Sedat Gumus

Multilevel analysis of teacher work attitudes

Purpose – The purpose of the current study was to investigate whether the instructional and administrative leadership practices of principals and professional collaboration of teachers predict teachers’ self‐efficacy and job satisfaction in Turkish middle schools.Design/methodology/approach – By applying a causal comparative design and a multilevel methodology, the current study used OECDs Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) data set to examine the relationships among study variables. The multilevel data included 178 schools/principals and 2,967 teachers. Two‐level Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) method was used to investigate whether principals’ leadership and teachers’ collaboration predict teacher self‐efficacy and teacher job satisfaction, net of several important teacher‐level and school‐level control variables.Findings – The findings showed that some select aspects of principal leadership and teacher collaborative practices significantly predict teachers’ self‐efficacy and job sat...

A systematic review of studies on leadership models in educational research from 1980 to 2014

The purpose of this study is to reveal the extent to which different leadership models in education are studied, including the change in the trends of research on each model over time, the most prominent scholars working on each model, and the countries in which the articles are based. The analysis of the related literature was conducted by first employing a bibliometric analysis of the research and review papers indexed in the Web of Science database between 1980 and 2014. Then, a more in-depth analysis of selected papers was done using the content analysis method. The results showed that there has been increasing interest in leadership models in educational research over time. Distributed leadership, instructional leadership, teacher leadership, and transformational leadership are the most studied leadership models in educational research. It was also found that related research increasingly focuses on the effects of leaders on organizational behaviors/conditions and on student achievement. Accordingly, usage of quantitative methodology has significantly increased during the last decade. Possible reasons for these changes, implications, and recommendations for future research are also discussed.

Policy, practice, and reality: exploring a nation-wide technology implementation in Turkish schools

Technology has already become an indispensable part of our lives, and nations around the world see schools as the main agents to prepare their youth for a technology-filled future, and invest important amounts of funding to provide hardware to schools, students and teachers. The Turkish Ministry of National Education is in the midst of the FATİH project, a nation-wide attempt to provide each classroom with an interactive whiteboard and each student with a tablet computer. In this paper, the authors present interview data from teachers at first-year FATİH pilot schools who are using these technologies to understand how this national attempt is being translated into practice, and identify what is working and what areas need further attunement. Results show that teachers were especially content with being able to make their lessons visually more appealing for their students. They were, however, not satisfied with the in-service training provided, especially in understanding ways to effectively integrate the technologies into their teaching, and the limitations put upon Internet access from the tablets. The impacts of these tools on their teaching practices were very minimal.

Agreement of self-other perceptions matters: Analyzing the effectiveness of principal leadership through multi-source assessment

The purpose of this study was to examine the possible effects of the simultaneous inclusion of self and other ratings of principal instructional leadership on teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. Special attention was given to the case where principal and teacher ratings were incongruent and exhibited a self-other rating disagreement regarding the principals’ effectiveness in instructional leadership. The data used in the analyses were taken from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECDs) Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) conducted in 2008 and involved information from 672 principals and 11,323 teachers in four OECD countries located in the broader Asia-Pacific region. The study tested a set of hypotheses based on a multi-source assessment framework for the analysis of leadership performance. Results indicated that principal–teacher incongruence regarding principal instructional leadership was significantly and negatively associated with teacher self-efficacy across all four countries. The findings suggest that multi-source assessment can provide unique performance-relevant information about leadership that would not be captured by traditional single-source ratings alone.

Türkiye’deki Üniversitelerde Görev Yapan Bölüm Başkanlarının Akademik Liderlik Sürecindeki Gereksinimlerinin İncelenmesi

While the educational leadership literature is replete with studies focusing on leadership practices at K-12 level, higher education institutions all over the world do not receive their share from this intense scholarly interest. This is the case with Turkish higher education institutions too. Starting from this point of view, the purpose of this study is to examine department chairs’ needs in performing academic leadership. To this end, the study was designed as a qualitative inquiry. In order to reveal a range of leadership experiences, maximum variation sampling was employed to address the diversity of chairs’ academic leadership experiences. Accordingly, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the study group of 16 department chairs who varied in terms of their province, university type (public and foundation), teaching field, gender, and years of service in chairship position. Findings emerged in the phase of content analysis revealed that needs of department chairs can be categorized under the themes of: (a) More autonomy for decision-making in staff recruitment, monetary, and curricular issues (b) Additional academic and clerical personnel, and (c) Training for leadership and orientation for administrative duties.

The Evolution of Leadership Research in Higher Education for Two Decades (1995-2014): A Bibliometric and Content Analysis

ABSTRACT The present study aims to examine the leadership research in higher education in order to shed light on its development during the last two decades by revealing the evolving trends in research on leadership in higher education, the most prominent scholars working on related research, the most popular topics in related research, and the countries in which the related studies are based. Bibliometric method was employed in the analysis of the original research and review papers published in five prominent higher education journals between 1995 and 2014: Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education, The Journal of Higher Education and The Review of Higher Education. The results of this bibliometric analysis show that the majority of the related articles come from three countries: the U.S.A., the UK and Australia. It is also found that the leadership research in higher education is still very scarce and has not shown any meaningful increase during the last two decades. In addition, content analysis is used to provide more in-depth information about the topical focus, purpose and methodology of the selected articles. The results of content analyses are discussed in detail, and suggestions for the future research are provided.