TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PRACTICES IN NEPAL

Abstract

Teachers are the foundations of quality education and thus teacher professional development (TPD) is the most important concern in the national education system. TPD is the first step toward quality education and is a continuous process. Professionally qualified teacher delivers quality education in the national education system; however, supporting them for quality education is very challenging. In this context, the scope of the study was to explore and analyze the teachers' professional development practices in Nepal. More specifically, the study was oriented towards finding out teachers' perception and practices of their professional development activities and contribution of these endeavors to their professional skill development. The study was designed under the interpretive paradigm utilizing narrative as well as descriptive modes of analysis. Two community schools of Myagdi district - one from district head quarter area and the next from a village area - were selected. Similarly, the research participants were selected through purposeful sampling. In order to collect the data, document study, in-depth interviews, FGD and observations were executed. As a result, the study gained the findings as output. The study found that teachers perceived the profession as a way of livelihood and by professional development they meant career development and getting more facilities. The study also revealed that teachers perceived TPD as a way of updating their competencies. ii The study further found that the teachers perceived education policy as the most important thing and were known to the existing provisions of the TPD program but they expressed that instability in the teacher training policy was the problem for TPD. They perceived that culture and local context play an important role for professional development (PD) and there exists a dire lack of sharing culture among teachers. The study explored that teachers' professional development activities were mainly guided by formal program rather than self-initiated informal activities. Nevertheless, the study further revealed that site-based and self-directed TPD is better than the standardized TPD. The study also found that teachers' involvement in party politics and side-job as well as their right oriented movement forgetting teaching profession, inherent duty and responsibility of the stakeholders were the virulent causes for the deterioration of teachers respect from the society and, consequently, the quality of education in community schools. The study could not get noteworthy differences between district head-quarters based secondary school and village based secondary school in terms of teachers' professional development activities performed by them