The Relationship between the school principals communication skills and the school culture

IV ABSTRACT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE SCHOOL PRINCIPALS' COMMUNICATION SKILLS AND THE SCHOOL CULTURE Yücel ŞİMŞEK Divison of Educational Sciences (Education Administration, Supervising, Planning and Economics) Anadolu University Institute of Educational Sciences, March 2003 Adviser: Professor Dr. Coşkun BAYRAK This study aims to identify the opinions of the general public secondary school teachers on the relation between the school principles' communication skills and the school culture. Further, these teachers' opinions is classified according to the sex, education level, professional seniority and the working period in the school. The study İs designed in correlational relation survey method in the fall of 2002-2003. A total of 706 secondary school teachers in 17 various schools in Eskişehir centre participated in the study and % 57,25 of the subjects presented the available data. The data were collected through "The Opinions of Teachers to the Relationship Between School Principal's Communication Skills with School Culture" which was prepared by the researcher and consisted of three parts with a sum of 76 items. The validity and the reliability of the questionnaire is tested and it has above.90 reliability. In the study during the data analysis, to identify the school culture profile and the school principles' communication skills arithmetic mean, standard deviation, percentages are found and paired sample t test was used to determine the meaningfulness of the teacher's opinions. The relationship between school principles' communication skills and school culture is found out by using Pearson Correlation Coefficient analysis. Theeffect of different teacher features on their opinions is calculated by Pearson Correlation Coefficient and to compare Correlation Coefficients, z test technique was used. For the statistical analysis used in the study significant level of t test is accepted as.05 and Pearson Correlation Coefficient is accepted as.01. The statistical analysis of the data were realized by the Microsoft Excel 2002 of Microsoft Office Software and SPPS 10.0 for Windows programs. According to the findings of this study, % 6 of the schools has an average culture level, % 75 has stronger culture level, which needs to be improved and % 19 has top level stronger culture. The principles with top level effective communication skills is % 25 of the whole population. The % 75 of school principles have effective communication skills but yet they need improvement. There is a top level positive relationship between the school principles' communication skills and the school cultures and this relationship is affected by the school teachers' education level, professional seniority and working period in the working schools but not teachers' sex.