e-Uluslararası Eğitim Araştırmaları Dergisi

Öz

The roles of leaders are very important on the effectiveness of educational institutions which value both individual and social point of view greatly. This worth of school administrators' leadership roles arises from effecting all the duties and aims of school directly and indirectly. In this context, leadership behaviors of today's school administrators are emphasized more, and a significant impact of them in particular as instructional leaders on school performance is determined. Therefore, school administrators have to behave properly to different leadership understandings when confronted with various problems in the school regardless their dominant leadership styles and types. At this point, leadership orientations; ensuring to know what kind of applications reaching more effective results in circumstances, which school managers are leaders, come into prominence. In this sense, knowing leadership orientations of teacher candidates as future school administrators can be utilized for realizing the importance of using the leadership perspectives in pre-service training so leadership orientations of pre-service teachers made the subject of study.
Method: The research is a descriptive study in survey model. The research sample consists of 452 pre-service teachers determined by disproportionately cluster sampling technique from Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University Education Faculty. The questionnaire containing “Leadership Orientations Scale” and personal information form was used as data collection tool. Reliability coefficients in the scale are .92 for Structural Leadership, .93 for Human Resource Leadership, .91 for Political Leadership and .93 for Symbolic Leadership. The reliability coefficient of whole scale is .91 according to analyses in the research process. The data analysis was made use of SPSS 18.0 program. Primarily, descriptive statistics such as frequency, percentage, arithmetic mean, standard deviation of variables were examined. F and t tests; to examine the indicating significant differences at the mean scores of teacher candidates' leadership orientations according to selected variables, and LSD test; to find out the source of the differences, were used, and effect size values were calculated.
Findings: According to findings, the mean scores of pre-service teachers' leadership orientations are X Ì…=3.78 for Structural Perspective, X Ì…=4.08 for Human Resource Perspective, X Ì…=3.49 for Politic Perspective and X Ì…=3.58 for Symbolic Perspective. Besides, the significant differences according to age variable are in favor of the older pre-service teachers on Structural, Human Resource and Political Perspectives and respect to gender in favor of female teacher candidates on Symbolic Perspective that is another result of the research. In addition, significant differences are in favor of the higher class level on Political and Symbolic Perspectives and depending on the study fields are in favor of student teachers studying at especially German Language Teaching and other foreign languages on Structural and Human Resources Perspectives. Also, there are significant differences on Structural, Human Resource and Political Perspectives in favor of pre-service teachers having higher average grade (GPA).
Conclusion: Among leadership orientations, Human Resource Perspective having the highest mean score is the most prominent leadership orientation with 312 (%60.03) pre-service teachers. This result exhibits that the most of problems faced by teacher candidates in the learning environment during their lifetime are based on human relations and they do not encounter frequently problems with needed different kinds of solutions that can be said as the causes of that Human Resource Perspective is come to the fore on too many pre-service teachers. Additionally, the variables which create significant differences into pre-service teachers' leadership orientation perceptions are “age, gender, class-level, study field and grade-level”. When these affecting variables on leadership orientations of pre-service teachers are considered, some educational practices; providing better solutions by using structural, political and symbolic ingredients together with human resource elements, should be integrated into training process in schools for redounding awareness about leadership orientations to students in an early age levels.