Abstract
Qualitative research in teacher in-service education suggests that principal support is an important feature in individual teacher professional growth processes (e.g., Fullan, 1988; Peter, 1996; Wilson, 1989). This chapter focuses on the specific role of the principal in teacher professional development and aims to identify their role at the school level for staff development. For a principal to be able to work together with colleagues or staff members it requires certain professional attitudes and competencies which we argue are related to the four dimensions of professional practice as described by Krainer (1998). This theoretical framework explores the complementarity of the factors action, reflection, autonomy and networking in teacher education. In order to adapt this model to describe and analyse the professional work of school principals with respect to staff development, and to relate the model to the important issue of collaboration, the dimension “networking” will specifically be regarded with respect to the notions of imposition, co-operation and collaboration. This elaborated model of professional practice will be applied to two case studies of principal interaction and support in relation to two in-service projects; one was an extended secondary mathematics teacher development project in Australia which involved faculty members of three schools and the second one was a school based mathematics teacher in-service initiative in Austria.
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Krainer, K., Peter-Koop, A. (2003). The Role of the Principal in Mathematics Teacher Development. In: Peter-Koop, A., Santos-Wagner, V., Breen, C., Begg, A. (eds) Collaboration in Teacher Education. Mathematics Teacher Education, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1072-5_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1072-5_12
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