Exploring the Impact of Career Steps and Evaluation Systems on Teacher Professional Development: Teachers' Opinions on Career Steps Exams

Teachers' professional development and educational policies are two phenomena that significantly affect stakeholders in education. Related research has emphasized that these policies are mostly in striking contrast with long-standing perceptions of the status of profession, values, beliefs and norms of the teachers. This research is to evaluate teachers' opinions in terms of the policy, the procedures, the criterias, the effects on teaching professional ethics and the suggestions regarding "Teaching Career Steps Examination" implemented by the Ministry of National Education in Türkiye. In this study, teachers' opinions on these exams were obtained by comparing the type and scope of questions, difficulty levels, entry conditions and the regulations for the exams held in 2006 and 2022. The research data consists of the opinions of teachers, expert teachers and head teachers who work in kindergarten, primary, secondary and high schools in the academic year of 2022-2023. The study was carried out with the phenomenological pattern, which is one of the qualitative research methods. In the study, the opinions of 85 teachers were taken with semi-structured interview forms to collect the qualitative data. Moreover, a semi-structured interview form was created using the maximum variation sampling method, one of the purposeful sampling methods. According to the data obtained as a result of the research, it was concluded that the majority of the teachers did not approve of the current examination system and that it caused discrimination in terms of salary increase and status.