ABOUT

 I am an Associate Professor, Head of the International Affairs Unit and Head of the Leadership, Organizational Development and Policy program, at the faculty of Education, Bar Ilan University in Israel. I also serve as the Chair of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee of the Faculty of Education, Bar-Ilan University.

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I completed a PhD at Haifa University, Israel in 2012, in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy under the supervision of Professor Anit Somech. As part of my Visiting Scholar Post-doctoral training position in 2014 with the Department of Educational Administration and Policy Studies (EAPS), State University of New York at Albany, under the supervision of Professor Aaron Benavot and Professor Heinz Deter-Meyer, I have been working on a cross-national comparative approach using the PISA data set. I have pursued the investigation in the domain of education governance and policy and cross-cultural research in educational leadership.

 

I adopted a cross-cultural and comparative perspective for my research on policies and leadership practices.

 

I have three main research domains:

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 (1) My first field of research Educational minorities and underrepresented population. My research focuses on the implications of ethnocultural factors on the effectiveness of several leadership styles, with the aim to highlight the significance of such factors in explaining the variations in the effect of principals’ leadership and teachers’ attitudes on educational effectiveness across culturally diverse samples including minorities and underrepresented populations. This investigation is unique because ethnocultural minorities and marginalized population have often redesigned themselves, moving between tradition and modernism with implications for academic outcomes, inclusion, equity, social justice and educational policies

 

Recently, I have focused on Diversity, inclusion, and equity in higher education. My research focus on the lived experiences of marginalized groups and ethnocultural minority in higher education. I aim to gain a critical understanding of the marginalized student population as well as to highlight the perceptions of marginalized groups regarding the inhibiting and enabling factors to their access, participation, and academic success in higher education. With this investigation I aim to emphasized how current students exercise agency and meet the current challenges of academic success in higher education. Also, I hope this research will contribute to design practical measures to address the needs of current and future marginalized students.

 

 (2) My second field of research focuses on the impact of globalization and “education governance” on educational policies worldwide.

 

Specifically, I have been focusing on the influences of “education governance” on educational policies worldwide, particularly the ways in which the OECD communicates and markets educational quality, and on cultural dimensions as significant factors that have too often been under-emphasized or ignored in research on educational performance on international tests.

 

 (3) My third field of research focuses on systemic aspects in the work of school leaders and educational teams that influence school effectiveness.

 

This second field of research can be divided into the following sub-areas:

        (1) Boundary management and team leadership,

       (2) Participative management and

      (3) Systems thinking.

 

Applying a comparative and systemic approach to school leadership, I have focused on the role of school leaders as team leaders and boundary managers and on whether the effectiveness and consequences of several leadership styles such as participative management and system thinking is contingent upon cultural attributes utilizing and analyzing data at the national level. One of my main research objective has been to investigate the unique role and activities of principals in managing their senior management team (SMT) boundaries and the impact of such activities on SMT and school effectiveness.

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