The relationship between project school principals' strategic leadership practices and teacher motivation according to teachers' perspectives

The aim of the research is to determine whether there is a significant relationship between the strategic leadership practices of project school principals and teacher motivation, according to teacher perspectives. The population of this research, conducted using the relational scanning method, consists of 593 teachers working in 10 project schools of science, social sciences, and Anatolian high school types in 5 central districts of Antalya province during the 2022-2023 academic year. The sample of the study consists of a total of 227 teachers randomly selected using simple random sampling method. In this study, the "Strategic Leadership Scale" (SLS), developed by Guerra and Pisapia (2009) and adapted into Turkish by Çoban (2016), and the "Teacher Motivation Scale" (TMS), developed by Akdemir and Arslan (2013), were used to collect data. A Likert-type five-point rating scale was used in the measurement instrument. In the analysis of the data collected within the scope of the research, a significance level of p ≤ 0.05 was used in all significance tests, and percentage, frequency, arithmetic mean, standard deviation, Pearson correlation coefficient, independent samples t-test, one-way analysis of variance for unrelated samples, Mann Whitney U test and Kruskal Wallis-H Test were used. It was observed that teachers' perceptions of strategic leadership did not differ according to gender and education status, while they differentiated according to age, seniority, and working period with administrators. On the other hand, while teacher motivation did not show significant differences according to gender, education status, age, and working period with administrators, it differentiated according to seniority. It was concluded that there is a moderate, positive, and significant relationship between the perception of strategic leadership and teacher motivation. Keywords: Leadership, Motivation, Teacher Motivation, Project School, Strategic Leadership