Contemporary research on instructional leadership has largely concerned itself with developing concrete instructional leadership models and investigating the association of such leadership practices with teaching and learning. Yet there is little research on how the internal school community reacts to the notion of principals influencing classroom instruction. The purpose of the current research is to provide a comprehensive understanding of how instructional leadership is perceived in Turkish middle schools. The study draws upon data collected from a total of 36 personnel, including principals, assistant principals, teachers, and counselors in six middle schools in the province of Istanbul, Turkey. Interviews and documents were utilized to collect the data. The results show that participants’ perception of instructional leadership is mostly influenced by the notion of leaders’ indirect influence on teaching, and principals’ direct involvement in instructional issues is constrained by problems associated with leadership content knowledge, coherence of leadership practices, and teachers’ classroom privacy.