Background: Indonesian schools are in the midst of implementing a new reform initiative, the 2013 Curriculum, mandated by the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture. The new curriculum requires a drastic change in instructional practices from the traditionally teacher-centered to student-centered instruction. As school leaders, principals play an important role in the implementation and enactment of the 2013 Curriculum in schools. This research explores the leadership practices of Indonesian school principals in facilitating the implementation of new reform policies and initiatives.
Purpose: The study served two purposes. The first was to examine Indonesian public school principals’ enactment of agency within the boundaries set by the social systems around them as they implemented the 2013 Curriculum. The second purpose was to develop a framework that can be used as a lens to further study school leadership practices in the context of Indonesia. Two research questions guided this study: (1) What leadership practices are shaped by which social systems and values? and (2) How does principal agency manifest when implementing the 2013 Curriculum? Responses to the research questions were used to develop the framework.
Data Collection and Analysis: A case study for theory development approach to qualitative research was used. The study took place in the northern area of a small island located in east Indonesia. The primary source of data came from multiple interviews with three public elementary school principals whose schools served as pilot schools for the 2013 Curriculum. In addition to principal interviews, interview with teachers, documents, and observation field notes served as data sources. The data collected were analyzed and manually coded following the data analysis procedures of grounded theory. In the first coding cycle, I coded the data by assigning descriptive and InVivo codes summarizing topics. The second coding cycle involved assigning concepts and categories based on the open codes from the first cycle with a focus on the principals’ actions in facilitating the implementation process. In the third cycle, I compared the concepts and categories to respond to the research questions and examined the relationships between the concepts and categories to develop the framework from the ground up.
Findings: The data analyzed indicated there are three major systems shaped the principals’ leadership practices during the implementation of the 2013 Curriculum: the educational system, the local culture and community, and the school system. In addition to the three systems, the principals’ personal and professional values served to guide the way they led their schools in alignment with the goals of the 2013 Curriculum. The systems and values provided them with rules and resources on which the principals drew in deciding specific actions to perform in order to meet the written and unwritten expectations of their stakeholders. The principals’ enactment of agency was primarily in the form of complying with government orders and balancing expectations from multiple systems, which, then, led to the discovery of three leadership categories in the implementation process: (1) compliance, (2) negotiation, and (3) independence. Compliance refers to those practices the principals perform to satisfy government expectations. Negotiation refers to practices the principals perform in their efforts to juggle expectations and pressures coming from multiple systems. Independence refers to practices the principals perform as they respond to government policies and regulations, as well as community expectations, in a way that is aligned with their personal and professional values.