Analysing Turkish teachers' perceptions about teacher leadership

The aim of this study is to examine the Turkish teachers' perceptions of teacher leadership in terms of gender, marital status, management education, management experience, professional seniority. Leadership is one of the most important roles expected from teachers today. It is thought that teacher leadership is an important factor that can improve the quality of teaching and therefore, it should be focused on the effect of formal and informal roles of teacher leaders on classroom and school development in empirical researches related to teacher leadership. The leadership of the teachers is an important factor for the development of the schools, the direction of the society, the ability to raise its qualities and to manage it effectively. In this respect, teachers' perceptions about this important role should be measured and evaluated. The reason why Turkish teachers are asked to examine teacher leadership perceptions is that there is a relationship between a skill, a competence perception of an action and that skill's level of achievement. This study, which is quantitative, is the screening model. The universe of the research consists of Turkish teachers working in all districts of Kırşehir in the 2015-2016 Academic Year. The sampling method was not applied and the entire universe was reached. Teacher Leadership Perception Scale was used as data collection tool. From the research, it was concluded that the level of perceptions of the Turkish teachers about the general level of the Teacher Leadership Perception Scale was frequent. It was found that the marital status, management experience, and professional seniority variables were the variables that create a statistically significant difference between Turkish teachers' perceptions of teacher leadership. Another important result of the study was that the variables of gender and management education were not statistically significant differences between Turkish teachers' perceptions of teacher leadership. Keywords: Teacher leadership, teacher perceptions, Turkish teachers.