Perceptions of primary school principals and teachers for leadership practices: An application in Çankaya county

Today's school leaders, should execute different practices than in the past to satisfy the expectations of rapidly changing and evolving community dynamics, It is a necessity that school administrators should wriggle out of status that controls and governs traditional bureaucratic set of processes and should take in a position to bring change, lead and steer the change in school environment and should be innovator leaders who have practices that serve the requirements of organizational management approach of today's age. This will be only possible at school management with the leadership practices that respond the needs of age. This study aimed to reveal the leadership practices related to perception of principals and teachers, who are serving at the state primary schools in Çankaya county in Ankara, on the basis of five exemplary leadership practices model developed by Kouzes and Posner (2003). The sample of this research is formed by 63 primary school principals and 637 primary school teachers working in state primary schols in Çankaya county. The datas of research were collected with leadership practices inventory self-assessment and observer forms that are developed by Kouzes and Posner (2003) and analyzed with SPSS 15.0 software. In this study means, standard deviations, t-tests, and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were utilized for analysing the datas. As a result of research it is come out that, the perceptions of primary school principals and teachers related to leadership practices of primary school principals, has a significant difference and the teachers have a perception that the primary school principals carry out leadership practices in lower levels. Another conspicuous result of this reearch is that, the perception of male teacher for female principals' leadership practices and the perception of female teachers regarding the leadership practices of male principals' were in high levels. Key Words: Kouzes and Posner Leadership Model, Leadership Practices, Primary School Principal, Primary School Teacher.