Creating Collective Responsibility at School: Principals’ Roles, Faced Challenges, and Solution Strategies

Collective responsibility means that teachers work in cooperation and collaboration, act, and solve problems together. When teachers act together, they can be more productive. Urban schools’ principals prefer activity and project-based approaches in order to better integrate students into urban life, and for this, they work to ensure that teachers act together. The study aims to determine the role of principals in order to create collective responsibility in the school and to reveal the challenges they experienced and strategies to overcome them. The study was carried out in the 2023-2024 academic year in line with the experiences of eight school principals working in urban public schools in Türkiye. The study is a phenomenology design, one of the qualitative research designs. Data was collected with focus group interviews and recorded via video. The study concluded that they experienced some difficulties in creating collective responsibility and that these were caused by teachers, principals, and school and out-of-school factors. It has been determined that principals play an important role in collective responsibility, that they make an effort to turn the school into a team and work together, and that they use communication, support, and various managerial policies and strategies. It may be beneficial for principals to create professional learning communities in their schools for share information and act together for teachers’ professional development and schools’ improvement.