Challenges of primary school principals of Ahvāz in leading a virtual school: A phenomenological study

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate and explain the challenges of primary school principals of Ahvāz in leading schools during the virtual education. To achieve this goal, a qualitative research method was used with Husserl's descriptive phenomenological approach. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight primary school principals, who were purposefully selected. Data were extracted and analyzed using Creswell’s analysis cycle, including data organization, reading and writing, description, classification and coding, interpretation of the data validity and reliability, and displaying and visualization of the data. The results showed that the school principals identified the challenges of the virtual school in the areas of financial resources, time, parent/family cooperation, professional development, responsiveness to the responsibility and teachers/school staff, respectively. In addition to these challenges, which were based on the theoretical framework of the study by Richardson et al (2015), principals described the other challenges of the virtual school as “shād application” and "family issues". The most important challenges of shād application are themes such as not defining the role of school staff except teachers, low internet speed, problem of students’ authenticating and leaving the shād application, inability of users to see the message recipients, and the low quality of the files sent by users in this application were detected. In addition, the principals described the challenges of families in terms of the two themes: "poverty and financial inability of families" and "unemployment, divorce, addiction and parental delinquency."

Keywords

• virtual education
• primary school principals
• covid-19 pandemic
• lived experiences
• phenomenological study