EXPLORING THE COMPETENCIES OF SCHOOL EDUCATION SUPERVISORS: A QUALITATIVE STUDY

Abstract

The present study was a qualitative study and the statistical population consisted of experts, academic members of universities in the field of educational management, educational sciences instructors in the area of elementary education as well as faculty members and experts in educational areas in the city of Mashhad in the academic year of 2019-2020. The sampling was performed via a purposive method and saturation was reached with the participation of 22 people. Data were analyzed using semi-structured and in-depth interviews using a seven-step approach and open-axis coding. For data validity, the trustiness of the subjects and for the data reliability, the contingency coefficient of two coders using the Kappa's coefficient were used. To analyze the data, content analysis method using MAXQDA software was applied. The research demonstrated that there is a central core-based paradigm for education supervisors in school affairs which involves the elements constituting the competencies of education supervisors as consisting of 6 main categories and 26 components along with 104 open-coding. The findings revealed that the main categories of education supervisors’ competencies included interpersonal characteristics, professional knowledge, managerial characteristics, individual characteristics, and professional and attitude skills. Competency-based management is considered to be a coherent approach and a coordinated framework to manage human capital in the long run, which is based on a common set of competencies as well as qualifications related to the organization's macro strategies.