Confidence Beats Command: What Really Drives Innovative Teaching in Oman’s Classrooms

What makes a primary school teacher abandon the lesson plan they have delivered for a decade and try something entirely new? A research team led by Said Rashid Ali Alshuhum of the International Islamic University Malaysia set out to answer that question in the unlikely laboratory of Muscat, Oman’s capital, surveying 368 primary school teachers about the forces that push them toward or away from innovative teaching. The study, published in Discover Education, applied a statistical technique known as partial least squares structural equation modelling, or PLS-SEM, to test four candidate drivers simultaneously: transformational leadership from school principals, the overall school climate, teachers’ own self-efficacy, and the learning culture of the school as an organization. The results deliver a strikingly clear message about where the real engine of classroom innovation lies, and it is not where many school reformers have traditionally looked.

The single most powerful predictor, by a wide margin, was teacher self-efficacy, the belief teachers hold in their own capacity to manage classrooms, engage students, and deliver instruction effectively. Its standardized path coefficient of 0.749 dwarfed every other factor in the model, with a t-statistic above 12 and an effect size in the medium-to-large range. In practical terms, teachers who believed they could pull off a new pedagogical approach were far more likely to actually generate, adopt, and apply new ideas, technologies, and methods in their classrooms. This aligns closely with Bandura’s self-efficacy theory, which holds that people who judge themselves capable of a task are more willing to take the risks that task requires. For teaching, that means pedagogical risk-taking, experimentation with unfamiliar strategies, and persistence when the first attempt at a new method stumbles. Confidence, in this dataset, was not a nice-to-have; it was the dominant mechanism.

Transformational leadership also mattered, but far less dramatically. School principals who articulated a shared vision, intellectually stimulated their staff, provided individualized consideration, and modeled idealized behavior showed a statistically significant positive association with teacher innovation, but the effect was modest, with a path coefficient of just 0.128. The authors interpret this as evidence that leadership acts as a genuine but comparatively small direct lever. Transformational leaders, the literature suggests, encourage followers to exceed expectations by questioning routine practices and inspiring imaginative problem-solving. In Oman’s context, where traditional pedagogical norms remain strong and curricula are centrally prescribed, such leadership may be especially relevant to instructional modernization, even if its direct statistical footprint is smaller than the teacher’s own psychological resources.

The surprises came from the two organizational-level variables. School climate, encompassing collaboration, psychological safety, and access to instructional resources, showed no statistically significant direct association with innovative teaching. Organizational learning, measured with the well-established Watkins and Marsick framework covering dimensions such as continuous learning, empowerment, and strategic leadership, likewise failed to reach significance. Both hypotheses were rejected. The full model still explained a substantial 64 percent of the variance in innovative teaching behavior, with an adjusted R-squared of 0.636 and a Stone-Geisser Q-squared of 0.398 confirming genuine predictive relevance, but the explanatory weight rested almost entirely on the individual-level factors.

Why would a supportive climate and a strong learning culture fail to translate directly into innovation? The authors are careful to label their explanation as a plausible post-hoc interpretation rather than an empirically demonstrated mechanism, since centralization was not directly measured. Oman’s education system is highly centralized, with curriculum and pedagogical decisions largely prescribed at the national level. In such a system, even teachers embedded in collegial, psychologically safe schools may feel constrained by systemic and regulatory boundaries that no amount of local encouragement can overcome. The finding contrasts with international studies, particularly from more decentralized systems, where climate has repeatedly emerged as a facilitator of creative and adaptive teaching. The authors stress that describing climate and organizational learning as indirect enablers remains theoretical speculation that their direct-effects design did not test, and they call for future research to measure curricular autonomy and centralization explicitly.

