The elementary school principals practice for the distributed leadership

The purpose of this study is to investigate the elementary school principals? practice for the distributed leadership.In the study, the general survey model, descriptive research method, was conducted to collect the quantitative data from the participants. The population of the study was the teachers who work in the elementary schools located in the downtown of Kocaeli. 300 elementary school teachers who work in 2010-2011 academic year were chosen as the sample.The data was collected by a liker-type questionnaire developed by Kouzes and Posner (1995) named as ?Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI)?.The frequency and percentage tables were constructed to analyze the data collected. The differences of teachers? gender were compared by T-Test. The differences of teachers? educational status, age, the time that they worked in the school, major and the principals? time of the school were compared by one factor variance analysis form (ANOVA).According to the results, the participants in this study reported that they have generally positive opinions about the principals? practice of distributed leadership. Most of the teachers think that the princpals develop cooperative relationships among the people, praises people for a job well done, actively listens to diverse points of view, treats others with dignity and respect, and builds consensus around a common set of values for running the organization.According to the comparison there is not a statisticly significant difference between the elementary school teachers? ideas about the principal?s practice for the distributed leadership based on teachers? gender, educational status, age, the time that they worked in the school, and major.