Peiying Chen* National Taiwan Normal University Tzu-Bin Lin National Taiwan Normal University

1. Developing the Leadership Empowerment Program for School Principals in Taiwan Peiying Chen* National Taiwan Normal University Tzu-Bin Lin National Taiwan Normal University

2. School Leadership Preparation Programme, Taipei • Taiwan’s Contexts: • From central control to decentralisation • From authoritative to democratic • From top-down decision-making to collective decision-making • Need for a new generation of school leaders with different competence and vision in the fast-changing time of globalisation • Initiated by the Department of Education, Taipei City Government and National Taiwan Normal University. • A pilot programme is implemented in 2012 Action Research

3. Program Design (I) Figure 1 School principals' educational challenges, leadership competences and program framework

4. Program Delivery Table 1 Principal Empowerment Workshop Schedule

5. Phase of Reflection Feedbacks from the participants (Feedbacks from workshop activities, Facebook, questionnaires) Qualitative feedbackses Feedback from academics Feedback and reflection from co-developers

6. Facebook Qualitative Feedback Outputs • The effect of scaffolding learning was produced due to the heterogeneous grouping, where the newly-appointed principals could learn from experienced ones. Many of the participants believed that the workshop had created an epistemological space for them to brainstorm ideas, stimulate thinking, and better clarify conceptions. They have found that systems thinking could liberate themselves from self-restricted perceptions and avoid linear thinking in dealing with the school administration. In addition to the mindset shift, … these courses provided them with new perspectives and strategies for school management, strengthening their confidence in leading teachers to participate in the projects of school improvement

7. Feedback from academics

8. Feedback from Co-developers Accomplishment of Collaboration Cross-border Collaboration Disciplined Innovation of Curriculum As all the members are very busy, simply arranging a meeting can be very challenging. The monthly meeting … requires great patience to discuss, communicate, and coordinate over and over again. When I look back and read the all the documents and materials on Dropbox, I cannot but greatly admire what the team has done and what the members have given ... To seamlessly scrape all the pieces together, the designers have to see the whole picture from an outline angle before entering details, and then develop pieces and get back again to the whole picture. In the midst of the back-and-forth cycle are numerous revisions. The cross-border team focused on innovative programs for principals' leadership, and attached great importance to empower the principals and expand upon their visions in an era of educational renovation. Showing shared visions of future and concerns of inevitable changes in the education system, members with diversified backgrounds identified challenges and key competences of principals from focus group interviews and surveys. …The prototype of curriculum model has been developed through a cyclical process of designing, doing, and revising, and finally resulted in a comprehensive and hands-on workshop for the cultivation of principal professionalism I’m impressed by school educators’ dedication and commitment, which is rather different from our enterprise clients. This workshop is more than a single project, but a seedbed of the continual reform to construct a future education system. …We are honored to take part in this movement, and we would like to continue such partnership.

9. Challenges and Suggestions • Diverse themes in professional principal leadership • Heavy loads of school administrative chores of participants • Choice of time for holing the workshop • Increasing diversity of course contents and activities • Designing a one-day warm up workshop • Cultivating seed principals and master principals Conclusion: continuing empowerment for school leaders is key to school improvement. Full support for professional empowerment of school leaders is surely needed to well prepare school pathfinders with competences and confidence to cope with or even transcend daunting challenges inside and outside schools

10. THANK YOU! pychen@ntnu.edu.tw tzubin_lin@ntnu.edu.tw