School improvement capacity: a bottom-up investigation in Türkiye

School improvement efforts are often initiated top-down and externally imposed. They may lack context-specific considerations and teacher perspectives, leading to limited success. Addressing this empirical and practical knowledge gap, our study offers a bottom-up perspective by exploring primary school teachers’ beliefs about their schools’ improvement capacity in southeast Türkiye. Using Q methodology, we systematically collected subjective viewpoints from forty urban public primary school teachers through their sorting of a 32-item Q sample. Centroid factor extraction followed by Varimax rotation enabled us to identify both areas of consensus and disagreements regarding the conditions that facilitate or hinder school improvement. Utimately, the analysis revealed three distinct perspectives: (1) a harmonious environment with strong leadership, safety, and diversity; (2) emphasis on teacher collaboration but experiencing weak leadership; and (3) acknowledgment of teacher consultation but lacking a collaborative culture. These empirically derived perspectives illuminate how teachers differentially interpret leadership, collaboration, and professional development as components of school improvement capacity. By foregrounding teachers’ subjective viewpoints, the study demonstrates the value of incorporating practitioner perspectives into the design and enactment of school improvement policies. Further research should explore the underlying causes of these perspectives to enhance the effectiveness of educational reforms.