Journal of Educational Practice and Research

Academic Leadership in Public Universities – The Case of a National University

Tian-Ming Sheu*, Yu-Chuan Chen, Patricia Yu, & Ya-Wen Shang

As higher education faces challenges in driving innovation, the effectiveness of academic leaders affects an institution’s overall performance. In Taiwan, most of the leading research focuses on leadership in primary and secondary schools. In this study, we interviewed a public university’s academic and administrative directors to outline the responsibilities and expectations of academic leaders, and investigated the problems and challenges that they faced during their work process to propose the support and leadership development needed for them to navigate through the obstacles and challenges. The results illustrate that an ideal academic leader should possess the following essential qualities and skills: enthusiasm, empathy, fairness and openness, and interpersonal communication skills. Academic leaders are faced with problems including budget, student enrollment, professors’ rights, and conflicts between professors and students, and challenges resulting from social change, such as faculty recruitment, student career development, university transformation and self-efficacy in administration. According to these findings, we propose suggestions for revising election procedures of institutional leaders and a leadership development program. The study contributes to this research field by offering insights of the problems and challenges of transiting from a faculty member to an administrator and by proposing a support system to enhance department leaders’ awareness of the importance of their roles and responsibilities in building consensus toward university development direction.

Collaborative Instructional Leadership: A Case study of Elementary School Principal and Teacher Leaders

Jen-Ning Liou*

The study investigates the operating process of a collaborative instructional leadership team composed of principal and teacher leaders, and the professional growth of team members and school teachers during this process. This study presents a case study of a public elementary school in Eastern Taiwan. Seven participants from the school were interviewed including the principal, three teacher leaders, and three school teachers and the interview transcriptions were analyzed. This study reached five conclusions: 1) the collaborative instructional leadership team develops an effective learning through professional co-learning, collaboration and task orientation; 2) being non-restricted by the original role is crucial for the success of the collaborative instructional leadership team’s internal operation ; 3) the conversion and fulfillment of role functions and the promotion of practice orientation are essential strategies for collaborative instructional leadership teams; 4) creating fair, sincere, and pragmatic conversation situations can build an effective communication platform for collaborative instructional leadership teams and school teachers; 5) the collaborative instructional leadership team’s operation can simultaneously improve the professional knowledge and leadership willingness of team members and school teachers. Lastly, this study further proposed suggestions for practical application and future research.

Bedside Itinerant Teachers’ Experience in Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Their Professional Identity

Wen-Chang Teng*& Rui-Long Yan

In order to protect the right to education for children with severe diseases, special education teachers have stepped into the hospitals to become hospital bedside itinerant teachers and have served as the bridge between education and healthcare professions. The job of bedside teachers differs from that of school teachers in that it spanned two different professional fields, which in turn affects the perception of professional identity. This study attempts to understand the interdisciplinary collaborative experience of bedside teachers and their professional identity. This study adopts the qualitative research approach. After acquiring consent from the institution, nine bedside itinerant teachers were recruited. One to two-hour in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted one to three times for each subject. Inductive content qualitative analysis was used to further understand the bedside teaching experience. The challenges in interdisciplinary collaboration were found: (1) interdisciplinary collaboration requires mutual exploration; (2) teaching in the hospital requires reshaping of pedagogical structure; (3) struggling with facing life and death issues; (4) crossing fields challenges the perception of professional identity. With these challenges, the bedside teachers’ experiences of identity were: (1) using self as research material to decipher chaos; (2) regrouping and re-fusion of identity. Based on the results, issues surrounding interdisciplinary collaboration and professional identity were discussed and recommendations were proposed.

Recognizing, Assessing, and Responding to Children’s Interpersonal Sexual Behavior

Yeh-chen Kuo*

The assessments and responses of early childhood workers (ECWs) to children’s interpersonal sexual behaviors (ISBs) are especially crucial in the early childhood stage du to their roles. They are not only educators and protectors but also mandated to report suspected cases of child sexual abuse and are expected to reduce the chances that children develop offender’s behaviors. In the first part of this article, normative data about children’s ISBs to delineate the boundaries of typical and atypical ISB in young children is presented. In the second part, literature about how ECWs responded to children’s ISBs and the factors that influenced their responses are reviewed. Assessment and suggestions for ECW regarding how to respond to children’s ISBs are discussed in the third part of the article. The three dimensions developed by Gail Ryan - lack of consent, lack of equality, or coercion in the interaction -were proposed to explain to children why their behaviors would be perceived as problematic. In the last part of this article, implications of this overview for ECW’s training and future research were proposed. This article benefits ECWs by providing a comprehensive framework for recognizing, assessing, and responding to children’s ISBs. Informed by this article, ECWs will be able to protect young children and promote their healthy sexuality development