Instructional leadership has been a substantial focus of school improvement research over the last thirty years. The literature on effective schools has associated effective school leaders with those who spend a considerable proportion of their time dealing with instructional and curricular activities aimed at improving teaching and learning in schools. Consistently, many countries require principals to become instructional leaders in their schools. The importance of instructional leadership has also been acknowledged by the Turkish Ministry of Education, which mandated school principals to become involved more in instructional issues by entering classrooms, observing teaching, and providing teachers with necessary feedback. Despite the prominence of the instructional leadership research, the literature has failed to provide extensive knowledge regarding how instructional leadership is understood and enacted in real school contexts. This deficiency is especially the case in Turkey, where the literature has focused mostly on descriptive analysis of either teachers or principals' perspectives. The purpose of my research was to focus on formal leaders' instructional leadership practices by investigating the extent to which principals become involved in instructional leadership, and by examining which contexts and personal characteristics explain current leadership practices. The study also aimed to inquire into how instructional leadership is understood and is enacted, depending on multiple administrative and instructional staff. I used the explanatory approach of mixed method research to conduct this research. Data for the quantitative part of the research came from TALIS (Teaching and Learning International Survey), which included surveys of 191 principals and 3,637 teachers. The second part of this research involved an analysis of qualitative data, which depended on documents and interviews that were collected from six schools. These data involved a total sample of 36 participants, including 12 administrative staff, 18 instructional staff, and six counselors. Descriptive analyses of the quantitative survey data showed that principals paid specific attention to the development of school goals and instructional problems, and that they were less likely to become involved in the direct supervision of classroom instruction. Although principals and teachers disagreed about the frequency of each leadership behavior being carried out by leaders, they concurred on behaviors that occurred with the highest and lowest frequency. Inferential analyses indicated that female principals and the principals working in private schools were more likely to carry out instructional leadership than others were. The qualitative results further enhanced the knowledge regarding the type of instructional leadership being carried out by principals. I found that principals did become involved in various instructional leadership activities, yet most of these activities were not coherently linked to one another to bring about instructional change. In addition, I found that principals had a short vision concerning whether a leader can or should influence teaching. Principals lacked strong intention and specific action to contribute to teaching and learning in the classroom. Teachers' views in this regard were not different. Even though teachers were not reluctant to have a principal help them to improve their teaching skills, teachers seemed to be suspicious about the capability of principals to do so. Teachers' notion of a principal influencing instruction was substantially shaped and constrained by the idea of leaders lacking knowledge and expertise in the particular subject matter in which teachers considered themselves to be experts.
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