SCHOOL LEADERSHIP AND TEACHERS’ IMPLEMENTATION OF CURRICULUM REFORM IN TAIWAN: MEDIATING EFFECT OF TEACHERS' ORIENTATION

Abstract

In response to the global education development trend, Taiwan had officially launched the Competency-based Education Reform in 2019. Although school leadership has been linked to teachers' changes, the relationship's underlying mechanism remains unclear. Thus, we aimed to examine the mediating effect of teachers' orientation toward curriculum changes on the relationship between school leadership and teachers' implementation of reform. In October 2020, we conducted a questionnaire survey on teachers in 53 elementary and middle schools among six counties/cities in Taiwan. Among 506 valid responses, 345 teachers are women (68.2%) and 161 are men (31.8%). We adapted the Education Reform Scale developed by Ramberg in 2014. The dependent variable was “Teachers' Implementation of Curriculum Reform (3-item)”. The main predictors included “School Leadership (4-item)” and “Teachers' Orientation toward Changes (3-item)”. Each item was responded to on a 6-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. We used SPSS PROCESS macro to conduct the mediation analysis. After controlling for teacher’s characteristics, the regression model showed that school leadership is positively associated with teachers' implementation of reform (β=0.450, p<0.001). After adding teachers' orientation in the model, the association of school leadership with teachers' implementation of reform attenuated but remained statistically significant (β=0.286, p<0.001). Teachers' orientation showed a significant indirect effect on the association between school leadership and teachers' implementation of reform (β=0.164; Bootstrap 95% CI=0.105 to 0.227). This study suggests that teachers' orientation toward curriculum changes partially mediates the relationship between school leadership and teachers’ implementation of the Competency-based Education reform.