Preschool principal’s curriculum leadership indicators: a Taiwan perspective

Abstract

The role of a principal’s curriculum leadership has become an educational issue in Taiwan’s early childhood education. This study represents a pioneering attempt in adopting a target school interview, fuzzy Delphi, and analytic hierarchy process for constructing preschool principal’s curriculum leadership indicators. Fifteen experts and practitioners were involved in the Delphi panel and a two-stage questionnaire survey was administered. The findings revealed that preschool curriculum leadership indicators could be classified as 20 implementation items in six aspects: formation of preschool vision; organization and functioning of the preschool curriculum development team; control of the preschool curriculum implementation process; improvement of teachers’ curriculum professionalism; integration of different educational resources; and assessment of preschool curriculum implementation performance. Analysis of the relative weighting of curriculum leadership indicators reveals that the most important implementation items are “Ability to analyze the preschool’s background and features to provide a basis for development of a curriculum vision,” “Ability to construct a preschool curriculum vision together with other members,” “Ability to call together teachers to jointly establish a curriculum development team,” “Ability to secure resources from inside and outside the school to provide the environment and equipment needed to meet teachers’ curriculum and teaching needs.” These indicators emphasizing organizational cooperation, entrustment, and control under the context of the new leadership in Taiwan are in line with the Western concept of distributed leadership.