Abstract:
In the current ever-changing teaching and learning environments in schools, teachers – who directly influence students’ achievement – are seeking more chances for leadership inside class, collegiality with their peers and decision-making at a school level. Yet, teachers in the Arab World and Lebanon specifically seem to lack practicing their leadership. Literature has shown that teachers share divergent conceptions and/or perceptions on practicing their teacher leadership. The purpose of this study is to explore the degree to which the conceptions of teachers working in private, semi-free private and public schools in South Lebanon, align to their perceptions towards teacher leadership. Data was collected through an embedded mixed-methods research design using an online survey. The survey has a qualitative open-ended question and a quantitative questionnaire that is the Teacher Leadership Inventory survey by Angelle and Dehart (2010). The survey was administered online to 232 K-12 teachers working in both sectors. After a thematic analysis of qualitative responses, and a statistical analysis done by SPSS, and then analyzing both datasets, the study found that the sampled teachers positively conceive and perceive sharing expertise as one dimension, do not necessarily conceive nor they perceive their leadership as willingness to do more than required. The study also suggested that those teachers perceive teacher leadership when it comes to sharing leadership and involvement with peers, yet they do not conceive it. The findings lastly suggested that the teachers conceived teacher leadership as an informal influence, but perceived it to be partially associated with formal roles.
