Talis 2024 A SEM Path Analysis of School Leadership Influencing Teaching through Teacher Efficacy and Teacher Collaboration

Utilizing data from 8,085 teachers across seven educational systems in the TALIS 2024 dataset, this study employs structural equation modeling to investigate the mechanisms through which school leadership impacts teaching practices. The findings reveal that leadership does not exert a direct effect on instruction; rather, its influence is fully mediated through a sequential pathway. Specifically, leadership enhances teaching practices by first strengthening teachers’instructional and socio-emotional self-efficacy, which in turn fosters professional collaboration and the utilization of digital educational resources. Notably, socio-emotional self-efficacy demonstrates the strongest direct predictive power for teaching practices (β= 0.550), underscoring the importance of affective competences in contemporary classrooms. The model confirms a complex serial mediation chain, wherein leadership empowerment translates into pedagogical improvement through the interplay of psychological activation, collaborative transformation, and technological integration. This study extends Fullan’s school improvement theory by empirically integrating individual, social, and technological mediators into a unified framework. The results offer actionable implications for policy makers and school administrators, highlighting the necessity of cultivating both instructional guidance and relational trust to stimulate teacher agency and, ultimately, enhance instructional quality.