Contributions of Instructional Leadership and Teachers' Empowerment towards Achieving an Effective School System

This study examines the contributions of instructional leadership and teachers’ empowerment towards achieving an effective school system. The study adopted a correlational research design. The population consisted of 2361 secondary school teachers serving in the 158 government owned public secondary schools in Zamfara State, from which 266 teachers were sampled through multistage random sampling technique using Cochran’s sample size determination formula. Three structured questionnaires were adapted as instruments for data collection, viz; Instructional Leadership Questionnaire developed by Akram et al. (2017), the reliability of the instrument was computed based on the pilot testing and yielded the value of (α=.82); School Participants’ Empowerment Scale (SPES) developed by Short and Rinehart (1992) with Cronbach’s alpha value of reliability .910; and School Effectiveness Questionnaire developed by Lezzote and Snyder (2011) with Cronbach’s value of reliability .949. The data collected were analysed using both descriptive statistical method (Mean and Standard Deviation) and inferential statistical method (Pearson product moment correlation coefficient and standard multiple regression). The findings of the study revealed that, there is a significant high correlation between instructional leadership, teacher empowerment and school effectiveness. The study also observed that both instructional leadership and teacher empowerment contribute significantly towards achieving effective school system with statistical values of (β=0.515, t=11.000, p=0.000); (β=0.369, t=7.881, p=0.000) respectively. Based on these findings, the paper recommends that, educational authorities, policy makers, school principals, classroom teachers should synergically cooperate together in the proper implementation and improvement of instructional leadership and teacher empowerment for the attainment of an effective school system.