School leadership, one of the most important aspects of school improvement, has not received
much attention from either policymakers or researchers in Turkey despite many countries
embrace creating and developing effective leaders as one of the important first steps to improve
their education. This research looked at the instructional leadership skills of Turkish principals
from the teacher’s perspective measured through a survey collected from primary school teachers
in five different cities in Turkey, first, to describe the current situation and, second, to find out if
teachers’ experience and gender affect their views. The results show that Turkish principals
practice their instructional leadership roles only occasionally and teachers’ gender significantly
affects their perception.