Abstract:

The paper focuses on the Exemplary Leadership Practices in teachers at Slovak primary and secondary schools. Our aim was to explore whether there is a relation between the teachers´ leadership practices (behaviors) in the sense of transformational leadership and their age, the length of their teaching experience, or the length of their managerial experience. Our sample consisted of 191 teachers from various Slovak schools. In order to gather the data, we applied the Slovak mutation of the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner. Analyzed data are a part of the dataset investigated by the research team within the project APVV 17-0557 Psychological Approach to Creation, Implementation, and Verification of Educational Leader´s Competence Model Development at the Faculty of Education at the University of Matej Bel (Slovakia). The data suggest moderate relationship between the leadership practices and the age. The strongest relationship was shown in the first subscale of LPI – Model the Way (r = 0.353; Sig. = 0,000). In the other subscales, we revealed only a weak or very weak positive relation between leadership behavior and the teachers´ age. The data evidenced a stronger relation between leadership behavior and the length of teaching experience; the moderately strong correlation was significant in the first subscale Model the Way (r = 0.382; Sig. = 0,000) and in the subscale Enable Others to Act (r = 0.308; Sig. = 0,000). Further, we found a weak positive relation on the significance level 0.01 between the other LPI subscales and the teaching experience of our respondents. However, the data suggested very weak relationship between the leadership practices and the length of managerial experience. The relation was significant only in two subscales: Model the Way (rs = 0.183; Sig. = 0,011; significance level 0,05), Inspire the Vision (rs = 0,155; Sig. = 0,032; significance level 0,05). Until now, leadership skills in Slovak teachers have only been minimally examined, and, given the current educational trends, more attention needs to be paid to them.

Keywords:

Exemplary leadership practices, teacher, experience.