Large-scale change and survival of school principals in Turkey

Abstract

Turkey possess one of the most vibrant educational systems in the World. This study specifically aims at revealing Turkish school principals' perceptions about the large-scale changes imposed by the Ministry of Education and the strategies they follow for coping with these changes. The study was designed as a generic qualitative study. Twenty principals from different schools at different levels were identified through snowball sampling and semi-structured interviews were conducted with each of them. The decoupling between change interventions and the needed change, inappropriate change implementation process, the passive role of the school principals in the design phase of change interventions are some of the major challenges that school principals encounter. The passivity of the principals during design phase put them into a state of reluctant activeness to find out resources, create readiness and adopt a mediating role between top authority and the teachers in order to implement the imposed changes.