Exploring the roles of school leaders and teachers in a school‐wide adoption of flipped classroom: School dynamics and institutional cultures

Abstract

While numerous studies have explored the efficiency of instructional design supported by ICT (eg, Blanc, 2018) and the effectiveness of ICT-integrated learning environments (eg, Sun, Lin, Wu, Zhou, & Luo, 2018), most of them are focused on designed instructional activities, procedures or learning environments. How ICT supports instructional reforms in natural settings, especially on an institutional level, still needs further exploration. AbstractWhile the development of digital technologies provides generous resources for educational practices, how the use of information and communication technology (ICT) supports instructional reforms in schools still needs further exploration. The purpose of the study is to understand the roles of school leaders and teachers play in an instructional reform supported by ICT as well as how these roles interact with each other. The study selected a Chinese middle-high school that successfully had a school-wide instructional reform supported by ICT as an exemplary case and collected data through document analysis, interviews and observations. The results indicated that the school leadership was critical in the instructional reform. While the executive vice principal was in an essential position as an initiator and strategic planner, the leadership was distributed and stretched over in the school. The school built supporting pedagogical and organizational systems for continuous and collaborative learning and helped the teachers develop four new roles: learners, facilitators to student-centered learning, collaborators and researchers.

Preparing Teachers to Teach in K-12 Blended Environments: A Systematic Mapping Review of Research Trends, Impact, and Themes

“…The 10 articles in this final competency category presented competencies uncovered during implementing or transitioning to BT. While most of the articles focused on the skills that individual teachers need, Bingham ( 2016 ) and Sun and Gao ( 2019 ) reported the importance of clear roles for teachers, administrators, and other leaders in establishing school-wide BT. Competencies for individual teachers focused on overcoming barriers related to implementing BT.…”

Facilitating innovation with technology: Key actors in educational ecosystems

“…The study of management reported by Sun and Gao () is more ethnographic. It describes a large‐scale intervention that focusses on technology adoption as experienced across the whole school community.…”

“…An ecological perspective involves awareness of the rich variety of settings within which educational practice takes place: accordingly, research will need to confront this variety, to capture and express it. For example, from the corpus of research reported in this Special Issue, there is clearly a significant gulf between “a Chinese middle‐high boarding school” (Sun & Gao, ) and a primary school in a culturally diverse area of New Zealand (Davis et al , ). Yet we should retain faith in the central place of the findings from such case studies.…”

The Uniqueness of Flipped Learning Approach

“…Since innovation develops over time (Yunus, 2018) education has no exemption. Technology-integrated education is one of the chosen ways as it offers unlimited resources to education (Sun & Gao, 2019). It is also a medium of delivering and receiving information between teacher and students (Zaki & Yunus, 2015).…”