Determining the Effect of Principals' Change Leadership on School Teachers' Professional Development

[[abstract]]With a rapidly changing era, educational change has become one of crucial components for better performance in schools. Potential and innovative leadership in schools have been expected to fit the fast-paced of change to achieve better results. Therefore, how to build teacher’s professional development to fulfil the outcome-based policy in schools has grown into a new challenge for principals. This study focused on principals’ change leadership perceived by school teachers and explored which dimension of change leadership might impact on teachers’ professional development. We successfully invited 490 teachers from 41 elementary schools in New Taipei City (Taiwan) to participate in this study. Finally, there are 453 valid questionnaires, it represents 92.4 % of return rate. Both self-developed change leadership and professional development questionnaires have been verified by factor analysis. Twenty-five indicators of change leadership have been classified into three dimensions, named “communicating and shaping change action”, “building supported environment”, and “adjusting organization and performance”. The teachers’ professional development has been defined by five indicators. We employed the stepwise method to determine which one is the major factor impacted on teachers’ professional development in regression models. The result reveals both “building supported environment” and “adjusting organization and performance” in principal’s change leadership can explained 27.5% of the teachers’ professional development. Based on the linear model in regression analysis, we suggest properly shaping principal’s change leadership can be prompted to enhancing teachers’ professional development. Furthermore, the change leadership might be applied to more wide practices to improve teachers’ performance in various settings.[[notice]]補正完