Instructional Leadership Practices adopted by Principals for Administrative Effectiveness in Public and Private Secondary Schools in Anambra State, Nigeria

Abstract

This study investigated the instructional leadership practices adopted by principals for administrative effectiveness in public and private secondary schools in Anambra State. Two research questions guided the study and two null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study. The population of the study comprised 759 respondents made up of 258 public and 501 private secondary school principals in the state. Cluster and simple random sampling techniques were used to draw 304 principals, which is made up of 103 from public secondary schools and 201 from private secondary schools. The researchers developed questionnaire titled ‘‘Principals’ Instructional Leadership Practices for Administrative Effectiveness Questionnaire (PILPAEQ) was used for data collection. The instrument was validated by three experts; who are lecturers, two in the Department of Educational Management and Policy and an expert in Measurement and Evaluation in the Department of Educational Foundations, all in the Faculty of Education, Nnamdi Azikiwe University. Cronbach alpha was used for a test of internal consistency of the instrument and it yielded reliability co-efficients of 0.79 and 0.76 for Clusters I and II respectively and overall coefficient of the entire instrument was 0.78. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions, while t-test was used to test the null hypotheses. The findings of the study revealed that instructional supervision practices are adopted by principals for administrative effectiveness in public and private secondary schools in Anambra State. Based on the findings, it was recommended among others that Ministry of Education and school proprietors should conduct regular unannounced intensive inspection exercise to oversee the supervisory practices of public and private school principals and make possible recommendations for improvement.