Page 118 - ALR2018 Handbook

Principal Leadership for Teacher Learning:

A Review of Research in Turkey

Sedat Gümüş

School leadership has been one of the most studied research topics in the field of
educational administration worldwide. Turkey is not an exception. Recent systematic
review studies show that leadership research has been developing very fast in Turkey,
especially during the last two decades. Specifically, different leadership models such as
instructional leadership, distributed leadership, transformational leadership, and
teacher leadership have been studied heavily. Existing studies can be categorized into
two groups in terms of their purposes. First, most of the related studies investigated
the teachers’ views on their principals’ leadership styles and tried to explore the
factors affecting teachers’ perceptions. There are also some studies which investigated
the influence of principal leadership on teachers’ work attitudes or behaviors. This
paper focuses on the research articles in the latter category and synthesizes their
findings. The results show that only a few studies have focused on school principals’
impact on teacher learning in Turkish context so far. In addition, existing studies
provided very little insight into the actual practices of principals to support teacher
learning. Therefore, there is need for more research using advanced statistical technics
or in-depth qualitative analysis in this topic.

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