This quantitative study investigates teachers’ perceptions of how Emotional Intelligence (EI) was utilised by their school principals to manage mandated curriculum change processes in schools in the Johannesburg North district of Gauteng in South Africa. Research shows that EI consists of a range of fundamental skills that could enable school principals to facilitate the curriculum changes that are mandated by the Department of Basic Education and implemented by teachers in their classrooms. Researchers argue that principals could simply instruct teachers that the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statements, for example, are mandated by top management and that they have to implement them, or they could use EI skills to obtain teachers’ collaboration and commitment to implement the mandated changes. Using a quantitative research method, a structured questionnaire was administered to a sample of 600 Foundation Phase and Grade 10 teachers to probe their perceptions about the extent to which leadership utilised EI to manage mandated curriculum change. The results of this investigation show that there is a strong correlation between the utilisation of EI by school principals and the implementation of the mandated changes.
A B S T R A C TThis article examines the factors which impact upon the creation of a school environment for the effective management of cultural diversity as legislated for in the directive principles of the South African Schools Act of 1996 and the Schools Education Act of 1995. The two Acts determine that every person shall have the right to basic education and to equal access to schools and centres of learning. It is within this framework that this research was undertaken employing a quantitative research method. The research demonstrated that a school environment for the effective management of cultural diversity can be achieved through creative approaches to professional management and school governance, characterized by a collaborative management style. Managing cultural diversity can often be complicated by communication problems and stereotyping due to differences based on moral, ethical, socio-political and economic issues. The previous divisions of schools under the pre-1994 regime according to departments of education and mother tongue were found to be both statistically and substantially significant as independent variables for the management of cultural diversity. K E Y W O R D S collaborative management, cultural diversity, governance, management of diversity, school effectiveness
Attempts to improve poor academic performance in South African public schools resulted in the Schooling 2025 mandate, which stipulated the academic standards that learners needed to achieve by 2014. As school leaders must do this through their teachers the emotional tensions associated with such changes are likely to increase. This paper investigates the use of emotional competence by school leaders via the perceptions of their teachers. Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analyses of the data obtained from a random sample of 2386 teachers indicated that the postulated five sub-dimensions associated with emotional competence could be reduced to two, namely intrapersonal and interpersonal. The Structural Equation Model suggested a strong positive causal relationship between the two competences and hence a good understanding and regulation of one's own emotions, influences, understanding and relationships with others. A school leader with a good understanding of their personal emotional competence will have a greater influence on social orientation towards others and possibly lead to improved interpersonal competence. In the South African context it was found that both competences are associated with gender, school type, socio-economic contexts of the learners and home language of the educators.
This study investigates the perceptions held by the teaching fraternity of teacher competence. The original eight areas of competence (the learning environment, professional commitment of the teacher, discipline, educational foundation of the teacher, teacher reflection, cooperative ability of the teacher, effectiveness and leadership style) were based on a research project completed in June 1995 where 1265 teachers were asked to give their perceptions on 74 items based on what competent teachers do. During 1996 eight groups of MEd students used a literature study to investigate these eight original theoretical constructs in greater detail. They designed a structured questionnaire containing 108 items relating to teacher competence and two successive factor analyses on the data revealed two factors which were named: (1) educative competence; and (2) collaborative competence.
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