ABSTRACT

Departmental Heads (DH) has huge responsibilities of heading phases, departments, and teaching of subjects. At the same time, they need to focus on their leadership and management tasks as senior teachers. The predicament of being a teacher and leader-manager is exacerbated by more expectations from the principals and school management teams (SMT), staff, learners, and the community. The work of the DH is very demanding. The demands are ordinarily driven by expectations on curriculum leadership and curriculum delivery, emanating from DHs themselves and from other quarters within the school community. The expectations and perceptions can cause tensions in how DHs execute their roles. This article discusses the perceptions of the DHs’ point of view. The article followed a qualitative phenomenological approach underpinned by an interpretative paradigm based on the lived experiences of the participants. Purposive sampling was used to select 12 DH participants due to their knowledge, understanding, and proximity to the researched phenomenon. Using an interview guide, semi-structured, open-ended questions were employed to collect data to answer the research question “what are the perceptions of departmental heads on their curriculum leadership roles.” Among other things the literature review revealed that DHs perceived their roles as those of monitoring, motivating, role modeling, commitment, communication, goal setting, accountability, and of personnel management. The article also reported empirically on DHs perceptions and what can be done to assist them in executing their roles.

摘要

部门负责人 (DH) 在领导阶段、部门和学科教学方面承担着巨大的责任。同时，作为高级教师，他们需要专注于自己的领导和管理任务。校长和学校管理团队 (SMT)、教职员工、学习者和社区的更多期望加剧了作为教师和领导管理者的困境。卫生署的工作要求很高。这些需求通常是由对课程领导和课程交付的期望驱动的，来自 DH 本身和学校社区内的其他方面。这些期望和看法可能会导致 DH 执行其角色的方式紧张。本文讨论了对卫生署观点的看法。这篇文章遵循了一种定性的现象学方法，该方法以基于参与者生活经验的解释范式为基础。由于他们的知识、理解和接近所研究的现象，有目的的抽样被用来选择 12 名 DH 参与者。使用面试指南，采用半结构化的开放式问题来收集数据，以回答研究问题“部门负责人对其课程领导角色的看法是什么”。除其他事项外，文献回顾显示，DH 认为他们的角色是监督、激励、角色建模、承诺、沟通、目标设定、问责制和人事管理。这篇文章还根据经验报告了 DH 的看法，以及可以做些什么来帮助他们履行职责。