The instructional leadership behaviours of primary school principals

The debate about the differences between leadership and managership has been going on for years. It is obvious that there are differences between managerial and leadership behaviors, although they look similar, giving the fact that they are a part of the management. In an organization, leadership behaviors are described as defining mission and vision statements, establishing efficient communication and collaboration, creation a positive learning atmosphere and achieving the organizational goals by influencing the employees. Today, managers are expected to be not only effective managers, but also influencing leaders while performing their managerial duties. Consequently, these apply to primary school principals as they essentially have to perform leadership and managerial behaviors. The aim of this study is to define the instructional leadership behaviours of the primary school principals. In the study, the level of the instructional leadership of the principals is intended to be determined in the light of the opinions of principals and teachers who they work with. The instructional leadership behaviors of the principals have been researched in four dimensions. These dimensions are listed as defining mission and vision statement, managing learning and educational programmes, creating a positive learning atmosphere and inspecting and evaluating of teaching. In this study, the issue of principals having significant differences between principal?s and teacher?s point of views about educational leadership behaviors and the issue of personal traits being effective on these views or not are also being analyzed. The sample of this study, which used the survey method, is made up of primary school teachers and primary school principals who work in the primary education institutions in Çanakkale in 2006-2007 season. v In this study, as means of data gathering the resources and previous researches have scanned and analyzed by the researcher and the views of been taken and two parallel questionnaire forms have been applied and the collected data have been statistically analyzed by the help of SPSS software. In the verification tests between the groups, the level of p = 0,05 has been taken as a base, in the analyses of the data, frequency, percentage, means, standard deviation and the t-test and one way ANOVA test has been used. At the end of this study, a parallelism has been observed between the opinions of primary school principals and teachers on educational leadership behaviors. Principals and teachers are observed to always agree on the relationship of the following issues with the managerial duties: defining the mission and vision statements, inspection and evaluation of instructional, creation of a positive learning atmosphere. On the other hand principals and teachers are observed to often agree on the relationship of the following issue with managerial duties: management of the learning programme and teaching. Although there has not been observed significant differences between the opinions of principals and teachers in all four dimensions, teachers have been observed to have more positive opinions on relationship of managing learning progremmes and education with managerial duties, and principals have been observed to have more positive opinions on relationship of creation of a positive learning atmosphere with managerial duties. Based on the outcomes of this study, suggestions have been proposed making various arrangements for enabling principals to develop themselves on the issues they feel inadequate about, enforcing educational leadership behavior as mandatory criteria in employment of the managers and paying utmost attention on the personal and professional development of inexperienced principals. Key Words: Leader, manager, instructional leader, principal, teacher.