Examining Teachers’ Lifeworlds Through Their Experiences of School Leaders and Leadership

This thesis examined teachers’ lived experience of school leaders and leadership and the impact on their lifeworlds. Hermeneutic analysis on transcripts of eight teacher interviews revealed five essences of how teachers experience school leadership through their lifeworlds: Valuing the Person, Leadership Communication, Teacher Mental Health, Way of Life of the Teacher and Organisational Citizenship. These essences were distilled into a framework called the Teacher Experience of Lifeworld Leadership (TELL). The TELL framework begins the theorisation of how teachers experience school leadership and provides opportunities for addressing the attrition and retention issues being faced by contemporary Australian schools.