An examination of teachers' perception and expectations about teacher leadership roles (The case of Yozgat)

The purpose of this study is to investigate perceptions and expectations of teachers, working at elementary and secondary schools in Yozgat, with respect to teacher leadership roles under three dimensions as institutional development, professional development, cooperation with colleagues. In this study, the quantitatve research approach was employed and survey design was utilized. The target population of the study was comprised of 763 teachers working at 52 schools in the academic year of 2017-2018 in Yozgat. The sample was made up of 313 teachers from 14 schools. The gathered data was analyzed through arithmetic mean, standard deviation, t-test, variance analysis (ANOVA), and correlation analysis respectively. The results of the analysis indicated that the overall perception and its sub-dimension scores for teacher leadership roles among the participating teachers were observed as "often" level; the expectation score was observed as "always". The teachers expected that teacher leadership roles were demonstrated as "often", all the dimensions were demonstrated as "always". Of all the dimensions of teacher leadership variable, professional development dimension was the most observed one, and also regarded as the most required behavior. This dimension was followed by cooperation with colleagues and institutional development consecutively. It has been found out that teacher perceptions regarding teacher leadership roles significantly differed in terms of teachers' work experience. In the dimension of institutional development, the views of teachers who had experience between the years of 1 and 5 had more positive perceptions than the ones having teaching experience as the years of "6-10", "11-15", and "16-20". For the expectation dimension, there was a significant difference in terms of gender and teaching branch. In professional development dimension, female teachers had more positive expectations than male teachers. Regarding the bivariate correlations between perception and expectation scores of teachers about teacher leadership roles, it was found out that there was a positive, moderate, and significant relationship between the particular variables. Key words: Leadership, Teaching Leadership, Teacher Leadership.