Exploring the roles of school leaders and teachers in a school-wide adoption of flipped classroom: School dynamics and institutional cultures

While the development of digital technologies provides generous resources for educational practices, how the use of information and communication technology (ICT) supports instructional reforms in schools still needs further exploration. The purpose of the study is to understand the roles of school leaders and teachers play in an instructional reform supported by ICT as well as how these roles interact with each other. The study selected a Chinese middle-high school that successfully had a school-wide instructional reform supported by ICT as an exemplary case and collected data through document analysis, interviews and observations. The results indicated that the school leadership was critical in the instructional reform. While the executive vice principal was in an essential position as an initiator and strategic planner, the leadership was distributed and stretched over in the school. The school built supporting pedagogical and organizational systems for continuous and collaborative learning and helped the teachers develop four new roles: learners, facilitators to student-centered learning, collaborators and researchers.