Chinese School Principals Explore the Fifth Discipline Fostering a Learning Community in a High School in Beijing

Abstract

This qualitative case study explores the Chinese school principals’ experiences in building a learning community through the Fifth Discipline (shared vision, personal mastery, mental models, team learning, and system thinking) in helping them embrace student engagement, teacher commitment, and parents’ involvement for school improvement and student achievement. Findings show that principals face three challenges, including (1) testing score limits to create a learning community; (2) saving cost causes difficulty to hire a highly professional teacher; (3) high expectations cause the high rate of dropout. This study also finds three ways in using the Fifth Discipline for student engagement, teacher commitment, and parent involvement which are (1) communication, (2) self-improvement, and (3) self-reflection. Findings show that principals use three strategies of nurturing school capacity, including (1) visibility, (2) educational core values, and (3) lifelong learning. The future qualitative grounded theory research design of using the Fifth Discipline was suggested by interviewing principals, teachers, parents, and students to create a leadership framework in leading the school change in the 21st century.