencies acquired in leadership preparation programs can transform school principals into leaders only in the eyes of social groups whose expectations are met through those competencies. At this point, it should be noted that formal authority does not always bring about leadership and that school principals must get the endorsement of followers to attain leadership status. To be more precise, leadership in schools is co-constructed by school principals and followers rather than being granted by formal authority. Accordingly, relational competencies are needed to create an (if not the) appropriate context through relationship building for the construction of leadership. The preparation of educational leaders is solely not the work of ensuring school principals are equipped with the skills they need for their formal roles. They should first gain the relational skills that can help with the approval of their leadership by social groups in schools possibly carrying rather different leadership expectations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, Burdur, Turkey

    Tuncer Fidan

  2. Management Information Systems, Ankara Medipol University, Ankara, Turkey

    Pınar Ayyıldız

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  1. Tuncer Fidan
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  2. Pınar Ayyıldız
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Correspondence to Tuncer Fidan .

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  1. Department of Educational Leadership, Ball State University, Muncie, IN, USA

    Fenwick W. English

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Fidan, T., Ayyıldız, P. (2022). The Role of Prototypicality in Educational Leadership. In: English, F.W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99097-8_124

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