Teachers’ leadership styles: teenage students’ point of view

Abstract

Studies on leadership styles adopted by teachers, in different learning levels and modalities, have become topics for discussion in the academic environment. Several researches relate factors concerning the teachers’ leadership style to low learning levels, conflicts and improper behavior, and prevention to bullying at school. This study aimed at meeting high-school students enrolled in a Brazilian public school, and assessing their perception towards their teachers’ leadership styles. 458 students and 47 teachers participated in this research, which consisted of a nonexperimental qua-litative-quantitative description. We used three instruments to collect data: the students answered to a Teachers’ Leadership Style Inventory scale and 43 of them attended a semistructured interview; the teachers answered to sociodemographic and working questionnaires. We used descriptive met-hods to generate the analyses, and obtained total scores based on responsiveness, demand and coercive control. Level of significance used was p smaller than 0.05. A significant portion of students consider their teachers negligent. The coercive control used by teachers is also significant, reaching 77%, which ranges between “slightly high” and “high”. This study points out that, at school, there is a complexity of factors that may interfere significantly with the expected results, and that allows the assessment of the teachers’ leadership styles from the students’ point of view.