Campus Location
Dallas Campus (Online)
Date of Award
10-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Department
Organizational Leadership
Degree Name
Doctor of Education
Committee Chair or Primary Advisor
Timothy Stafford
Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor
Melissa Atkinson
Third Committee Member or Committee Reader
Julie McElhany
Abstract
Secondary education public schools are increasingly being confronted with student misuse of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Students are using these technologies to engage in disruptive and harmful behaviors like cyberbullying and sexting. As a result, some public school districts have responded by banning the use of ICTs in the classroom, while others have turned to teaching digital citizenship through a dedicated digital citizenship curriculum. However, effectively implementing such a curriculum remains a significant challenge. According to the literature, the best way to implement a digital citizenship curriculum is by fostering a positive school culture where stakeholders model and support responsible ICT use, which is inherently heavily influenced by principal leadership. Despite the central role principals play in shaping these conditions, their perspectives have been largely absent from existing research on digital citizenship education. This qualitative case study explored how secondary education public school principals perceived digital citizenship and how those perceptions influenced their principal change leadership competencies toward implementing a digital citizenship curriculum. The study was conducted in a midsize public school district in Southeast Texas. Purposive sampling was used to select five secondary education public school principals within the district who completed an online open-ended questionnaire and face-to-face semistructured interviews. The researcher also completed field notes. The study’s data were analyzed thematically to identify four emergent key themes and 12 subthemes related to principals’ actual or hypothetical actions to embed digital citizenship as a campus-wide norm, build their staff capacity, model appropriate behavior, and strategically plan. The study concluded that principals’ perceptions of digital citizenship were shaped by their level of technological proficiency and would influence their leadership behaviors during digital citizenship curriculum implementation efforts. These findings contribute to the limited body of research on principal leadership in digital citizenship education and underscore the need for principal leadership development programs to integrate technological proficiency, strategic planning, and change leadership competencies to support responsible technology use in secondary education public schools.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Randolph, Waylon M., "Digital Leadership: Secondary Education Principals’ Perceptions and Change Competencies Toward Implementing Digital Citizenship Curricula" (2025). Digital Commons @ ACU, Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 947.
https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/etd/947
Included in
Educational Leadership Commons, Educational Technology Commons, Secondary Education Commons