Moral Leadership Construction:A Case Study On School Principals And Teachers At Primary And Secondary Schools In X City Of Sichuan Province In P.R China

As "Moral Education" was officially established and extensively recognized as the primary objective for the elementary education in China, the quality of education starts to accept more and more consideration in Chinese basic education educational reforming agenda. A quality-oriented educational reform not only aims at technically optimizing school management, but also demands a road of education that values both humanism and instruction. In China, it is the principal that is in charge of and responsible for the development of primary and secondary schools. Traditional school leadership laid emphasis on instrumental rational means, so that most of the principals concerned more about their leadership techniques, ignoring the value pursuit of humanism and instruction. The current return of value pursuit in basic education reform calls for the promotion of principal’s moral leadership.Researchers have given a wide range of concerns to principals’ moral leadership since it was introduced into China in early twenty-first Century. However, most of existing related literature is engaged in its theoretical introduction of moral leadership. Concrete elaboration of the moral leadership in Chinese context is especially rare. For various reasons, we are still incompetent to structurally describe principal’s moral leadership. The implementation of principals’ moral leadership needs theoretical guidance and vice verse.Therefore, this study selects X City of Sichuan Province as the research sample. On the basis of constructing the theoretical framework of the principal’s moral leadership, the qualitative and quantitative research methods were used to investigate the practice behavior of moral leadership of primary and middle school principals in the sample area.This study mainly addresses the following research questions: First, what is the actual situation of the principals in their moral leadership practice in X city? Second, what factors affect the implementation of moral leadership in X City? To answer these two research questions, a moral leadership descriptive model is established. This is a three dimensional model that integrates moral of caring, moral of justice, and moral of criticism. Data are collected through questionnaire survey and in-depth interview. SPSS21.0 is employed to analyze the collected data.Data analysis results shows that, the primary and secondary school principals have begun to build moral leadership in X city, but there is a gap between the desired level and full implementation. The principals did the best in the moral of caring.Analysis on the factors influencing the moral leadership of principals, the researcher also finds that the principal’s moral leadership is influenced by the related variables of the school, the principal and the teacher. Among them, the most influential is the related variables of the principal, including the principal’s gender, education and tenure; what follows is the location of the school and the school section; The least influence on the principal’s moral leadership is the related variables of the teacher, including teachers’ gender and teachers’ positions. Through the analysis of the current situation and influencing factors, the study discusses the survey results from three aspects as below: 1) the principal lack of a liberal school environment; 2) the principal’s education values alienation; 3) the principals’ role conflicts triggered by their frequently encountered moral dilemmas..In the end, this study puts forward the countermeasures and suggestions to promote the moral leadership of the principals in X City from three parts. First, the education administrative agency should do the following three points: giving the principal more school autonomy;updating principals and teachers’ ideas through training; regulating the sex ratio of principals; Second, the principals should do the following points: committed to the construction of a common vision; respect and appreciate the teachers; strengthen the consciousness of innovation and change; focus more on teaching and learning; play the characteristics of schools and individuals and take full account of the needs of teachers’ personality. In addition, teachers should constantly improve the level of professionalization, to provide more support for principals’ moral leadership.The three-dimension moral leadership descriptive model established in this study is of theoretically significant in that it not only provides a practical and valuable solution to the problem of moral leadership measurement, but also the conception of moral leadership is considerably extended. The case study, on the other hand, is of pragmatically significant in that it is a good example that enables a comprehensive understanding and promotion of principal’s moral leadership in Chinese context.