Abstract
Background & Objectives: One of the basic pillars of any society is education. In today's world, transformation in the education system is considered a serious prerequisite to respond to scientific, philosophical, cultural, economic, social and moral challenges in advanced countries. The institution of education, which is considered to be the foundation of fundamental changes and developments in a society, is affected by these changes and developments more than any other institution. Empowerment of schools facilitates the leadership of teachers, improves performance, improves the ability to influence the implementation of school reforms, ensures self-efficacy in the work environment, so that teachers perform their duties with a sense of responsibility and job commitment. On the other hand, creating transformation in the education system is a serious prerequisite for overcoming the scientific, cultural, social, and economic challenges of advanced countries. For this reason, it is necessary to make necessary changes in the goals and programs of the educational system according to the scientific, social and economic developments in every society. Thus, this research was conducted to develop and validate the educational package for empowering special schools for secondary school students.
Methods: The current research was based on a qualitative approach of thematic analysis, which was conducted based on interviews with professors and experts to develop an educational package for empowering schools. The participants were experts, faculty members of Tehran University in the fields of psychology, educational sciences and educational management. Thirteen experts (8 people in the field of educational management and 5 people in the field of educational sciences) were selected as samples and members of the accreditation group. These professionals had scientific publications or practical experience in their field of study with sufficient experience working with students. Based on the number of experts panel, the criterion for deciding on the relative coefficient of content was Lawshe's table (1975) with the minimum acceptable value of 0.55. Also, Waltz and Basel (1981) method was used to check content validity index. According to this method, the items with a score higher than 0.79 were suitable, between 0.7 and 0.79 needed to be revised and less than 0.7 were unacceptable. The study of sources and the use of experts' opinions were carried out until the saturation of information. Then, to analyze the data obtained from the interviews, the theoretical coding method was used. The coding steps used in this research included open coding based on the categories extracted from the preliminary study of the theoretical foundations of the research, axial coding, and selective coding. At the end of this stage, the components of the school empowerment training package were summarized. In addition, the criteria for the inclusion of studies and articles in this research was the closeness of the title to the subject of the research and the year of their publication. Finally, the educational package was designed according to the needs of students and the requirements of real situations and educational programs available in the research literature with the approach of empowering schools.
Results: Analyzing the information using the theme analysis method, led to the extraction of 10 organizing themes and 5 inclusive themes, and the effective factors on empowering schools were as follows: empowerment through rules and regulations, balanced and coherent school, specialized and professional empowerment, psychological empowerment, empowerment through education. The results showed that the index of CVI and CVR was higher than 0.80, indicating the validity of the package from the experts' point of view. Also, the content validity index for the whole package was 0.81.
Conclusion: According to the findings, the educational package of empowering schools for secondary school students has good content validity and has the necessary validity and reliability for educational and research applications. In other words, the prepared educational package has the ability to improve the empowerment of schools.