Examination of the relationship between the leadership features and the class management skills of teachers working in secondary schools

The aim of this research is to examine the relationship between the leadership features and the class management skills of teachers working in secondary schools. The universe of this research is the secondary school teachers who work in İstanbul, Fatih country during 2015-2016 school year. Among this universe, some of the schools were determined by simple random sampling and the surveys are distributed to teachers at those schools. These surveys were applied to 320 teachers and 20 of them were considered void because of encoding errors and the analysis is made based on the remaining 300 teachers. Findings based on the "Personal Information Form", "Teacher Leadership Scale" (Deniz, Hasançebioğlu 2003), and "Class Management Skills Scale" (Delson 1982; Yalçınkaya and Tonbul, 2002) are as the following; 1. Teachers' leadership styles are considered Autocratic, Half Democratic and Democratic if their total points from the scale are 17-64, 65-76 and 77-85 respectively. From this perspective, it is observed that 203 (66.8%) of them have autocratic, 94 (30.9%) of them have half democratic and 7 (2.3%) of them have democratic leadership styles. In short, majority of the teachers have autocratic leadership style while the democratic ones are very few. 2.No meaningful difference was determined among the arithmetic mean of the groups based on gender, age, graduation, marital status and democratic leadership levels of the teachers who constitute sample group. 3. It is observed among the sample group that the teachers who hold a master degree are behave less democratically than the teachers without a master degree. 4. It is observed among the sample group that the class management skills of the teachers in the sample group are at medium level. 5. No meaningful difference was determined among the class management skills of the teachers, who constitute the sample group, based on gender, age, graduation, and marital status. 6. No meaningful difference was determined among the class management skills of the teachers, who constitute the sample group, based on seniority and educational background. 7. Positive correlation is determined between the democratic leadership scale and class management skills scale. Whenever the democratic leadership features increase, class management skills increase as well.