Monitoring study of teachers’ needs and demands in developing their leadership skills

Abstract

The paper presents a monitoring study of schoolteachers’ needs and requests to develop their lead- ership skills and prepare to be leaders. A “teacher-leader” issue is becoming a highly essential social matter due to the growing citizenship involved in local democracy, and the role of schoolteachers in distributing knowledge and influencing the population via urban and rural communities. Teachers are an influential part of society. Currently, it is not enough for a teacher to demonstrate only deep knowledge in a teaching area. The most important for teachers is to educate citizens who are constructively active in transforming their own lives, the lives of other people, their local and state communities. However, teachers’ formal and informal training and professional development do not include acquiring effective leadership competencies for the school/regional/societal levels. The current study identified the needs of Kazakhstani teachers for leadership skills, which are indicated as the necessary ones to attain to transform schools, colleges, and universities into civic, cultural, and social resource centers open for the public in the civil society engagement and to encourage socially significant activities. Also, the study conceptualizes the notions of “Leadership for teachers” and “Teacher-leader”.

The research findings are to create informal training programs for teachers’ leadership skills, for building teachers-leaders cohort. The identified and recommended training topics can be used by teach- er training centers. The study results are helpful in leadership consulting of teaching communities, cop- ing with stress, and managing conflicts.

Key words: teacher-leader, leadership, leadership skills, high school teachers.