Bridging Leadership and Educational Neuroscience: The Predictive Influence of Instructional Leadership on Teacher Efficacy and Brain-Based Pedagogy in Primary Schools
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63283/IRJ.04.01/22Keywords:
Instructional Leadership, Teacher Self-Efficacy, Brain-Based Pedagogy, Primary EducationAbstract
The link between instructional leaders' practices, teacher self-efficacy and classroom application of brain-based pedagogy has been studied in government primary schools in district Wazirabad. The study focused on the relationship among the instructional leadership of principals, teacher confidence, and the actual instructional change, based on the instructional leadership model of Bandura's social cognitive theory and Caine and Caine's brain-based learning theory. A quantitative approach, specifically a correlational research design, was used. A representative sample of 300 primary school teachers (120 male teachers and 180 female teachers) was randomly selected from a target population of 1,330 teachers in 227 schools using Cochran's formula. A self-developed, valid and reliable 30-item Likert questionnaire, with an overall reliability of alpha = 0.989, was used to collect data. Descriptive results showed that perceived instructional leadership (M = 4.12, SD = 1.19), teacher self-efficacy (M = 4.09, SD = 1.19) and brain-based pedagogy implementation (M = 4.22, SD = 1.14) were all relatively high. Pearson correlation analysis indicated that there were strong positive correlations between all three variables (r = 0.848, 0.873 and 0.877, all p < 0.01 with the highest correlation between teacher self-efficacy and classroom implementation, r = 0.877, p < 0.01). Simple linear regression results revealed that the instructional leadership is a highly significant predictor with 73.4% variance accounted for in teacher self-efficacy (R2 = 0.734, Beta = 0.857, p < 0.001) and 71.9% variance accounted for in brain-based pedagogy implementation (R2 = 0.719, Beta = 0.848, p < 0.001). The conclusions highlight the impact of instructional leadership as a force that can increase teacher confidence and align cognitive neuroscience to classroom practice in developing contexts.
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