CURRENT STATUS OF CONTINUOUS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMM IMPLEMENTATION AND ITS CHALLENGES IN GOVERNMENT SECONDARY SCHOOLS OF SIDAMA ZONE

This study seeks to examine the current status of continuous professional development program implementation and its challenges in Sidama Zone secondary schools. To this end, the Convergent Parallel (concurrent) research design was conducted in the 10 government secondary schools. From those Schools; 144 teachers and 80 school leaders (including principals, vice principals, department heads, unit leaders), were selected by simple random sampling technique; while 10 supervisors and 10 woreda education office teacher development program coordinators were selected by purposive sampling technique. The instruments used to collect data were questionnaire, document analysis, and interview. The data collected through the questionnaire were self-administered and analyzed using percentage, mean and t-test. Results indicated that the major finding of the study were; most activities of Continuous Professional Development implementation in the study area were moderately implemented: there were inadequate support and inputs for Continuous Professional Development program; lack of teachers working collaboratively with colleagues, and less engagement in their own Continuous Professional Development throughout their careers and the CPD program was delayed by many discouraging factors. The findings of the study concluded as CPD program was not implemented successfully due to the, lack of trained CPD facilitators, absence of motivation to CPD work for teachers by the school leaders, lack of resources or budget to implement CPD, absence of commitment of teachers to implement the CPD program, less support from school leaders and etc… were major affecting factors. On the basis of these major findings and conclusion the following recommendations were made: to implement the CPD program effectively, Woreda education office in collaboration with Zone education department has to organize the necessary training on CPD as well as school leaders and teachers organize motivation program to improve their work and allocate necessary budget for effective implementation for continuous professional development program.