ISSN 2239-978X ISSN 2240-0524 Journal of Educational and Social Research MCSER Publishing, Rome-Italy Vol. 4 No.2 April 2014 215 The Awareness of High School Teachers on their Instructional Leadership Roles 1 Ulku Tosun* Bilal Aygun** * Assistant Professor, Fatih University, Turkey; e-mail: ulku.tosun@fatih.edu.tr **Education Management Specialist, Turkey; e-mail: baygun@hotmail.com Doi:10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n2p215 Abstract The aim of this study is to examine the level of high school teachers’ awareness on instructional leadership roles according to their perceptions. The sample of this study was composed of high school teachersin Beylikduzu and Buyukcekmece districts in Istanbul. The participants were administered by ‘Demographic Questionnaire’ and ‘The Instructional Leadership Roles of Teachers’ questionnaire developed by the researcher. The data were analyzed by SPSS 20 program. The questionnaire were converted to a scale by verifying reliability and validity statistics. The results includes the frequencies, the percentages and the means of the teachers’ awareness on instructional leadership roles. The variations of teachers’ awareness on instructional leadership roles according to demographic variables were tested by independent samples t-test and ANOVA. The results shows that high school teachers’ awareness on instructional leadership roles were high level in all sub dimensions. KeyWords: Leadership, Teacher Leadership, Instructional Leadership Roles 1. Introduction Leadership, which has appeared as a result of societies’s need of people who will drag them in a certain direction, has gained more importance nowadays and it is being mentioned in all areas. As education is an important factor of changes and coping with the problems that arise in these cases, it has been inevitable that teachers exhibit leadership manners in this changing and constantly renewed social life (Can, 2007, p. 164-165). Teachers should be leaders who are enterprising, can renew and manage themselves, capable of taking decisions, internalize and comment on educational values and who are able to undertake the responsibility of this. As a matter of fact that the teacher has such characteristics of creativity, directivity, effectiveness, leadership and so on will carry today's students into the knowledge- based society of the future (Bostancﾕ, 2011, p. 216). 1.1 Instructional Leadership Instructional leadership is the competency of being able to plan and organize educational and instructional activities effectively and undertake active roles and develop them by performing leadership in the learning process and developing and sharing an educational vision. The main purpose of instructional leadership is the arrangement of the school environment as one which is productive and completely towards instruction (Erdo÷an, 2004, p. 88). Teacher leadership is the skills and qualifications the teachers of the future should have (Urbanski and Nickolaou, 1997, p. 248; Hoyt, Price and Emrick, 2010, p. 404; Johnson and Snyder, 1986). A leader teacher is one who is perfect in his or her class, continuously learn as a student does, can also exhibit talent and performance outside the school, is involved at the center of changes to raise the quality of education and who posesses leadership skills. The main objective of the teacher leadership is to improve the quality of education (Hook, 2006, p. 13). 1.2 Teacher Leadership Roles As a result of studies in the regarding literature, the teacher's instructional leadership roles are specified in the following 1 This study has been constructed from the master degree thesis titled " A Study On High School Teachers For Their Instructional Leadership Roles And Their Approaches Toward The Restricting Factors Of Instructional Leadership" written by Bilal Aygun.