Ideal image of the head of the educational complex: Research methodology and results

Abstract

The requirements for the professional and personal qualities of teachers are presented in the Federal Law “On Education in the Russian Federation”. However, the article focuses on the “ideal portrait of the head of the educational complex” as both a leader and a teacher. The analysis of the results of studies conducted in recent years has revealed a number of requirements for the personal and business qualities of leaders-teacher, and two problems. First, many authors consider ideal portraits, on which the research is theoretically based, to be “ideal types” (according to M. Weber), i.e. “utopian by nature”, “models that cannot be verified” [1], since they “cannot be found in everyday life” [2. P. 207]. Second, the pressing methodological issue of ways to identify and measure ideal qualities of real workers remains unresolved. The article aims at identifying the professionally important personal qualities of leaders-teachers, at developing an ideal portrait of the head of the educational complex, and at proposing a mathematical model for assessing the strength of personal qualities. Therefore, the following tasks were set: to identify the degree of compliance of the leaders-teachers’ personal qualities with the author’s “ideal model”; to form an empirical database for the subsequent development of a model of the effective leader-teacher of the educational complex, and to successfully solve functional problems of educational organizations. The author presents a method for identifying personal qualities of the leader-teacher, which correspond to the results of sociological surveys of employees of state educational complexes and parents; ways and methods to verify the selected requirements; and an applied empirical model of the “ideal portrait of the head of the educational complex”. This ideal portrait has some unique features: out of 16 possible personal qualities, 11 became distinctive and dominant, which is significantly more than that of the “average person”, including representatives of other professional groups.