Article review

I chose the journal article entitled Educational leadership and management: theory, policy, and practice for my article review, however, I believe the way I review the article was not really deep and critical, I just did normal review without giving any opinions and recommendations. Below is my first attempt to review the article.

The journal article link: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/426/

This article has been reviewed from the South African Journal of Education year 2007, with title of Educational leadership and management: theory, policy, and practice. The author of this article is Tony Bush. In this article, Tony Bush had stressed on leadership behaviours that most likely give an impact among school teachers to keep inspired and motivated. In general, this article is focused on the importance of educational leadership and management application in schools including South Africa whereby the author highlighted that not only schools need trained and committed teachers but teachers themselves need effective and supported leaders in order to produce the best education for learners.

The purpose of this article is to underpin and assess different leadership models and also to discuss the facts of relative effectiveness in developing successful schools. Furthermore, Tony cited the key issue now is the extent to which school managers are able to modify government policy and develop alternative approaches based on school-level values and vision. According to Cuban 1988, he provides one of the clearest distinctions between leadership and management. He links leadership with change while management is seen as a maintenance activity. He also stresses the importance of both dimensions of organisational activity; he mentioned that leadership influence others’ actions in achieving desirable ends. He added that leaders are people who shape the goals, motivations, and actions of others. It takes much ingenuity, energy and skill and managing is maintaining efficiently and effectively current organisational arrangements.

In this article, the author has touched on conceptualising educational leadership and management whereby he stated that the various theories of educational leadership and management reflect very different ways of understanding and interpreting events and behaviour in schools. The author has also come out with theories of educational management which contain six major models: formal, collegial, political, subjective, ambiguity and cultural. On the other hand, he has reviewed concepts of educational leadership and come out with the models, they are managerial, transformational, transactional, post-modern, contingency, moral, and instructional. The author examined the models considered to be most relevant to the South African context.

From my point of view, Caldwell, 1992, argues that managers and leaders of self managing schools must be able to develop and implement a cyclical process involving seven managerial functions that includes goal setting, need identification, priority-setting, planning, budgeting, implementing and evaluating. These functions are focused on managerial leadership. Despite of that, Leithwood (1994) conceptualises transformational leadership along eight dimensions and they are building school vision, establishing school goals, providing intellectual stimulation, offering individualised support, modelling best practices and important organisational values, demonstrating high performance expectations, creating a productive school culture and developing structures to foster participation in school decisions.

Moreover, Sergiovanni, 1984 points to the importance of a participative approach. This will succeed in boding staff together and in easing the pressures on school principals. On the other hand, Miller and Miller’s in 2001 definition refer to transactional leadership as an exchange process. Exchange is an established political strategy for members of organizations. According to Sackney and Mitchell (2001) stress the importance of voice in post-modern leadership. Stakeholders have a right to be heard. This fits the aspirations of 21^st century South Africa. In point of view for moral leadership, West Burnham (1997) discusses two approaches to leadership which may be categorized as moral; he first one he describes as spiritual and relates to the recognition that many leaders possess what might be called higher order’ perspectives. These may well be represented by a particular religious affiliation. Such leaders have a set of principles which provide the basis self-awareness. The second category is moral confidence the capacity to act in a way that is consistent with an ethical system and is consistent over time.

Southworth 2002, says that instructional leadership is strongly concerned with teaching and learning, including the professional learning of teachers as well as student growth. However, the contingent model provides an alternative approach, recognizing the diverse nature of school contexts and the advantages of adapting leadership styles to the particular situation, rather than adopting a one size fits all whereby; this approach assumes that what is important is how leaders respond to the unique organizational circumstances or problems. The peak of this article, there is an emerging recognition that African models also have much to offer in interpreting management practice and in understanding the behaviour of school leaders and communities. Leadership can be understood as a process of influence based on clear values and beliefs and leading to a vision for the school.

I believe that teachers teach and work in schools that are usually administered by managers, often known as principals or headmasters. School administration is itself often part of larger administration units. The conditions of teachers working life are influenced by the administration and leadership provided by principals, and it is widely assumed that school leadership directly influences the effectiveness of teachers and the achievement outcomes of students.

As a conclusion, this article that has been written by Tony Bush can be reference for schools’ principals or managers in order to be good leaders in schools. As well as motivates, encourages and inspires teachers to deliver the best lesson to school learners. Even though, the author has focused in schools at South Africa, this article can also be used to all leaders and teachers across the globe. Each of models that discussed in this article is to provide distinctive but one-dimensional perspectives on school leadership. Leaders must affirm and teach the powerful roles that organizational beliefs, vision, and mission play in creating a job culture capable of high levels of motivation.

