The role of school principals in teacher professional development program / Safeena Adam

Abstract

The study was designed ti investigate principal's role in teacher development programs to enhance their growth as teachers. Teachers development is the key process which aims to increase the capacity of teachers, both as individuals and as team members to enable them to contribute to the school collaboratively.
I used the mixed methodology to conduct this research. Two questionnaires were used to gather data. One questionnaire was designed to gather information from principals. While the other, parallel in nature, sought to gather data from teachers to verify Principals' responses. In addition, a semi structured interview with the Principal was used to validate the responses from the questionnaire.
A descriptive discussion of the findings revealed that although Principals are properly trained, there seems to be lack of effective ongoing teacher development or poorly conducted programs. Also, there is no policy in the school for continuous teacher development. There are some factors that hinder Principals performing effective teacher development. This indicates lack of resources compound with heavy administrative duties and the in ability of principals to manage time effectively.
Some of the analyses determines that some of the training programs are well designed to meet the need of the teachers, but are poorly executed and participants (teachers) reacted positively in the effort to identify the area of improvement. They also agreed on the lack of variety of teaching strategies. The implementation drawn from this research is that comprehensive evaluation of professional development in education is both an alert and necessity. It was apparent that there is an urgency to formulate policy with regard to teacher development. It has become highly important to take time and put the pieces of puzzle together to identify the loop holes in these practices.