محمود تيمور كمصلح اجتماعي

Born in 1894 in "Darb Sadah" of Cairo: Mehmood Taimur has attained a distinguished place in the world of literature. Besides writing literature, he has also written many essays/articles. He has highlighted social problems in his social essays and has become a social reformer. He has pinpointed the following social issues in these essays: (1) He has exposed the social ills like class distinction: sexual deprivation destitute and ignorance. (2) He has also acquainted the people about the causes of polygamy and divorce in the light of Shariat and rejects the contention with the solid argument that woman is a weak creature subjected to all kind of wrong treatment. Every person has a right to lead a peaceful life in this world and no one has the right to deprive him of this privilege except owing to some Islamic law. Most of the people were unaware of the rights of woman granted by Islam or they were not accepting them but Mehmood Taimur has presented all those rights in a beautiful way before society that is why on reading his social essays man reaches the conclusion that he was a social reformer.

The Role of School Headteacher in Empowering Teachers: A Case Study

In the mid-1980s, teacher empowerment emerged as a strategy of school reform for teachers. This notion was a response towards the falling quality of education as a result of changes and demands in the educational field. However, the implementation of teacher empowerment has not been pronounced in the developed countries. This study associated teacher empowerment with teacher motivation, classroom autonomy, and increased teaching expertise. A small-scale case study was conducted in Karachi, Pakistan, to examine the role of the school head teacher in facilitating teacher empowerment in a government school context. A qualitative inquiry was used to seek information from one government secondary school head teacher and three teachers of the same school. This process was done through in-depth interviews, observations, document analysis, and informal conversations. The study found that the contextual realities together with human factors were critical in enhancing teacher empowerment in the school. In this case, the processes involved in enhancing teacher empowerment were constrained by the centralized education system that turned school head teacher an implementer of curriculum decisions made at the state and district level. The results were that the school head teacher remained a government representative in the school in which her leadership strategies were primarily used to control teachers. The prominent feature of the study was the head teachers understanding of educational change process that focus on teacher empowerment for school improvement. Several other factors were found to be critical in realizing teacher empowerment: an atmosphere of support and trust, teachers assuming leadership roles through administrator encouragement, diverse, active, and self directed learning experiences connected to teacher work context and expertise, integration of efforts to improve classroom teaching and learning. The study urges the educational policy to rethink school leadership structures, roles, together with skills and knowledge of school headteachers and teachers in realizing teacher empowerment in schools.