Identifying Behaviors and Dimensions of Teaching-Learning Leadership of Elementary School Principals: A Qualitative Research

A general consensus has been created on the need for the presence of effective school leaders who have can improve the quality of teaching-learning. Instructional leadership is a comprehensive activity which provides learning opportunities for teacher professional development and student academic achievement. This study was qualitative of descriptiveˇexploratory type. Thematic analysis and themes network were used to identify the behaviors and dimensions of instructional leadership. In order to collect and identify themes, theoretical foundations and opinions of experts in this field were extracted and coded by analyzing the sources published texts during 1990-2018 which were indexed in databases. Due to the large number of sources, a number of them were selected based on sample criteria. In the present study, the coding first was done manually by studying the teachingˇlearning leadership-related articles and documents (line by line) and computer coding was done with MAXQDA after completing the manual coding. Then, the results of these two codings were compared with each other, and the Holsti’s approach was used to calculate the reliability, the reliability of which was 0.92.. Findings indicated that instructional leadership has eight dimensions, 25 components and 177 behaviors whose dimensions include defining the school’s vision, school-based supervision, action research, the teacher professional development, preparation, monitoring of the teaching-learning process, distributive leadership, and curriculum management.