Examination of the relationship of instructional leadership roles of primary school principals and effective schools

The purpose of this study is to examine primary school teachers? opinions about instructional leadership roles of primary school principals and effective schools. The study group comprised of 500 teachers in total working at 20 state primary schools in central districts of Ankara in 2008-2009 School Year.For data collection, ?Effective School Questionnaire? developed by Balcı (2002) and ?Inventory for School Principals? Instructional Leadership Behaviour? developed by Şişman (2004) were used. For data analysis, t-test was used in comparisons made according to two subcategories of gender and branch variables. In comparisons made according to variables of professional seniority, educational background and period of service at their school, One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was conducted.. Group arithmetic means ( ) and significance values (p?.05) were taken into account when interpreting the results of the analysis. The value of 0.5 was accepted as a significance threshold. When the results were analyzed, it was seen that teachers? opinions about instructional leadership roles of primary school principals and effective schools did not show any significant difference according to the abovementioned variables. However, a positively significant relation was found between levels of effective school and instructional leadership behaviour The result is found as highly significant. In other words, the more teachers? perceptions related to instructional leadership behaviour of primary school principals increase, the more their perception related to effective school increase.Whether teachers? perception of effective school levels affects instructional leadership levels was attempted to be explained by single regression analysis. According to the findings, perceptions pertaining to instructional leadership behaviour was found to be significant in predicting teachers? perceptions of effective school.Key words: Effective School, Instructional Leadership