Research On Special Education Teachers' Professional Development And Its Social Cognitive Factors In Benin

Professional development of teachers in special education is essential to strengthen their capacity in order to enhance the ultimate goal of promoting the learning of children with disabilities.Professional development has the role of helping teachers develop new teaching theories and practices and develop their expertise in the teaching field thereby enhancing the quality of education.There are factors that influence the process of professional development in teachers.These factors include cognitive,social,cultural and contextual aspects of the teaching process.The main purpose of this study was to investigate levels of professional development among the novice(pre-service)teachers and the experienced(in-service)teachers of special education in Benin.Furthermore,the study was set to find out the influence of some critical educational undertakings such as pedagogical practices,professional reflective practices and professional identity on the professional development of the teachers.This was a cross-sectional study,which employed 'mixed methods' design to find out professional developmental levels of special education teachers,and the factors that influence the development.The embedded research design which is a one-phase mixed methods approach in which researchers implement the quantitative and qualitative methods concurrently was used to analyze and interpret the data from the two approaches.In this study,using grounded theory,the qualitative data supported the main quantitative data.A total sample of 259 was selected from teachers of the hearing and visual impaired students for the quantitative data and responses were collected using four different questionnaires which were bound together to match each participant's responses.Through in-depth interviews,qualitative data was collected from 12 key participants who were teachers and their trainers specialized in teaching students with hearing and sight disabilities.Quantitative data was entered in IBM(?) SPSS(?) statistics version 22 for data analysis.Qualitative data was transcribed and entered in NVivo 11 software for the data coding and theme identification using the grounded theory approach.Findings from the quantitative data indicate that overall,most special education teachers,regardless of their demographic differences,demonstrated higher levels of professional development skills,pedagogical practices,professional reflective practices and professional identities.These results suggest that generally,there is some substantial professionalism among teachers of special education in Benin.However,comparisons within the sample subgroups regarding demographic characteristics revealed some notable differences worth pointing out in this paper.To begin with there were some remarkable differences between the experienced(in-service)and the unexperienced(pre-service)teachers,the results revealed that in almost all significant differences observed,experienced teachers had higher scores that the novice teachers.Secondly,concerning place of residence,it was found that teachers from Atlantique/Littoral,which is in the urban setting had higher scores in almost all the observed differences than their fellow teachers from either Oueme/Plateau or Mono/Couffo which are from semi-urban and rural areas respectively.Furthermore,pedagogical practices,professional reflective practices and professional identity were found to partly influence professional development.Professional development was measured through three dimensions,namely,cognitive and emotional resources,professional actions and professional environment.Cognitive and emotional resources was positively predicted by 'advocate for diverse learners' and 'problem solvers'which are dimensions of reflective practices,and 'skill acquisition' which is an aspect of pedagogy practices;professional actions was positively predicted by skill acquisition,problem solvers,teaching strategy(pedagogical aspect)and advocate for diverse learners;and professional environment was positively predicted by skill acquisition,problem solvers,teaching strategy and intrinsic value identity(professional identity aspect).These results suggest that skill acquisition and problem solvers are the important predictors of professional development;they predicted all the three dimensions of professional development.Predicting only two aspects were advocate for diverse learners and teaching strategy.Intrinsic value identity only predicted one dimension of professional development.Findings from the qualitative data have shown that there are some factors that affect quality of the teaching among special education teachers in Benin.Such environmental factors as lack of the learning resources,lack of continuous trainings and lack of knowledge sharing among teachers negatively affect professional development.The study also discovered the important role of experience on the teachers.As for the acquisition of knowledge and the development of skills,experience help teachers realize their potential in the teaching process;pre-service teachers were found to struggle handling issues like problem solving in class.Finally,it was discovered that most teachers and the expert trainers possessed intrinsic value especially manifested in areas of motivation for work,satisfaction and the strong need for continuous training.In conclusion,these findings largely provide a rich empirical evidence of professional development among special education teachers in Benin.Overall,teachers demonstrated higher levels of professional development skills,pedagogical practices,professional reflective practices and professional identities.However,the study noted that there are a number of social and cultural factors that affect professional development of pre-service teachers and those from the rural areas that need to be looked at if we are to achieve quality of education in special schools.Such factors include not limited to the insufficient or ineffective training,the unconducive teaching environment and lack of teaching and learning materials.Implications for the study have been highlighted and discussed in the thesis.