Assessing Pre-primary Teachers’ Involvement in Decision Making in Tanzanian Public Pre-primary Schools: A Look of Implementation of Structured Play Activities in Longido and Monduli Districts

Abstract

This study examines the extent to which school administrators involve pre-primary teachers in decision making related to implementation of structured play activities in Tanzanian government pre-primary schools where Longido and Monduli were used as study cases. Collegial Models of educational leadership and management developed by Tony Bush guided the study. The study adopted Convergent design of mixed methods approach. Sample of the study included 268 respondents where 34 were head teachers, 34 were academic teachers, 136 were internal school quality assurance team members, and 64 were pre-primary teachers who were obtained through stratification, purposive, and simple randomly respectively. Data were collected through structured questionnaire and semi-structured interview. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively and through inferential statistics while qualitative data were analysed thematically. Findings show that teachers’ involvement in school administrative decision making related to structured play activities is very low. Hypothesis testing shows existence of significant relationship between low level of teachers’ involvement in school administrative decision making and those teachers’ inadequate implementation of structured play activities in pre-primary classes. The study concludes that low level of implementing structured play activities by the pre-primary teachers is associated with low level of teachers’ involvement in school administrative decision making. The study recommends that administrators should involve pre-primary teachers in decision making so as to improve implementation of structured play activities.