This qualitative study explores school principals' perceptions and enactments of shared sense-making processes during a generally-outlined pedagogical reform, i.e. "a broad-policy reform allowing educators to exercise their discretion in meeting its pedagogical goals," aiming to inquire what makes such processes critical to schools'…

School principals' decisions are made within the complex organizations called schools. This study explored how systems thinking is reflected in principals' perceptions about their decision-making processes. Based on a qualitative analysis of interviews and focus groups, principals' descriptions of their own effective decision-making reflected…

Systems thinking (ST) is a holistic leadership approach that puts the study of wholes before that of parts. It focuses attention on how organization members act together in networks of interactions. This is done by researching organization members' mental models, which are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even mental pictures or…

This study examined the coping strategies utilized by new assistant principals (APs) in order to establish their professional and managerial authority as they enter their role. This article is based on a qualitative study of 23 APs at different stages of their careers, deriving categories from 37 semi-structured interviews (14 were repeated ones,…

Purpose: Turning an education reform program into school reality greatly depends on the principal. In certain cases, principals choose to implement reform instructions only partially. The purpose of this paper is to explore school principals' considerations leading to their decisions not to fulfill a national reform's guidelines in a full and…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study is to examine the effect of principals' sense of uncertainty on organizational learning mechanisms (OLMs) in schools. Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected from 130 school principals (90 women and 40 men) from both Tel-Aviv and Central districts in Israel. After computing the correlation between…

This article is an attempt to reflect on the doubting process as an emerging perspective in school change. After introducing the notion of doubt and its importance to school change, the author describes conditions influencing the doubting process. She reflects on these conditions in a case example of a secondary school principal who doubted the…

Uses case-study approach to illuminate how a retired military officer serving as the principal of a south Tel-Aviv high school engages in the deliberative process (a communal experimental process designed to examine the consequences of actions under consideration) to solve a significant problem of a rising level of violence. (Contains 26…