Transformational School Leaders Support Teachers to Foster Student Grit

Abstract

Grit has drawn increasing intention in the field of educational research. As a crucial noncognitive indicator, grit has been used to understand individual success and performance in various fields. The past empirical research has shown inconsistent findings on the relationship between grit and academic achievement. The purpose of the study is aimed to explore how transformational school leaders support teachers to foster student grit through discovering what transformational school leaders' practices inspire teachers' practices in the classroom to the students. The semi-structural interview was conducted in the phenomenology study, and two school principals and eight teachers participated in the study. The researcher analyzed interview data guided by three theories of Dahlgren & Fallsberg's seven steps, cultural-historical activity theory, and the critical ecology framework. The Nvivo 12 program was utilized to code and to analyze the interview data. The study found that grit was a significant indicator of school improvement led by transformational school leaders' belief of core values such as hope, passion, excellence, resilience, and coherence. The study also found that grit fully or partially mediated the relationship between self-efficacy and school outcome and influenced among school leaders, teachers, and students. The significant finding was the strongest correlation between noncognitive factors and school leaders' belief and teachers' practices of grit, self-efficacy, mindset, and motivation. Results suggested that school leaders would promote grit as one of the school core indicators for school development; and suggested that the mindset needed to implement in the curriculum practice. Future researches would be recommended.



Author Information
Wei Zhang, Western Michigan University, United States
Tetyana Koshmanova, Western Michigan University, United States

Paper Information
Conference: ACAH2020
Stream: Teaching and Learning

This paper is part of the ACAH2020 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Zhang W., & Koshmanova T. (2020) Transformational School Leaders Support Teachers to Foster Student Grit ISSN: 2186-229X – The Asian Conference on Arts & Humanities 2020 Official Conference Proceedings https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-229X.2020.17
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-229X.2020.17


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Posted by James Alexander Gordon