Conceptualizing school leadership in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) cultures: Demarcating challenges for research

Abstract

Although school turnaround has been studied extensively in Western contexts such as the United States, the applicability of remedies to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries has not been extensively studied. The literature that exists predominantly uses a Western cultural lens. This article identifies four key dimensions of leadership for transformation of schools—what is leadership, who becomes a school leader, how are leaders supported, and do school leaders believe they can succeed—, contrasting between the Gulf region and the West; in doing so, the article seeks to explain why the solutions to school failure that originate from the West, widely understood around the globe, are either irrelevant or of limited use in this region. Drawing in part on the authors’ experience in establishing a leadership centre, through collaboration between the Ministry of Education in Bahrain and the Bahrain Teachers College, the article calls for systematic empirical studies to establish how each of the four dimensions inform region-specific approaches to leadership for school transformation and quality improvement. It concludes by arguing that researchers should explicitly consider the extent to which their findings can be translated into practical leadership action in a range of cultural settings.