Estonian and Georgian School Leaders' Perceptions of Their Tasks, Work-Related Challenges, and Resources
Roč.30,č.3(2025)
School Leader(ship) in Focus: Understanding Current Challenges and Shaping Future Perspectives
School leaders face complex responsibilities, increasing workloads, resource constraints, and stakeholder expectations that affect their professional performance. This study aims to understand how school leaders in Estonia and Georgia, two post-Soviet countries with different transitional trajectories and school governance models, perceive their main tasks, challenges, and resources. Data were collected through a survey of 39 Estonian and 49 Georgian school leaders in 2024. The leaders in both countries primarily perform the tasks related to curriculum development, its implementation, and teacher professional growth with distinct approaches. The comparative analysis shows that Estonian leaders emphasize goal setting, collaborative culture, and teacher development in their work; Georgian leaders prioritize student-related activities, monitoring of the learning and teaching processes, and quality assurance. The results reveal that daily operations are one of the most time-consuming and challenging tasks for school leaders from both countries. Estonian leaders face challenges related to teacher recruitment, relations, and workload; Georgians deal mostly with resource constraints and curriculum implementation. To cope with their challenges, both groups rely on personal competencies and collegial support, but Estonian leaders have more diverse internal and external support than their Georgian counterparts. Our study offers understanding of how school leaders perceive their complex work, shaped by each country's historical transitions. The findings provide insight for the further development of school leadership policy measures and support systems.
English
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