PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE TEACHER EDUCATION AND SUPERVISION, THE NEED OF ALL PROSPECTIVE HEADS OF SCIENCE DEPARTMENTS AND HEADS OF SCIENCE INSTITUTIONS

Never before has leadership in education setting been more critical for our schools, the society and its organisations, both public and private. Concerns about performance has mounted, while at the same time we are beginning to appreciate the complexities of bringing about improvement in our schools. As a result, the shortage of qualified leaders at all levels of educational institutions is of much concern. In a complex and multi-layered world, the conventional idea of great leadership being the result of the efforts of a single individual is rapidly becoming redundant. In recent years, new responsibilities have been added to an already complex and demanding position of head of department or head of science institution. Most common of these include decentralisation of decision-making, increased use of collaborative decision-making, expanded accountability, increasingly diverse nature of communities, and greater concern for listening to stakeholders. In addition to these problems, as managers of educational organisations for young people, heads of departments or heads of science institutions are faced with some special problems. Unlike leaders in other organisations, heads of department or heads of science institutions work in settings where the following conditions prevail: local communities view schools more as a symbols of the community than places of learning, use of often outdated techniques (4-8 periods a day, and paper-and-pencil tests) are often valued by clients more than improving students learning with new, less traditional approaches, staff norms of autonomy are extremely high, and collaboration in school-wide projects is often uncommon, existing organisational cultures reinforce conceptions of purpose and pedagogy that are reified and outmoded, organisational goals are consistently shifting, depending on the educational fashion, fancy, funding and politics, many important goals, such as citizenship or lifelong learning, are hard to measure and viewed as achievable in some distant future, Informal, competing goals such as having winning sports and culture activities may absorb time, effort, and problem-solving attention that could be devoted to improving students learning; The core technology needed involves motivating captive participants (students and staff) to work and produce.