PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY AND SCHOOL MANAGEMENT IN SPAIN: OTHER’S POINT OF VIEW

ABSTRACT

An identity perspective of school management allows us to refer to the singularity and relevance of the “Spanish case”. Among other things, the provisionality of the position and to exercise management while remaining a teacher (in addition to other duplications), may result in an unstable, multiple or transient identity with serious implications in the development of school leadership. Through a qualitative methodology, we investigate the construction of the professional identity of school management in Spain from the perspective of others: teachers, families, and supervisors. The content analysis technique is applied to a conglomerate of data from a national research (National Institute of Quality and Evaluation) about “the principal’s role in public schools”. As a result, we have the category “Identity attributed to the school principal”. The interpretative progress of the study is completed by the frequency analysis of its subcategories continued by the narrative construct of the Grounded Theory.

KEYWORDS:
professional identity; school principals; school leadership; identity for others; focus groups