MAIN RESEARCH INTERESTS

As my academic research shows, I am interested in issues pertaining to educational policies and school leadership. Specifically, I’m investigating how the interplay between individual and environmental factors may influence the attitudes and behavior of both leaders, team members and school faculty.

 

My main research interests are:

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(1) Educational governance, comparative research, cross-cultural research

(2) Leadership in minorities and underrepresented population

(3) Diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education

(4) Boundary management, teamwork, senior management team,

(5) Organizational theory and organizational effectiveness

(6) Teacher retention and well-being

           

FUTUR RESEARCH GOALS

 

I have been focusing on education governance and policy, cross-cultural and comparative research combining quantitative and qualitative research. Also, my studies have focused on team leadership, boundary management, participative leadership, systems thinking from a multilevel approach within the educational context with a particular focus on minorities in education and underrepresented population. Specifically, I am investigating how the interplay between individual and environmental factors may influence the attitudes and behaviors of both leaders, team members and school faculty.

            

My first research goal will be to expand our knowledge of the factors that can contribute to school effectiveness and team effectiveness, focusing mainly on the role of the principal through his or her leadership and management activities. One of my main research focus has been to investigate the unique role and activities of principals in managing their senior management team (SMT) boundaries and the antecedents and consequences of such activities on SMT and school effectiveness, school violence and teachers’ withdrawal behaviors. I was among the first researchers to apply and research the concept of boundary management in the educational context.  Importantly, my implementation and empirical study of this idea have supported the unique value of teamwork and specifically teamwork at the management team level, emphasizing the important role of principals’ boundary activities.  Since principals are also constantly asked to demonstrate instructional leadership and to promote learning mechanisms, my research goal, will be to explore how instructional leadership and boundary management can function in a reciprocal way so as to complement or substitute for each other and to explore the role of the principals as a learning boundary spanner in promoting the school learning process.

 

More recently, I have been focusing on minority in education. I aim to explore the interplay between principal leadership styles and socio-cultural attributes and their influences on teacher well-being and school effectiveness by drawing comparisons across various samples culturally diverse. Applying a comparative perspective, I have explored the impact of cultural and religious attributes on the effectiveness of principal leadership styles, to highlight such attributes as significant factors in explaining the variations in the effect of principals’ leadership styles on teachers’ attitudes, wellbeing and school effectiveness across several samples culturally diverse in Israel. Such an inquiry is fruitful because of the changes that are occurring and re-shaping several minorities (i.e. ultra-Orthodox community, Arab sector community) in Israel. This inquiry can facilitate the development and improvement of practical processes for nurturing the application of new leadership practices that may be better adapted to suit particular school contexts characterized by unique cultural and religious attributes. Subsequently, my research goal, will be to deepen our understanding of socio-cultural attributes and their implications for school effectiveness and school management with a particular focus on ethnocultural minorities. This investigation is unique especially since ethnocultural minorities, have redesigned themselves, moving between tradition and modernism with implications for educational outcomes, equity and educational policies.

In addition, 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.

 

Finally, 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 underemphasized or ignored in research on educational performance on international tests. My research goals will be to pursue this vein of research, drawing comparisons based on international data scale, and adopting a critical perspective to develop new insights about how a particular form of professionalism is promoted by the OECD through TALIS, used as an epistemological tool.