The Impact of School Leadership and Professional Development on Professional Commitment

Abstract

This study used hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) approach to investigate the impact of school leadership, professional development, gender and teaching experience on professional commitment with a sample of 396 elementary and secondary school teachers and administrators from Kenya. The HLM results indicate significant differences among schools (?2 (49) = 218.92, p<0.001), with an intra-class correlation of 0.3183 indicating that 31.83% of variance in professional commitment was among schools. When professional development and school leadership were used as level 2 predictor variables with no level 1 predictors, the school variability dropped from 4.73584 to 3.30865 indicating that 30.14% of variance in school professional commitment was due to school leadership and professional development (?2 (47) = 161.67, p<0.001). Further, the reliability of the sample means in any school for the true mean school professional commitment was 0.703.