A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE IMPACTS OF PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES ON SHARED PRINCIPAL LEADERSHIP PRACTICES: EVIDENCE OF NINE COUNTRY CASES FROM TALIS 2013

In the current dispensation due to accountability measures in schools, there have been enormous pressures on key actors to enhance school effectiveness and improvement. This has put some pressures especially on schools heads/principals and teachers to improve student learning outcome, despite growing policies with respect to professional development of schools principals and teachers. At the same time there are increasing efforts to train and re-train school heads to adopt distributed or shared leadership practices so as improve student learning outcomes and school improvement, however there seems to be limited evidence in three ways. First, with regards to whether or not there is a relationship between professional development activities and principal shared leadership skills. Secondly, whether or not there exist some differences between privately or publicly managed schools with respect to principals shared leadership style and finally if there exists variations between female or male principals regarding shared leadership style. Using the TALIS 2013 for data analysis in nine countries which was conducted by the OECD. The results of the study revealed that there was no statistically mean differences with regards to how gender differ with principals’ shared leadership, secondly there is a difference in variation of mean with both publicly and privately managed school with respect to principals shared leadership and finally the type of professional development that includes courses, conferences, or observational visits had no significant effect on principals’ shared leadership. This paper has some sought of policy lessons for both policy makers and practitioners in the arenas of educational policy with respect to the type of leadership style and type of professional development for enhancing student learning outcomes and school-wide improvement