M.Ed. / This treatise, which deals with "Effective Teamwork" as an educational imperative for school principals, will hopefully serve as an information source for the school principal. From this study it has become clear that the school principal of today has a comprehensive and complex role to play, a role characterised to a great extent by the responsibility to ensure educational excellence in his/her school. Achieving this objective is not an easy task, since education today is constantly subject to change which may include internal and external factors and may also vary in complexity and intensity. In this continual quest for excellence in education, the school principal must have the skills to: identify the changes; and effectively handle the changes. However, the task of identifying and handling changes and continually achieving educational excellence is too comprehensive for the school principal to carry out alone, and all the role players in his school will have to be involved. In this study the spotlight falls on the teachers as a functional team assisting the principal in his task of delivering excellent service in his/her school. From the above the problem addressed in this study flows, namely: How can the school principal (as team leader) go about guiding and training his teachers to function as an effective team so as to ensure educational excellence within rapidly changing conditions. In an attempt to resolve this problem, research has been undertaken into: the essential aspects of an effective team, i.e. to determine the nature, functions and characteristics of an effective team; and essential team leadership, i.e. to determine the nature, functions, skills and characteristics of an effective team leader.

M.Ed.(Education Management) / The ushering in of a new education system in South Africa comes with its own challenges to educational authorities. The role that school principals should play will still be significant as they are an important link between the school and outside authorities. Despite this important part they play, principals should always involve their staff, students, and parents in educational matters. Drawing in various stakeholders in the school will ensure that there is widespread responsibility. The platform suitable for stakeholders' participation appears to be the creation of teams. Teams have been identified as a suitable forum for the application ofTotal Quality Management in schools This approach, of looking at the interests of students first, should be coupled with ensuring that societal values, norms, mores, and . ethics are takencare of in schools. The essential function of a school leader is to present to students and teachers their ownpersonal vision of where the school and society should be going. Participation in school matters by teachers, students and parents alike necessitates that mutual respect be prevalent in such an environment. Thecollaboration of teachers, students and parents will foster teams which will provide greater power, both with regard to ideas and the ability to act on them. This study hashighlighted the following: I. The team is the major, and sometimes, the only source of emotional support for colleagues in schools. 2. Effective teams co-ordinate the interaction of members of staff so that they arc able to deal with information from many different directions and sources. 3. Teams generate greater ideas and considerable benefit IS derived when all members stimulate each other's professional growth. The establishment and building of teams should also encourage professional -,development of the teachers, which is also a vital element in teaching and learning. Delegation of essential management decisions to teams should be a common practice by the principal. This will ensure that interested parties in school matters will be kept informed of new developments. It will also draw in the participation of stakeholders, which create a pooling of ideas. Changing realities in the South African education system should not catch education authorities, principals, teachers. students and parents unawares. They need to keep abreast of developments through an imperative communication network. Teachers. students and parents should be empowered so that they not only play a vital role in education but a meaningful one as well.

M.Ed. (Educational Management) / The aim of this research is to assess the management role of the principal of a state-aided school with regard to the management of general assistants employed by the governing body of such a school. To ensure efficient management, the principal must implement the principles of planning, organizing leadership and control in the process of managing general assistants. Planning should be aimed at reaching short-term goals while a more mechanistic and bureaucratic organizational structure will be more effective. Communication and interaction with general assistants are prerequisites for efficient leadership. Duties performed by general assistants must be continuously controlled to ensure that the activities are in line with the goals of the school. The principal is essentially a manager of human resources and therefore also a personnel manager. In respect of general assistants, labour unrest must be prevented. This task represents a new dimension of management for principals of state-aided schools where labour relations have become an important issue. As of 1 September 1988, the Labour Relations Act (Act 28 of 1956) is applicable to black general assistants employed at state-aided schools. Therefore the management of state-aided schools must take cognisance of the mechanisms for collective bargaining, namely, industrial councils, conciliation boards, mediation, arbitration and the Industrial Court. Collective bargaining takes place between an employer and a workers' union representing the employees.

