Influence of Instructional Leadership Practices on Teacher Continuous Professional Development in Selected Public Primary Schools in Rwanda

Abstract

The instructional leadership practices make a positive change in terms of continuous professional development of teachers. The purpose of this paper therefore was to assess the influence of instructional leadership practices on teacher continuous professional development in selected public primary schools in Gicumbi district in Rwanda. The target population was 256 people and   162 respondents as sample size got by using Yamane formula. Descriptive and correlation research designs were employed. Questionnaire, guided interview and education document analysis review was used as data collection instrument. The quantitative data was analyzed using IBM SPSS software version 21. Qualitative data was analyzed thematically. The findings revealed that indicated that an average of 27.2% of teachers accepted that there is effective instructional leadership established by school head teachers. It was also noted that an average of 26.7% of teachers agreed that there is a standard teachers’ continuous professional development in their working schools. The findings also revealed that effective school goal setting, creating conducive working environment supervision practices and teacher motivation can have influence on teacher continuous professional development at the level of 48.6% as R Square results.  This also implies that the remaining 51.4% of teacher continuous professional development can be influenced by other intervening factors. In addition, the findings also indicated that there is a positive relationship between instructional leadership and teacher continuous professional development thus P-value = .000< .01 as the significance level and Pearson coefficient of correlation r = .724. The study recommends that REB has to make effective teacher management in order to improve teaching profession among teachers and the quality of education.  Keywords: Continuous professional development, Instructional leadership, Instructional supervision, Public primary, Schools.