State and private primary school teachers' perceptions of the leadership roles they exhibit (the case of Adıyaman province)

Change is an inevitable reality of the social structure. The changes happening in the society necessitate change in the institutions interacting with the society. As in every field, the educational institutions experience a very rapid period of development and change.In order to realize educational changes in schools, the teachers should keep up to date with the latest advances, be open to development and innovation and carry out self-renewal. They are expected to have an understanding of education, which is beyond the current age. Teachers? capacity to perform these goes is in parallel with their performance in leadership roles.This study aims to identify state and private primary school teachers? perceptions of the leadership roles they exhibit.The population of this descriptive study which adopted the survey model comprises 1607 teachers: 1554 from 38 state primary schools and 53 from 3 private primary schools in Adıyaman city center in 2010-2011 educational year. As for the sample, it was composed of 670 teachers: 631 teachers from 19 state schools and 39 teachers from 3 private primary schools.?Teacher Leadership Perceptions and Expectations Scale? (TLPE) developed by Beycioğlu (2009) was used as data collection instrument. In the scale, teacher leadership was divided into three dimensions: Institutional Development, Professional Development and Cooperation with Colleagues.The scale is comprised of two sections. The first section contains questions related to participants? age, years of experience, university degree, field and the type of the school that the participant works at. In the second section there are 25 items measuring state and private primary school teachers? perceptions related to the leadership roles they exhibit on the basis of a scale of 1-5.In the statistical analyses, the standard deviation, frequency, percentage and arithmetic mean were taken into consideration. On the other hand, the total scores obtained by the 5-point scale were taken into consideration in the analysis of responses according to independent variables (gender, years of experience, the school, field and school type) and subdimensions.In order to understand whether there is a difference between state and private primary school teachers in terms of perceptions Tukey test, Mann-Whitney U were used in paired comparisons (95% confidence interval) while one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Kruskal-Wallis were used in multiple comparisons.The following results were obtained at the end of the study:1. Teachers from both state and private schools had ?high? perceptions related to the leadership roles they exhibited, while no significant difference was found between these perceptions.2. State and private school teachers? perceptions related to the leadership roles they exhibited did not differ significantly in terms of teacher leadership dimensions Institutional Development, Professional Development and Cooperation with Colleagues.3. In state schools, there was a difference in teachers? perceptions of leadership as regards gender while this difference was not observed in private schools. In state schools male teachers assumed the ?leader teacher? role more in comparison with female teachers.State school teachers? perceptions of ?Institutional Development? and ?Cooperation with Colleagues? differed significantly in terms of gender. However, no significant difference was found in terms of ?Professional Development?. Male teachers? perceptions related to ?Cooperation with Colleagues? and ?Institutional Development? were higher than that of female teachers.4. In terms of school type (state/private), there was no significant difference between male and female teachers? perceptions of leadership roles both in general terms and dimensions.5. In terms of university degree (faculty of education and others), state and private school teachers? perceptions of leadership did not differ significantly in the subdimensions of leadership roles.6. In terms of school type (state/private), there was no difference between graduates of education faculties and that of other faculties in perceptions of the leadership roles they exhibited both in general terms and in the dimensions of teacher leadership.7. State school teachers? perceptions of leadership differed significantly in terms of their field while such a difference was not observed among private school teachers. As regards the field variable, class teachers had higher perceptions of ?leader teacher? in comparison to social sciences teachers in the dimensions of ?Institutional Development? and ?Cooperation with Colleagues?.8. When the state and private school teachers? perceptions of leadership were assessed as a whole regardless of its dimensions, a significant difference was observed in only the field of mathematics and science, with private school teachers having higher perceptions. No significant difference was observed in the other fields.9. As regards the years of experience, there was a significant difference between state school teachers? leadership roles and perceptions of all of its dimensions. However, such differences were not observed among private school teachers. As the years of experience increased, perceptions related to teacher leadership roles increased as well.10. In terms of years of experience, a significant difference was observed among state and private school teachers? general perceptions regardless of dimension, with the private school teachers having higher perceptions. There was a significant difference in the perceptions of teachers having experience of 6-10 years while such a difference was not observed among other experience groups.With regard to the years of experience variable, there was a significant difference among the perceptions of state and private school teachers in the dimensions of ?Professional Development? and ?Institutional Development?. However, there was no significant difference in the dimension of ?Cooperation with Colleagues?. Thus, there was a significant difference between the perceptions of teachers having 6-10 years of experience, with the private schools having higher level perceptions, yet no significant difference was observed in the other experience groups.Key Words: Teacher, primary teacher, leadership, teacher leadership.