The study’s most methodologically distinctive contribution is its multi-group analysis of gender. Before comparing male and female subgroups, the team established measurement invariance using the MICOM procedure, confirming that the constructs carried equivalent meaning across groups. Henseler’s non-parametric MGA, run with 5,000 permutation resamples, then revealed a statistically significant gender difference in the leadership-innovation relationship. Female teachers responded more strongly to transformational leadership, with a path coefficient of 0.276 compared with 0.191 for male teachers, a difference of 0.085 significant at the 0.05 level. The authors ground this pattern in Social Role Theory, which holds that differential socialization leads women toward communal, relationally oriented behaviors and men toward agentic, task-oriented ones. Because transformational leadership operates substantially through relational behaviors such as personalized consideration and collaborative vision-building, female teachers may be comparatively more responsive to it. The researchers caution, however, that the practical magnitude of the difference is modest and should not be overstated.

Intriguingly, the self-efficacy-innovation relationship showed no such gender divide. The effect was strong and statistically equivalent for male teachers at 0.653 and female teachers at 0.541, with a non-significant difference of 0.112. This suggests that the motivational power of confidence operates universally in this context, regardless of gender-based differences in confidence norms or resource access. The authors speculate that relatively equal professional development opportunities for male and female teachers within Oman’s primary school system may explain the invariance. Together, the moderation findings point toward gender-sensitive leadership development rather than gender-differentiated confidence building as the more targeted policy intervention.

The research design itself reflects considerable care. The team drew a simple random sample from the official register of primary school teachers maintained by the Muscat Directorate of Education, distributing 432 questionnaires and retaining 368 complete responses, a response rate of roughly 85 percent. The sample was nearly balanced by gender at 51.4 percent male and 48.6 percent female, and experienced: over half of respondents had sixteen or more years in the classroom. The 92-item instrument was translated into Arabic through a forward-backward procedure with bilingual experts, piloted with 30 teachers outside the main sample, and reviewed by five specialists for face validity. Six items with factor loadings below 0.60 were iteratively removed. Reliability and convergent validity exceeded standard thresholds, all heterotrait-monotrait ratios fell below 0.85, confirming discriminant validity, and common method bias was assessed through Harman’s single-factor test and full collinearity checks, both of which came back reassuring, though the authors acknowledge these statistical remedies offer only partial protection against self-report biases.

The authors are equally candid about the study’s limits. The cross-sectional design means all reported relationships are statistical associations rather than confirmed causal effects, and reverse pathways, such as innovative teachers perceiving themselves as more self-efficacious, cannot be ruled out. The sample was confined to Muscat, limiting generalizability to other Omani regions and school levels, and teachers nested within schools could not be modeled hierarchically, so school-level variance was not partitioned from individual-level variance. Mediation pathways, including the widely theorized possibility that self-efficacy transmits the effect of leadership into innovation, were not formally tested and remain an explicit agenda for future work.

Even with those caveats, the practical implications are pointed. Leadership training for school principals should prioritize vision-building, trust development, collaboration, and individualized support, with a gender-sensitive lens on how these behaviors land differently across staff. Professional development should target self-efficacy directly through mentoring, peer collaboration, and hands-on experience, since confidence is the strongest lever the evidence identifies. Climate and organizational learning, though not direct drivers here, remain plausible components of a broader innovation ecosystem whose indirect mechanisms deserve systematic testing. For Oman, a system in the midst of ambitious educational modernization, the message is that empowering the teacher’s belief in their own capability, backed by principals who inspire rather than merely administer, may accomplish more than any amount of organizational restructuring alone.

Subject of Research: Determinants of innovative teaching practices among primary school teachers in Oman

Article Title: Modelling the determinants of innovative teaching practices among primary school teachers in Oman through a multi-group analysis using PLS-SEM

Article References: Alshuhum, S. R. A., Al-Hidabi, D. A., Aldaba, A. M. A., Ateeq, A., Ibrahim, S. B., & Al-refaei, A. A.-A. (2026). Modelling the determinants of innovative teaching practices among primary school teachers in Oman through a multi-group analysis using PLS-SEM. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1199. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02267-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02267-2

Keywords: innovative teaching, teacher self-efficacy, transformational leadership, school climate, organizational learning, PLS-SEM, multi-group analysis, gender moderation, Oman, primary education, Muscat, Discover Education