Educational leadership in the era of mass media: State, consequences and repercussions

This article examines the consequences of the relationships between school head teachers and mass media on various aspects of their role: emotional-personal, behavioural-managerial and perception. It also examines the sociocultural experience in which these head teacher-media interactions take place, that is, the adjustment of the school system, modernist by nature, to the relativist and postmodern reality represented by the relationships with the media. The answer to the questions that arise in this type of situation is derived from a study based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 30 head teachers from the Israeli school system. Findings show that the media plays a significant role in the professional lives of school head teachers. Most of the head teachers who participated in the study experienced personalisation, that is, the media's tendency to focus on the leader and emphasise his/her responsibility, without taking the bigger picture into account. Many head teachers adopt mediatisation as a coping strategy, meaning they often take the media's presence into account, speak its language and act according to the image they would like to project. This study highlights the three main strategies that head teachers use to cope with the media. Each strategy was developed in line with the approaches adopted by the head teachers as a result of their encounters with the media.