The Effect of School-Based Professional Development Community on EFL Teachers’ Performance

Abstract

This chapter displays a brief summary of the present study and the main conclusions, recommendations, and suggestions for further studies. 5.1. Summary Professional development for teachers in general and EFL teachers specifically has been one of the wide ranges of reforms by policy makers to improve education recently. As it has been claimed that teachers are the fulcrum that determines the success or failure of any attempt to reform the educational processes, empirical studies have been conducted either to investigate new strategies to enhance teaching or to help EFL teachers better manage their classrooms and solve whatever problems they encounter during their professional life. Skilled teachers are highly needed to achieve the expected outcomes, help students better acquire and learn English language, especially in public schools where the number of students is growing in classrooms and the students have fewer educational resources to practice a language. The present study was conducted with the purpose of constructing and measuring the effect of a SBPDC program that is based on the perspective of Constructivism (Contextual learning) on improving EFL teachers‟ performance. The program of the SBPDC was based on teachers‟ needs obtained beforehand 121 and the professional development sessions were run and conducted by the school-based community teachers themselves. The present study tried to answer the following questions: What is the effect of a school-based professional development community program on improving EFL teachers‟ performance? Three sub questions were derived from this question: 1. What are the differences between EFL teachers‟ performance before and after the experimentation? 2. What is the effect of a school-based professional community program on students‟ learning? 3. To what extent are EFL teachers satisfied with the school-based professional development community program? To answer these questions, the following steps were taken: 1. Reviewing literature and previous studies in the following areas; a) EFL Teacher Professional development. b) Professional learning communities. 2. Identifying the teaching needs of the EFL Teachers regarding the school-based professional development community program. 3. Identifying previous literature related to professional development communities and their effect of teachers‟ performance. 4. Identifying the issues needed for raising English language teachers‟