Principal’s Pillars of digital leadership practices and school effectiveness amongst teachers at IDRISSI International School, Selangor, Malaysia / Sara Nadhirah Mohamed Najid

The world of education continues to change at an exponential rate. With the recent phenomenon of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools have resorted to instil digital learning, and technology is believed to be at the forefront of everything. This shift in the digital learning landscape places a greater demand on principals to be digital leaders and adapt in tandem with the shift in education particularly in private schools. However, having the 21st-century principals who are technologically inept and less dynamic in embracing digital leadership practices, as well as ambiguous measurement of school effectiveness, has resulted the current study to be conducted. In view of the scarcity of instrumentation measuring digital leadership practices amongst school leaders, the study mainly aims to construct instrumentation measuring digital leadership practices as well as to explore relationships between principal’s pillars of digital leadership practices and school effectiveness amongst teachers at IDRISSI International School, Selangor, Malaysia. A correlational research design employing the mixed-methods approach was used to explore the relationships. 74 respondents amongst the teachers in IDRISSI International School participated in the study through an online platform. The instruments used to measure and collect the quantitative data were the Pillars of Digital Leadership Practices (self-constructed instrument based on literature by Eric Sheninger, 2019) and the School Effectiveness Questionnaire (SEQ) developed by Lee Baldwin, Freeman Coney III, Diane Fridge, Roberta Thomas (1993). Few statistical tests including mean score, standard deviation, Cronbach’s Alpha, Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation Coefficient and simple regressions were employed in the current study. In addition, qualitative data in a form of semi-structured and open-ended questions were developed and collected to further triangulate the quantitative data. Findings indicated that firstly, the results of Cronbach’s Alpha for the constructed instrumentation of Pillars of Digital Leadership Practices is above 0.8, indicating that all 40 items were reliable (0.981) with each dimension showing high and good reliability. Secondly, the teachers rated their principal as having a dynamic and high level of digital leadership practices for all the dimensions (ranging from M= 5.12 to M= 5.45) where the Branding Pillar was rated as the highest. Thirdly, the teachers rated their school as having a high level of school effectiveness (ranging from M= 4.79 to M= 5.42) where Emphasis on Basic Skills dimension was rated as the highest. Fourthly, the result from the correlation coefficient analysis with r= 0.870 and p-value = 0.000 (p <0.01) shows that there is a strong, significant, and positive relationship between the principal’s pillars of digital leadership practices and school effectiveness amongst teachers. Lastly, the simple regression analysis reveals that 75% (R =0.75) of the variance in the school effectiveness score could be predicted from an independent variable of pillars of digital leadership practices. In addition, the qualitative findings seemed to triangulate and support the quantitative findings. Consequently, all these findings lead to some implications, such as the extension of the corpus of knowledge, policy and training, and theoretical implications in the scope of digital leadership practices and school effectiveness.