Principals’ views on teachers’ professional development

Abstract

This article is an account of a study that aimed to elicit the perceptions of school principals and middle managers in Lebanon on teachers’ professional development (PD) and to promote an understanding of PD that extends beyond workshops. The study was qualitative and exploratory and used online interviewing to collect data. Questions were emailed to 30 school principals in Beirut and North Lebanon. The overall intention was to extract understanding of how this professional qualification and administrative responsibility is understood and how the administration attends to it. Data were reduced through a coding strategy and emergent themes such as limited awareness of the benefits of embedded PD strategies, PD features of relevance, practicality and follow-up were identified. Other themes were the focus on the concept of workshop training as PD, the administrators’ lack of awareness of cognitive learning strategies and the importance of teacher PD to school renewal. Obstacles to PD were identified and included lack of time and funding for the workshops and teachers’ attitude toward growth and renewal. The study revealed that reflection is required to alter engrained conceptual structures. Critically, the study highlighted the issue that the school system in Lebanon is not designed to promote teachers’ continual learning initiatives.