Caring leadership practices in Chilean educational communities: Perceptions of school principals and teachers

Abstract

Caring leadership has emerged as an approach that can help strengthen school leadership practices to promote the cognitive and social-emotional development of the school community. Therefore, our goal is to study the differences between how school principals perceive their practices to promote the development of a school culture of care and teachers’ perceptions of those same practices. For this purpose, the Caring School Leadership Questionnaire (CSLQ) by author Van Der Vyver (2014), was translated and validated statistically and subsequently applied to 332 school principals and 333 teachers in the Metropolitan Region of Chile. The results of the questionnaire reveal different perceptions among the two types of actors, varying across each dimension. Most differences are seen around the practices related to psychological well-being, with fewer noticeable differences in relation to practices associated with the workplace.