A Research on City and County Curriculum Supervisors’ Role-Perception and Role-Performance in Curriculum Leadership

• Main Authors: CHEN CHE YUN, 陳浙雲
• Other Authors: 黃嘉雄
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/95353755602491134933

碩士 === 國立台北師範學院 === 課程與教學研究所 === 92 === This research aims to study the practices of city and county curriculum supervisors’ role-perception and role-performance, the difficulties they faced in as well as the negative factors to their role-performance practices. It is hoped to make suggestions on improving curriculum supervisors’ work in curriculum leadership for curriculum supervisors and the educational administration authorities. This research reviews available literature to construct the subject matters of curriculum supervisors’ role in curriculum leadership. A questionnaire on curriculum supervisors’ role-perception and role-performance was designed according to this research and conducted among 44 in-service curriculum supervisors in Taiwan. The data collected by this survey is analyzed through percentage, mean, standard deviation, rank and other methods of descriptive statistics. The researcher interviewed 12 curriculum supervisors to collect the information about the difficulties they faced in their role-performance practices, and compare the information with the result of the survey to find the factors that will give negative impacts on the practices of their role-performance. Based on the survey and interviews of this research, the following conclusions are made. 1. The cognition of the importance to the curriculum supervisors’ role-perception in their curriculum leadership is really high. Different backgrounds of curriculum supervisors make no big difference on the cognition of the importance to the role-perception in curriculum leadership. However, they pay attention to different aspects in their role-perception in curriculum leadership due to their different backgrounds. 2. The level of the curriculum supervisors’ role-performance in curriculum leadership is in the middle of the rank, they did more on the roles in negotiation and assisting, but less on organizing, planning, management, researching and evaluating. Different backgrounds of curriculum supervisors make no big difference on their role-performance in curriculum leadership. However, they focus on different aspects in role-performance in curriculum leadership due to their different backgrounds. 3. There is a big gap between curriculum supervisors’ role-perception and role-performance in curriculum leadership. They have higher cognition of expectation for their roles in curriculum leadership than their real implementation in practice. With respect to the importance in every aspects of the role-perception in their curriculum leadership, different backgrounds of curriculum supervisors show the higher cognition then they did in their implementation in practice, and the real difference in every aspect depends on the case. 4. Curriculum supervisors emphasize on “communicating and negotiating members’ viewpoints,” and are involved more on this aspect. On the other hand, curriculum supervisors focus less on “establishing curriculum supporting system” and are not involved much in this aspect. Furthermore, curriculum supervisors strongly put emphasis on “having professional dialogues with Instructional Supervision Group and school staffs.” 5. In the respects of curriculum supervisors’ roles in “framing the development plans of curriculum” and in “reviewing the effects of the curriculum reform”, and their roles in the respects of “offering suggestions on school curriculum plans after curriculum evaluation” and in “planning to implement the evaluation of curriculum in city and county”, the gap between implementation in practice and cognition the importance is very huge and the gap needs to be filled. 6. The main difficulties of role-performance in curriculum leadership that curriculum supervisors faced includes “unclear roles of curriculum supervisors, unclear job responsibilities, the rights of their roles are not in proportion to the duties, having no status in law, having an obligation to enact the policies but unable to solve the problems resulting from the enforcement of the policies, and lacking of manpower supports’. 7. The negative factors to the curriculum supervisors’ role-performance in curriculum leadership include seven external factors and two internal factors. The seven external factors are “different cognition between the local and the central educational agencies, difficulties in controlling the implementation due to the autonomy of the city or county, overlapping organization in leadership, inappropriate appointing system of the curriculum supervisors, insufficient supporting administrative system, misusing people or not respecting professionals, and inadequate habitual behavior of the organization”. This research makes the following suggestions on curriculum supervisors and administration. Curriculum supervisor should embrace more knowledge in curriculum and leadership to fill the gap between role-perception and role-performance, use different leadership strategies to improve their role-performance, show their profession and play the role in curriculum leadership and strengthen the curriculum leadership to solve the problems during policy enforcing. For the educational administrations, the suggestion will be that it should revise educational laws to give curriculum supervisors legal status; all curriculum supervisors should be appointed and trained by Ministry of Education and specify their roles and duties; in order to enhance the social status of curriculum supervisors, the appointing qualifications should be raised and regulated by the license system; providing the pre-service and on-service training for curriculum supervisors to improve their professional knowledge; reinforcing the abilities of curriculum supervisors in “plan framing, researching methods, curriculum developing, curriculum evaluation and techniques of encouragement in communication” to enhance their abilities of role-performance in curriculum leadership; constructing the assessing system for curriculum supervisors to inspire them for enhancing their role-performance; providing the fundamental protection of interests for curriculum supervisors to maintain their dignity; and provide diversified incentive measures for curriculum supervisors to improve their morale. This research focuses only on curriculum supervisors. Many people are involved in the curriculum leadership in different cities or countries, so the future research can focus on them. Another area for future research can aim on factors that will have influences on roles of curriculum leaders in order to have further understanding on role-perception and role-performance of curriculum supervisors.