Strategic Leadership and Implementation of Teacher Professional Development in Kenya

Thesis Title: Strategic Leadership and Implementation of Teacher Professional Development in Kenya

Student’s Name: Wafula Mabele Samuel

Supervisors’ Names:

1. Sarah Naliaka Likoko
2. Paul Ongányi Obino

Abstract:

Quality education is attributed to the quality of teaching. Teacher professional development is vital towards continuous improvement of teachers’ competencies to yield improved quality instruction to students. Questions have been raised pertaining to the quality of basic education in Kenya. The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) rolled out Teacher Professional Development (TPD), a programme whose implementation has drawn criticism from various stakeholders, threatening its success. The low quality of education has been blamed on unstructured and discriminatory professional development programmes. The aim of this study was to leverage strategic leadership in the implementation of TPD in Kenya. The study sought to achieve five specific objectives which included: to examine the effect of teacher demographic characteristics on implementation of TPD in Kenya; to determine the effect of strategic alignment of goals on implementation of TPD in Kenya, to establish the effect of stakeholder collaboration on implementation of TPD in Kenya, to determine the effect of resource allocation on implementation of TPD in Kenya and to examine the effect of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) on implementation of TPD in Kenya. The study was underpinned by pragmatism philosophy and adopted a mixed-method embedded research design making use of both quantitative and qualitative data that were collected by use of questionnaires and structured interviews respectively. Respondents were drawn from teachers who had enrolled for the TPD course and TPD coordinators from the accredited TPD service providers. Teacher respondents were identified using exponential non-discriminative snowball sampling while TPD coordinators were purposively sampled for in-depth interviews. A sample of 404 respondents was used in the study. The quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics specifically, percentages, mean and standard deviation and presented in tables, pie-charts and bar graphs. Further analysis was undertaken using inferential statistics, namely One-way ANOVA, T-test, Pearson’s correlation coefficient and simple linear regressions to test the relationship and effects of the independent variables in this study on TPD implementation. Qualitative data was categorized into four main themes based on the study objectives. The resultant models showed that strategic alignment of goals, stakeholder collaboration, resource allocation and M&E explained 39.8%, 32.1%, 23.3% and 23.2% variability in implementation of TPD respectively. However, despite the contribution of these four factors not all teachers had enrolled for TPD, and of those enrolled 54.8% were dissatisfied perhaps explaining the declining enrollment trend in the programme. The study revealed flaws in the implementation of TPD in Kenya which include failure to involve teachers and other stakeholders, lack of financial support for teachers, and lack of clarity on M&E framework. The study therefore concluded that effectiveness in the implementation of TPD could be achieved by considering teacher demographic characteristics, strategic alignment of goals; stakeholder collaboration; resource allocation and M&E. The study thus recommended leveraging strategic leadership in implementation of TPD in Kenya.  If the government hopes to meet its educational and development goals through enhanced teacher professionalism and quality education, it must embrace strategic leadership for successful TPD implementation.