Browsing by Subject "Theories of leadership"

The aim of this research is to find out the leaderships connection to learning environments and children's play in Early Childhood Education (ECE) by the next problems of the study: (1) What kind of leadership types there are in ECE? (2) What kind of connections there are between the types of leadership and learning environments? (3) What kind of connection there are between the types of leadership and children's play? There is no previous research about this topic so I will try to fulfill the gap on my account. The research was carried out by using the quantitative research methods: The Spearman Rank Order Correlation Coefficient (Rho), Principal Components Analysis, (PCA) and the frequency analysis. The theory of this paper based on research material by using the earlier theories about leadership, learning environments and children's play. The data used in this study was a part of the "Orientation project" -research by Jyrki Reunamo. There was 2889 children, 156 teams and their leaders, who took part in the study from thirteen different municipalities in Southern Finland. The response rate among leaders was 80 %. According to this research the leadership of ECE consists of five categories: The Pedagogical leadership, the Leadership of development, the Leadership of economy, troublesome leadership and weak leadership. To clarify comparison, five types of leadership were compressed to two types: The Quality leadership and the Demanding leadership. According to the results there are some connections between leadership, learning environments and children's play. From the results it can be deduced that if the leader thinks that she/he is "The Quality leader" learning environments are more versatile, more high-quality and children have more opportunities for rich and versatile play. Children have also many opportunities for free play. If the leader thinks that it is demanding to lead personnel, the play of children is more physical. There are also fewer opportunities for supported play or controlled play. It is very important to develop and improve the quality of leadership so that the play of children can be of highest quality.