Porpose: The aim of this study was to provide a model of factors affecting the professional development of Iranian school principals.
Method: This study was quantitative in terms of applied purpose and descriptive in terms of implementation method. The population of the present study was 91972 school principals in Iran in the academic year of 1999-99. According to Krejcie and Morgan table, the sample size was 384 people who were selected by cluster sampling method according to the population size. The research instrument was a researcher-made questionnaire of factors affecting the professional development of Iranian school principals with 104 items whose face and content validity was confirmed by experts and its reliability was calculated by Cronbach's alpha method of 0.94. Data were analyzed by exploratory factor analysis in SPSS-23 software.
Findings: Findings showed that the factors affecting the professional development of Iranian school principals had 104 indicators, 9 components and 3 dimensions; Including individual factors (with four components of personality, cognition, general characteristics and behavioral characteristics), intra-organizational factors (with three components of learning manager, scholarly culture and driving leadership) and extra-organizational factors (with two components redefining school-community relationship and dynamic decisions Upstream) was. The professional development of Iranian school principals had a significant effect on all three dimensions of individual factors, internal organizational factors and external organizational factors (P <0.001).
Conclusion: According to the results of this study, specialists and planners of the educational system to promote the professional development of school principals can provide the basis for improving its indicators, components and dimensions.
Providing a model of effective factors on professional development of Iranian school principals
 
Purpose: Nowadays, it is clear that the professional development of school administrators is an inevitable necessity. Because the professional development of teachers, the improvement of teaching and learning processes and the development of students depend on the professional development of managers. Also, the professional development of school principals often emphasizes that principals and school leaders believe that they can improve student learning through professional development of teachers. Therefore, the professional development of managers is necessary and valuable because it can lead to the academic progress of students through improving the performance and professional development of teachers. Another important point about the importance and necessity of the current research is that there have been researches about the professional development of managers and the identification of factors affecting it, but on the one hand, many researches in this field are few and on the other hand, some of them are not schools or the society. Their society is limited to a certain province or city, and no research has been done on the managers of the whole country in this field. In addition, the results of this research can help specialists, officials and planners in designing appropriate and coherent programs to improve the professional development of managers in the country. Therefore, the current research was conducted with the aim of providing a model of factors affecting the professional development of Iranian school principals. Therefore, according to the research gaps related to the strategic thinking of managers and also according to the presented materials, the importance and necessity of research related to the philosophical foundations of the model of developing the strategic thinking of managers is evident.
Materials and methods: This study was applied in terms of purpose and descriptive in terms of quantitative type. The population of the present research was Iranian school principals in the academic year of 2018-2019 in the number of 91,972 people, according to the table of Karjesi and Morgan, the sample size was determined to be 384 people, who were selected by cluster sampling method according to the size of the population. In this sampling method, the entire country is first divided into five parts: North, South, East, West, and Central, and one province is selected from each part, including Gilan, Fars, Khorasan Razavi, West Azarbaijan, and Isfahan provinces, according to the population size or the ratio of managers. In each province, a number of managers to whom the researcher had access were selected as samples. Therefore, considering the size of the population, the sample size was 69, 113, 79, 44 and 79 people for each of the provinces of Gilan, Fars, Razavi Khorasan, West Azarbaijan and Isfahan, respectively. The tool of the current research was a researcher-made questionnaire on factors affecting the professional development of Iranian school principals; So that the said instrument had 104 items, each item according to the Likert scale with five options from completely disagree (with a score of 1), disagree (with a score of 2), neither disagree nor agree (with a score of 3), agree (with a score of 4) ) and I completely agree (with a score of 5). In this questionnaire, no item is graded in a reverse way and the total score of the tool is calculated through the total score of its items and the score of each dimension or component is also calculated through the total score of the items of that dimension or component, and a higher score indicates that the factors affecting professional development are favorable and more appropriate. It is school principals. The face and content validity of the researcher-made questionnaire on the factors affecting the professional development of Iranian school principals was confirmed by the opinion of 12 experts and professional development specialists working in education and training and Farhangian University, and its reliability was calculated using the Cronbach's alpha method of 0.94. Data were analyzed by exploratory factor analysis in SPSS-23 software.
Findings: The findings of the current research showed that the professional development of Iranian school principals had 104 indicators, 9 components and 3 dimensions; So that it includes individual factors (with 4 components of personality, cognitive, general characteristics and behavioral characteristics), internal organizational factors (with 3 components of learning manager, knowledge-oriented culture and driving leadership) and external factors (with 2 components of redefining the relationship between school and society and dynamic decisions) upstream) was The factor loading of all dimensions and components was higher than 0.60 and the reliability of all of them was higher than 0.70. In addition, the professional development of Iranian school principals had a significant effect on all three dimensions of individual factors, intra-organizational factors and extra-organizational factors. Although no research has been conducted on the professional development of Iranian school principals, these findings are in agreement with the findings of Timukhina (2021), Kamrei et al. Wang and Liu (2018), Javank et al. (2018), Nourad Sediq et al. (2018), Ghanbari and Mohammadi (2016), Ng and Chan (2014) and Kanukorn et al. (2014) were consistent. The effect of professional development of Iranian school principals on individual factors with a factor loading of 0.96 and significance of 0.001, the effect of professional development of Iranian school principals on intra-organizational factors with a factor loading of 0.99 and significance of 0.001, and the effect of professional development of Iranian school principals on extra-organizational factors It was confirmed with a factor load of 0.96 and a significance of 0.001. As a result, the professional development of Iranian school principals had a significant effect on all three dimensions of individual factors, intra-organizational factors, and extra-organizational factors (P<0.001).
Conclusion: The professional development of Iranian school principals has three dimensions of individual factors with personality, cognitive, general characteristics and behavioral characteristics, the dimension of intra-organizational factors with the components of learning manager, knowledge-oriented culture and driving leadership, and the dimension of extra-organizational factors with the components of redefining the relationship between school and society and upstream dynamic decisions. that they had good factor loading, validity and reliability and the professional development of Iranian school principals had a significant effect on the dimensions and dimensions on the components. The aforementioned results have practical implications for specialists and planners of the educational system, especially the education system, and with the help of the results of this research and similar researches, they can design programs for the growth and promotion of the professional development of Iranian school principals and implement them using in-service training. Another suggestion is that officials and stakeholders should examine the current situation of Iranian school principals according to the indicators, components and dimensions of professional development and seek to increase the professional development of principals with the help of educational workshops or other solutions. According to the results of this study, specialists and planners of the educational system can provide the basis for improving the indicators, components and dimensions identified for promoting the professional development of school administrators. Undoubtedly, improving and upgrading all indicators, components and dimensions of professional development of Iranian school administrators can improve the performance and effectiveness of the education organization through improving the performance of teachers and students.