Does school leadership matter for teachers’ classroom practice? The influence of instructional leadership and distributed leadership on instructional quality

ABSTRACT

The presented paper aims to examine the influence of principal leadership on teaching practices in order to reveal direct and indirect effects of instructional and distributed leadership models on teachers’ instructional quality, with the mediating effect of teacher collaboration and job satisfaction. This research conducted secondary data analysis using the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2013 dataset collected by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Multilevel structural equation modeling (SEM) was applied to the analysis of the data. The results suggested a significant direct effect of principals’ instructional leadership on instructional quality, while the effect of distributed leadership was mainly indirect, mediated by teacher collaboration and job satisfaction.

KEYWORDS:

• Distributed leadership
• instructional leadership
• instructional quality
• TALIS

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mehmet Şükrü Bellibaş

Mehmet Şükrü Bellibaş is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Sciences at Adıyaman University, Turkey. His main research interest is comparative and international educational leadership in K–12 settings and aims to provide an understanding of how various leadership types might influence teacher behaviors, professional learning and practices, as well as student learning outcomes.

Sedat Gümüş

Sedat Gümüş is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Sociology at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research interests include comparative and international education, educational leadership, and higher education.

Yan Liu

Yan Liu is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, & Instructional Technology at Central Connecticut State University. Her research has a particular interest in the functional implementation of educational leadership as collective efforts by the principal, the school management team, and teachers, as well as the effects of varied school leadership models and mechanism on school improvement through a comparative lens using large-scale and multi-country data.