However, I re-do my article review with another journal article entitled

Evaluation of the factors that determine quality in higher education: an empirical study

1.0  INTRODUCTION

I found this journal article with the title of “Evaluation of the factors that determine quality in higher education: an empirical study” in order for me to do comprehensive article review. This journal article has been researched by three authors and they are Maria Tsinidou, Vassilis Gerogiannis and Panos Fitsilis. The authors are from Technological Educational Institute (TEI) of Larissa, Larissa, Greece. I have reviewed the journal article and from my point of view throughout this journal article, it focuses on two areas.

The first area that has been focused by the authors is; to identify the quality determinants for education services provided by education institutions (HEIs) in Greece. On the other hand, the second area that authors touched on is; to measure their relative importance from the students’ point of view.

Universities are places of higher education that provides quality services for students to gain knowledge and excellence information. There are several areas of services that provided by universities. The services are to assure the effectiveness and efficiency that contribute to the quality provided to students. From my point of view towards this journal article, this study focuses on the factors or elements of service quality within the Higher Education sector and attempts to assess their individual weight in defining quality from a student perspective. Particularly on this study, researchers are highlighting the  objective is to establish and test dimensions for measuring service quality in higher education, with specific reference to students following undergraduate taught programs and to measure student’s preferences in the available educational services. Furthermore, this study also aims to measure and analyse the factors that determine the quality, to what extent they meet the students’ expectations and if there are any differences of the students’ perceptions about the weighting of the importance based on demographic factors.

2.0  METHODOLOGY

This study is actually focused on the factors that contribute quality of Higher Education institutions and objective was measured to weights of the quality elements in order to discover those that influence students’ satisfaction most.

The questionnaire wad developed by using HQAA which defined clearly the quality determinants. In order to achieve this objective the researchers used the analytical hierarchical process (AHP). The AHP can be best defined as a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM). This method was introduced by Saaty in year 1980. MCDM is a well known class of decision making, which addresses decision problems that are related with a number of decision criteria. Common MCDM methods include priority based, outranking, and distance based decision making. According to Figueira in year 2005, each method based on its characteristics can be classified as fuzzy method or depending upon the number of decision makers, as single/group decision making method.

The study has been conducted by means of a questionnaire that was distributed to students of Technological Educational Institute of Larissa (TEI/L). The questionnaires were distributed to 300 students but focused only to current undergraduate students of all departments in the School of Business and Economics. The school consists of four academic departments: the Department of Accounting, the Department of Project Management, the Department of Business Administration, and the Department of Tourism Enterprises. The questionnaires were distributed to students from all academic years, so as to provide a circular point-of-view about the institution and the opportunity to highlight differences among students of different academic years. In this questionnaire, the respondents have been asked to state their personal views about the degree of importance of the services offered by the university. Student’s participation was voluntary and completely unspecified. The sample was distinguished by gender, department of study and year of study. The researchers focused specifically, the distribution of students per gender was: 54 percent female and 46 percent male; the distribution per department was: 33 percent of the students were from the accounting department, 28 percent from the project management department, 21 percent from the business administration department and 18 percent from the tourism management department. Finally, the distribution of students per year of study was: 15 percent for first year students, 21 percent for second year students, 17 percent for third year students, 22 percent for fourth year students and 25 percent for students attending courses after the fourth year.

This used a random sampling technique and it was based on three criteria. The first one was the department; the second was the year of study and the third was the gender of the respondents. The population of the research consists of 4,878 students for the academic year 2007-2008 for the four departments of the School of Business and Economics of the TEI/L.

It took over a period of one week for data collection and resulted in a sample of 265 valid questionnaires from a total of 300 questionnaires distributed giving a response rate of 88.33 percent. The survey instrument was a self-explanatory questionnaire that respondents could complete by themselves. The questions were short, clear and easy to understand.

The instruments used for assessing the quality were mainly developed by HQAA. The questionnaire used in this study has been constructed using the same quality criteria, as they were proposed by the HQAA. Some additional criteria were added concerning questions related with the location of TEI/L. Even though the questionnaire was not structured according to SERVQUAL defined dimensions (tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy) it was ensured that all these aspects were covered. The basic reason for not adopting a SERVQUAL questionnaire was the need to evaluate the actual quality criteria, as they were presented in the official student quality assessment questionnaire used at TEI/L. It was preferable to use the same terminology and the same questions rather introducing a new set of questions. On the other hand, this decision affected positively the validity of the results and simplified the questionnaire’s administration process. The questionnaire included seven areas for evaluation: the academic personnel, the administration, the library, the curriculum, the location of the institute, the available infrastructure the services and future career prospects.

3.0  CONCLUSION

From what I have understand throughout the study, the researchers came out with that the issue of quality of the TEI of Larissa has been addressed in order to define the determinants and their respective weight in the overall quality assessment of the institution from a student perspective. I believe that other researchers can also do the same study but focusing on their own areas. I also believe that with evaluation of quality from students’ perspective, higher education institutes can improve on the areas that stress more from students. This is because students are the main customers for higher education institutes whereby they need sufficient information and correct knowledge with the right place.