The object of this study is to analyze the relationship between the principal’s leadership and the professional development of teachers so as to make quality improvement of early childhood education and to enable such institutes to respond to the de...
The object of this study is to analyze the relationship between the principal’s leadership and the professional development of teachers so as to make quality improvement of early childhood education and to enable such institutes to respond to the demands of the fast changing society. Through the analysis, the basic data to lay the foundation for the desirable leadership of principals and professional development of teachers, which are befitting to the operation of kindergartens, will be provided as an ultimate object of this paper.
To achieve such objectives, the key items for study are set as follow;
1. How about the co-relationship between the principal’s leadership perceived by the teachers and the teachers’ professional development?
2. What kinds of impact are imposed the principal’s leadership perceived by the teachers on the teachers’ professional development?
Through the random selection of 46 private kindergartens in downtown of Busan, a total number of 300 teachers are selected as subjects; the questionnaire developed by Kim, Il-sun (2005) based on MLQ Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire) developed by Bass in 1988 is in use to assess types of principal leaderships and the questionnaire developed by Caruso, J. J and F.T.(1999) and translated by Cho, Bu-kyung, Back, Eun-ju and Seo, So-young (2001) is adjusted in line with the circumstances of Korea is used to assess the professional development of the teachers.
According to the objective of this paper, relationship between the principal’s leadership perceived by the teachers and the teachers’ professional development, the data analysis of this paper is done in separated surveys for principal leadership and professional development of teachers, respectively. By applying SPSS 15.0 program, the average, standard deviation and correlation coefficient are calculated and then, stepwise regression is conducted so as to have conclusions as follow;
First, there is the significant co-relationship between the principals’ leadership and the professional developmentof the teachers. As for the professional development of the teachers, the self-acknowledgement factor has the highest co-relationship with transformational and transactional leaderships both while as for the demand for professional development; the transactional leadership has greater co-relationship than the transformational leadership.
Second, it was found the individual care and intellectual stimulus as the principal's innovative leadership factors and the situational compensation as the transactional leadership factor had greatly influenced on the teacher's speciality (professionalism) development. Although the study result showed that the principal's leadership generally influenced on the teacher's speciality development, the principal's leadership was found to insignificantly influence on the teacher's speciality development. Really, the influence rate of principal's leadership was below 10% in the all items except the leadership's intellectual stimulus and individual care in the effective communication for theachers' speciality development.