Exploring Teachers' Instructional Practice Profiles: Do Distributed Leadership and Teacher Collaboration Make a Difference?

Purpose: While the literature includes multiple studies on the relationship between school leadership and instructional quality, they often use instructional practice as a continuous variable, assuming that a teacher would perform all sub-dimensions of instructional practice at a similar rate and failing to link distributed leadership to classroom teaching. Addressing these gaps in the literature, this study aims to identify teacher- and school-level latent profiles of teachers' instructional practices and to investigate how distributed leadership predicts teachers' membership in different instructional practice profiles, with the mediating role of teacher collaboration. Research Methods/Approach: The study employed a cross-sectional survey design using Turkiye's TALIS data for lower secondary education. Multilevel latent profile analysis with mediation modeling was conducted on data from 3,223 teachers in 192 schools. Findings: This analysis yielded four teacher profiles: laissez-faire, typical, controlling, and versatile; and two school profiles, high controlling and high laissez-faire. Findings indicate that distributed leadership promotes professional collaboration in lessons among teachers, which could, in turn, play a critical role in determining both individual teacher- and school-level profiles. Implications: This study provides practical contributions to understanding the nature of classroom teaching, suggesting that future studies should use instructional practice profiles instead of a single construct of teaching.