Abstract:

The leadership in the field of education is seen as a concept associated with activities, which are carried out, beyond the status. It is an expected situation that the education managers fulfill the leadership roles. However, teachers, one of the most important stakeholders of educational organizations, need to carry out their leadership roles when necessary and to continue their professional development to realize these roles. With the research, the teachers in educational organizations have been evaluated within the scope of leadership roles. In this sense, through the “Teacher Leadership Scale”, it was tried to determine the expectation levels and perception levels regarding the concept of leadership in the existing organizations of teachers. The research was carried out in Manisa Demirci District with primary education teachers and branch teachers working in primary schools. By means of printed forms, the data were collected by reaching 239 teachers among the 315 teachers who worked in the related schools in the academic year of 2017 - 2018. In the analysis of the data, SPSS 23 package program was used. Teachers' expectations and perception levels were analyzed using minimum, maximum, arithmetic mean and standard deviation for each sub – dimension and total data set. Mann Whitney U and Krusskal Wallis Analysis were used to determine whether there was a meaningful difference between the expectation and perception levels according to the gender of the teachers, the teaching branch and professional seniority in the data set without normal distribution. In the analysis of the relationship between expectation and perception, Spearman's Rank – Order Correlation Analysis was used. According to the findings obtained, significant difference was found in favor of the expectation level of the teachers. However, there was no significant difference between expectations and perception levels in terms of gender, teaching branch and professional seniority. There is a "weak" relationship between expectations and perception levels. As a result, there is an expectation among the teachers about the concept of teacher leadership. However, the perception of teacher leadership in the institutions they work is relatively low.

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