A Study on the Effects of Staff Development on Teachers’ Satisfaction and Perceptions of Change in Teaching Performance

Abstract

Staff development is vital to the success of any academic institution as it ensures that staff maintains and enhances their skills and knowledge that can be used to improve quality and performance in their job role.  Therefore, assessing the satisfaction of staff towards staff development activities is becoming increasingly important to its success. This paper aims to focus on the reasons why academic staff attends staff development workshops/sessions, to determine their satisfaction levels towards staff development and whether participation in such activities enhances their perceptions of their teaching practices and how effective they are as a teacher. Data was gathered through a questionnaire survey. The results indicated that the two main reasons for attending staff development are to ‘gain knowledge and skills’ and for ‘personal development’. However, the two external factors that constrained them from attending all the workshops/sessions were ‘time conflict’ and ‘administrative workload’. A significant positive relationship between satisfaction with staff development and enhancing staff’s effectiveness as a teacher, teaching practices and applying the knowledge and techniques acquired in their lectures and classes was also found.

Keywords: staff development, satisfaction, perceptions, performance, higher education