The relationship between teachers' leadership styles and teaching quality in lower secondary schools in Liang Zhou district of Wuwei, Gansu, China

Abstract

The aim of this research was to study the relationship between the teachers' leadership styles and the teaching quality in lower secondary schools. The purposes of this study were 1) to study the level of lower secondary school teachers' perception on teaching quality, 2) their leadership styles, 3) to examine the relationship between teachers' leadership styles and the teaching quality in lower secondary schools. A multi-stage sampling was used to choose 16 lower secondary schools and the 352 lower secondary school teachers who responded to two questionnaires: The multifactor leadership questionnaire and the teaching quality questionnaire. Means, Standard deviations were used to analyze the teachers' perception on leadership styles and the teaching quality. Simple regression analysis was used to analyze the relationship between the teachers' leadership styles and the teaching quality. The findings indicated that transformational leadership style positively affected the teaching quality at the high level, while, the transactional leadership style positively affected the teaching quality at the moderate level. However, the Laissze-faire leadership style negatively affected teaching quality. The related policy-makers were suggested to make related policies to encourage local education authorities and school principals to improve teachers' leadership styles in their work. The future studies were suggested 1) to combine the qualitative with quantitative research method together to get more detail information.2) to extend the research scope to private and public school together to compare the different effects of teachers' leadership styles on their teaching quality.