Walking The Talk: An Essential Ingredient In Transformational School Principals

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to establish the relationship between modeling the way characteristic of transformational leadership and academic performance. Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) “Self” and Leadership Practices Inventory “Observer” were used to collect information on transformational leadership of school principals. LPI “self” was used for the principals and LPI “others” was used for the teachers for triangulation purposes. Means, standard deviations were used to measure the degree to which secondary school principals practice transformational leadership characteristic of modeling the way. One-way analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were utilized to establish if a relationship existed between selected demographic characteristics and the interaction of leadership characteristics of principals and students’ academic performance. To test relationships between principals’ ratings and teachers’ ratings, t-test was used. Pearson correlation analysis indicated that there was a positive significant correlation (r=0.648 p›0.237)   between High performing schools and transformational leadership. This means that in schools where the principals were more of transformational leaders, the students performed better than when they were less transformational. In confirming if there is a significant difference between transformational leadership and academic performance, Analysis of Variance indicated that an F-Calculated of 2.175 was derived.  However, the tabulated F Value was 0.237. Since the Calculated F was greater than the tabulated F-Value, we concluded that there is indeed a significant difference between transformational leadership and students’ academic performance.