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This study explored the dimensionality and measurement invariance of a multidimensional measure for evaluating teachers’ perceptions of the quality of their relationships with principals at the dyadic level. Participants were 630 teachers (85.9% female) from 220 primary and 204 secondary schools across the Netherlands. Teachers completed the 10-item Principal–Teacher Relationship Scale (PTRS) for their principals. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) provided evidence for a two-factor model, including a relational Closeness and Conflict dimension. Additionally, multigroup CFA results indicated strong invariance of the PTRS across school type, teacher gender, and teaching experience. Last, secondary school teachers and highly experienced teachers reported lower levels of Closeness and higher levels of Conflict in the relationship with their principal compared to primary school teachers and colleagues with less experience. Accordingly, the PTRS can be considered a valid and reliable measure that adds to the methodological repertoire of educational leadership research by focusing on both positive and negative aspects of dyadic principal–teacher relationships.
Educational innovations often tend to fail, mainly because teachers and school principals do not feel involved or are not allowed to have a say. Angela de Jong's dissertation shows the importance of school principals and teachers leading 'collaborative innovation' together. Collaborative innovation requires a collaborative, distributed approach involving both horizontal and vertical working relationships in a school. Her research shows that teams with more distributed leadership have a more collaborative 'spirit' to improve education. Team members move beyond formal (leadership) roles, and work more collectively on school-wide educational improvement from intrinsic motivation. De Jong further shows that school principals seek a balance in steering and providing space. She distinguished three leadership patterns: Team Player, Key Player, Facilitator. Team players in particular are important for more collaborative innovation in a school. They balance between providing professional space to teachers (who look beyond their own classroom) and steering for strategy, frameworks, boundaries, and vision. This research took place in schools working with the program of Foundation leerKRACHT, a program implemented by more than a thousand schools (primary, secondary, and vocational education). The study recommends, towards school principals and teachers, and also towards trainers, policymakers, and school board members, to reflect more explicitly on their roles in collaborative innovation and talk about those roles.
We explored how two types of study outcomes, perceived competence and earned credits, are interrelated, and influenced by self-regulation, motivation (intrinsic value and expectancy of procrastination) and deep approach to learning. The relationships between these variables were analysed in a sample of 894 first-year Dutch university students, using linear structural modelling. Results show that learning process factors play other roles in explaining perceived competence than in explaining earned credits. Perceived competence and earned credits, as two sides of the same coin in competence-based education, are only weakly related. Furthermore, this study shows that it is most likely that perceived competence affects earned credits, but a model in which earned credits affects perceived competence as possible causal relationship was also accepted, although the relationship remains weak. The practical implication of this study is that, as long as perceived competence and the number of credits are not related, competence-based higher education will not obtain optimal efficiency. For participants and researchers in higher education, it remains important to be aware that different learning goals may evoke different study behaviours in students, and the challenge for higher education is to align these goals.