Experiencing School Leadership A Phenomenological Study of the Mental Models of Secondary School Principals in Karachi
Bibliographic record
Abstract
School leadership has been studied extensively in recent decades. There is, however, a lack of research on the mental models of school leadership, particularly in the context of a developing country like Pakistan. In this qualitative phenomenological study, we explored the mental models of school leadership among 14 secondary school principals working in the private sector in Karachi, Pakistan. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data. A step-by-step phenomenological data analysis was conducted, incorporating processes such as epoché, horizonalization, thematic portrayal, textural description, structural description and textural-structural synthesis. The study revealed seven major themes: enormous responsibility, sacred work, change is indispensable, troubling experiences with teachers and parents, principals as leaders in multiple roles, support needed from staff and parents, and challenging areas of school management. Recommendations of the study were – but not limited to – that school principals should reflect on their thinking, views, beliefs and assumptions related to school leadership to see how their mental models are affecting their leadership practices either positively or negatively.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".