Influence of school senior leaders on teacher professional development: a comparative case study of four schools in Cape Town

As education reform initiatives around the world are becoming more focused on developing teacher professional development and school professional learning communities (PLCs), the role of school principal leadership in implementing reforms related to the government vision of teacher professional development and school PLC has come to be seen as important. This has also led to the establishment of leadership training programmes for school principals to assist these principals with their new role as leaders of school reform implementation. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the school principals' roles in leading teacher professional development in four public schools in similar socio-economic contexts, but with different levels of learner achievement, within the greater Cape Town area. Towards this end, the thesis relates professional development practices to the relevant policy - the Integrated Strategic Planning Framework for Teacher Professional Education and Development (the 'Framework'), to the Advanced Certificate of Education: School of Management and Leadership (ACE-SML) training curriculum and to the idea of a professional learning community, which is promoted by this policy and this training course. The research reported in this thesis draws on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus, capital, and doxa to conceptualise and describe the relationships between the various players and the ways in which these relationships affect teacher professional development practices and school PLC culture in the participating schools. Findings from this research reveal similarities and differences between the schools with regard to the roles of school senior leaders and the schools' approaches to teacher professional development practices. Ironically, government policy is taken less seriously in the three schools that achieve higher learning outcomes than in the school that achieves weaker outcomes. Instead of conforming to the policy, the approach in each of the three higher achieving schools is based on the history and values of the particular school, the preferences of the principals and whether or not the principal attended the school management and leadership training course