School-Based Teacher Professional Development Framework (SBTPDF): A Blueprint for School Principals in Nigeria

Abstract

There is a growing body of knowledge on effective Teacher Professional Development (TPD), with a consensus that skews in favour of decentralised, school-based and teacher-centred approach to TPD as opposed to the centralised, traditional and top-down approach. On the contrary, developing countries such as Nigeria still practise a centralised education system where traditional top-down TPD remains the norm, with the attendant consequence of professionally deficient teachers in the classroom. This situation has left a deficiency in centralised district/cluster-based teacher development. This study explored teachers’ and school administrators’ perceptions on the existing effectiveness TPD, with a view to developing a school-based TPD framework that caters for teachers’ professional needs. The study was a qualitative multiple-case study informed by the interpretivist paradigm. The study used, as its lenses, two complementary theories: Distributed Leadership Theory (DLT) and Adult Learning Theory (ALT). Three schools were selected using the purposive sampling technique. Four participants were selected from each school using a combination of purposive and snowball techniques. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analysed using the Thematic Analysis (TA) procedure. The findings revealed that one-size-fit-all centralised schools cluster TPD no longer meet the professional needs of teachers. The result also showed that participants preferred school-based teachers’ professional development to centralised approach. Hence, the study proposed a data-informed and theory-driven model known as School-Based Teacher Professional Development Framework (SBTPDF) as a blue-print for the implementation of school-based TPD for school administrators.