Attitudes of principals and teachers toward approaches used to deal with teacher incompetence

Abstract

My main purpose in this study was to investigate school principals' approaches to dealing with incompetent teachers and the effects of such approaches. I conducted a survey with 2,180 elementary and junior-high school principals and teachers in Taiwan. The results revealed that, besides using active approaches of encouragement and assistance, soliciting support from senior teachers to invite incompetent teachers to join their teaching teams to improve teaching skills, and initiating a process of teaching improvement, school principals should also show tolerance with incompetent teachers. The use of 2 approaches concurrently was found to be more effective than using just 1 approach in dealing with incompetent teachers. According to structural equation modeling, the 3 following approaches should be involved in, and may improve, the effectiveness of dealing with incompetent teachers: minimizing the difference in principals' and teachers' attitude toward dealing with incompetent teachers; ensuring that there is fairness in the workload allocation for incompetent teachers; and increasing teachers' satisfaction with the approaches used for dealing with incompetent teachers. Use of these approaches may also raise the morale of teachers and enhance teaching quality.