English abstract
The study aimed to identify the challenges that school leadership faced
during the Covid-19 pandemic in the Sultanate of Oman from the point of
view of school principals and the methods in which they dealt with them, and
to determine whether there were statistically significant differences between
the responses of principals about these challenges according to the variables
(gender, educational phase, and period of experience in school leadership)..
To achieve the study's objectives, the descriptive approach was employed,
and a questionnaire was prepared of (46) phrases whose validity and
reliability were confirmed. The phrases of the questionnaire were classified
into four axes: challenges related to the teacher, challenges related to the
student, challenges related to the student's guardian, and challenges related
to the school environment. The questionnaire was directed to the entire study
society amounted by (157) principals in Al Dakhiliyah Governorate in the
Sultanate of Oman. The data was statistically processed depending on the
arithmetic means and standard deviations, and the T-test and one-way
ANOVA (analysis of variance) were used. The study reached some results,
the most important of which are:
- The means of the challenges that school leaders faced during the
Covid-19 pandemic, from the point of view of principals of
elementary schools, ranged between (4.19 to 4.48), which indicate
a degree of challenge ranging from high to very high.
- There are no statistically significant differences between the
respondents' responses to these challenges due to variables of
gender, educational phase, and years of experience in the school
leadership, in all aspects and at the level of the total score.
- Principals took a set of measures to confront the Covid-19
pandemic, in various axes of study, such as: holding training
workshops for the use of educational platforms; taking into account
the social and economic aspects for dyslexic students; and other
procedures.
In the light of the educational literature's analysis and the study's
results, the study provides a set of recommendations, including: providing
more opportunities for principals to participate in decision-making related
to facing crises as appropriate, giving more powers to principals to
perform their work well and to get benefit from their practical experience,
contributing to raise efficiency of principals to plan, face various crises,
and develop their leadership skills through training programs and various
courses during service, preparing government schools to face any crisis
that may occur in the future, such as strengthening the Internet networks,
increasing the number of classes to reduce the students' number in the one
class, providing spacious and clean places for students to eat meals during
break etc. The recommendations also included caring about other studies
about the leadership role in how to plan for managing various future crises
and what is the role of leaders after these crises in other governorates of
the Sultanate.
