The relationships between school administrations and teachers in the context of teacher leadership

Abstract

Clear evidences support the fact that educators’ leadership plays an important role in the quality of education. Despite this fact, few studies have been conducted on teachers’ leadership in Lithuania or in other countries. Therefore, practical studies of teachers’ leadership are needed. The purpose of this article is to describe the direction of the relationships between school administrations and teachers in the Lithuanian education system, define the ways teachers’ leadership is expressed, and determine those interrelationships. For this purpose, the survey in written form of 394 teachers from different regions of the country has been carried out by using specially created instrument.integrating different expressions of this leadership. This survey showed that overall, in the Lithuanian education system, teachers’ leadership is quite strongly expressed. The study also showed that there was a connection between teachers’ expression of leadership and teachers’ relationships with the school administration. This survey and its results allow us to define the strong and weak points in the relationship between teachers’ leadership and the teacherschool administration relationships; these results also allow us to create methods to improve the leadership quality in the Lithuanian education system, therefore, improving the overall quality of the Lithuanian education.