The report “The Quality of Life of Educational Staff and its Impact on the Outcomes of the Educational Process,” prepared by the Education, Culture, Youth, Sports and Media Affairs Committee in the Federal National Council, revealed the limited impact of professional development programs for educational staff. Although teacher professional development programs are considered essential for developing teachers’ performance and raising their efficiency, the committee noted the limited impact of these programs provided on developing teachers’ performance and improving the educational process.
The report, which was recently discussed by the Council, showed that the results of studies related to professional development programs indicated several important observations made by a number of teachers, most notably: the repetition of some professional development programs and their lack of close connection to teachers’ actual needs, the lack of specialized training programs according to career paths, the difficulty of providing sufficient time for training during the school year without affecting the course of the educational process, the lack of incentives associated with attending training courses, which may affect teachers’ motivation to participate, and the need to provide competent and qualified trainers to provide high-quality training programs.
He pointed out that representatives of the Ministry of Education have explained that professional development programs for teachers take into account three categories of teachers, namely: the beginning teacher, the intermediate teacher, and the distinguished teacher, and that training programs are designed according to the actual needs of teachers. The Ministry also stated in its last meeting with the committee that it is working to rebuild programs for preparing and developing educators in a comprehensive manner, to ensure the graduation of qualified teachers capable of teaching the developed curricula efficiently.
The report pointed out that the committee found, through studying the results of the meeting with representatives of the Teachers Association, that there were other reasons that led to the weakness of professional development programs for teachers, including the use of foreign trainers to provide training programs and workshops for teachers, which creates difficulty in their understanding of the local cultural and social context, due to the difference in educational values and concepts, in addition to the language used in these workshops, and the absence of a technical guide in the educational field, which weakened the quality of the training content and its suitability to the actual needs of teachers, and limited the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of the training. Accurately and provide feedback to teachers.
The report indicated that the committee conducted a comparative study with some developed countries in the field of professional development for teachers, and found the need for educational cadres in the country to be trained in some specialized fields, including: training on how to teach students with special needs, the need for training programs on using new technology in the workplace, and training them on artificial intelligence techniques and employing them in teaching and learning processes, so that they are central to the country’s vision and strategy towards anticipating the future and artificial intelligence, and the need for important training programs in the field of classroom management, In addition to the need for teachers to provide training programs on teaching strategies in multicultural environments.
The committee recommended developing a training and professional development policy for educational staff, to include formulating work programs that keep pace with the latest developments, using artificial intelligence tools in the field of educational staff development, linking them to actual training needs based on the results of performance evaluation and field studies, and finding a mechanism to restore the role of the technical mentor in the educational process as a technical and academic reference for teachers in their field of specialization, to evaluate them and improve and develop their performance.