M.Ed. (Educational Leadership and Management) / The field of school leadership is currently preoccupied with the new idea of distributed leadership. Harris (2009:3) also writes that it is irrefutable that distributed leadership has become the idea of the moment. It is against this backdrop that this study aimed to explore the perceptions of teachers regarding the practice of distributed leadership in their respective schools. What propelled this research were the changes that are taking place in South African education system since 1994. This study explores the practice of distributed leadership in schools from a teacherbased perspective, rather than from the educational theorists and legislators’ point of view. The schools under study are the three secondary schools located within Johannesburg North District 10 in Gauteng Province. The research design followed a qualitative approach. Three secondary schools were sampled, and the data were collected through interviewing the teachers of different post levels (including principals), as individuals and in pairs. Documents containing minutes of the planning sessions and the first staff meeting were also used to triangulate the data. These documents showed how roles and responsibilities are allocated to each teacher in those three sampled secondary schools. The findings revealed that there are both benefits, and inevitable and inherent threats to the implementation of distributed leadership in the three schools. The benefits are that distributing leadership can raise school’s collective capacities, empower staff, and can encourage collaborative school cultures and decisionmaking; and all these can make the school effective because there is coperformance, collective agency and conjoint effort in running the schools’ affairs. However, there is inherent threat posed by the school’s hierarchical structure and the policy climate within which schools operate. These barriers cannot simply be underestimated or ignored, and it is naïve to assume that they would simply fall away to accommodate and support distributed leadership in schools.

Dissertation submitted in partial compliance with the requirements for the Master's Degree in Technology: Education (Management), Durban Institute of Technology, 2004. / This study deals with sexual harassment in the Lower Umfolozi District. The researcher investigated speculation that there was sexual harassment in the Lower Umfolozi District. The researcher discovered that there was sexual harassment of Pi temporary and unemployed educators in the Lower Umfolozi District / M

No description available.

No description available.

A phenomenological research study was conducted to examine teacher perceptions of elementary principals’ behaviors affecting school culture and climate. The researcher gathered data from participant interviews. Participants were selected using purposeful sampling of teachers identified by their principals as meeting study criteria. The schools in which teachers were selected were also chosen using purposeful sampling based on superintendents’ perceptions of positive principal influence on school culture and climate. Data analysis provided insight to the researcher into the phenomenon being explored in this study. Teachers were asked to participate in an individual interview with the researcher and provide answers to open ended questions regarding their perceptions of their principals’ influence on culture and climate in the school. The findings of the study were aligned with the literature regarding principal influence on school culture and climate. There was a clear relationship between principal behaviors and positive school culture and climate based on teacher perceptions. Three themes emerged as common in the data including relationships, communication, and shared leadership.

The purpose of this study was to investigate effective administrative support for successful teachers of urban at-risk students. The main difficulty in studying administrative support is that it comes in so many ways. Johnson’s (1990) theory of workplace variables and Butterworth's (1981) social exchange theory were the basis for this study. Failures of at-risk students threaten the well being of public schools and have become a generally recognized social problem of national priority. This study explores how principals act to influence the success of teachers as they work with at-risk students. It is grounded in the following four assumptions: 1. Administrators significantly influence workplace satisfaction (Butterworth, 1981; Sergiovani, 1991). 2. Workplace satisfaction directly affects quality of performance (Johnson, 1990; Lortie, 1975). 3. Teachers have a moral right to a satisfying workplace (Goodlad, 1984). 4. At-risk students are, in important ways, unique in their educational needs (Capuzzi & Gross, 1989; Chenoweth, 1993). Collection, analysis, and evaluation of data were guided by three research questions focusing on how uncommonly successful teachers of urban at-risk students perceive their administrative support, what these teachers recommend regarding administrative support and what these teachers recommend regarding preparation for teachers to teach at-risk students. The teachers were deemed successful by a combination of parental, student, teacher, and administrator evaluations (Peterson, Bennet, & Sherman, 1991). Thirty-nine teachers who had been recommended by their peers, parents, students, and building and central office administrators were sent letters inviting them to participate in this study. The first 18 who responded were interviewed using a 15 item protocol. Three were elementary teachers, 10 were middle school teachers, and 5 were high school teachers. Four of the 10 middle school teachers were from one middle school but the others were from a variety of schools. The elite interview technique proposed by Marshall and Rossman (1989) was used because it was felt that surveys do not elicit the depth of information desired and a single case study would not give enough breadth. The interview responses were analyzed both as individual documents and also an analysis by item was conducted. Twenty-two recommendations for aspiring and practicing administrators are listed and the eight main themes are listed. The results show specific kinds of support that can help teachers of at-risk students succeed: personal support, peer support, and training for both teachers and administrators. In general, the successful teachers felt that they did not receive adequate administrative support even though when asked the question “do you feel supported by your administrators?" some said "yes." The results also indicate that administrators need further training in both interpersonal skills and communication skills.

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between the leadership style of high school principals and their faculties' level of communication satisfaction. The study was also concerned with the relationship of the respondents' biographical data with leadership style and communication satisfaction. Subjects were selected from a population that consisted of thirty—two high schools in the North Central Texas Area. Each school that participated in the study had its faculty respond to the Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire and a teacher biographical data survey. Each school's principal responded to the Least Preferred Co—Worker Scale, principals' Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire, and a biographical data survey. The results were then analyzed using simple and multiple regression.