Principal Leadership Models and High Performing School Leadership in Malaysia

This presentation will focus on the models of principal leadership in Malaysia prescribed in the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013-2025 (MEB), compared to the leadership styles practiced by the principals of 14 schools in two... [ view full abstract ]

This presentation will focus on the models of principal leadership in Malaysia prescribed in the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013-2025 (MEB), compared to the leadership styles practiced by the principals of 14 schools in two states of Selangor and Sarawak in Malaysia. The vision of the MEB is to raise student achievement from its present position in the bottom quartile of the PISA rankings, to the top third, by 2025.  One key aspect of the Blueprint (Shift 5) advocates that high performing principals should practice instructional leadership and, to a lesser extent, transformational and distributed leadership.  The authors’ study shows there is weak understanding of this major policy initiative.  Although strongly advocated, instructional leadership is practiced only to a limited extent, with a focus on monitoring rather than mentoring and modelling.  There is some evidence of distributed leadership, but mainly among senior leaders, and it is more allocative than emergent in this centralized context.  Transformational leadership is variable but more evident among high performing schools. The study concludes that educational reform faces implementation challenges as policy changes may not be embraced, or even understood, in schools and classrooms.  Although these models of leadership are encouraged by the Ministry of Education, as a means to move principals away from administrative leadership, the efficacy of such models in the Malaysian centralized context appears to be more problematic than in the decentralized contexts where these models originated. Borrowing policies from the western context might not work for the schools in Malaysia as such models might not be fully understood nor implemented accordingly, due to a different value system, which in turn, leads to an inability to sustain reform policies.