STAFF DEVELOPMENT AND CURRICULUM IMPLEMENTATION IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN NYAMASHEKE DISTRICT, RWANDA

The study is entitled “Staff Development and Curriculum Implementation of Secondary Schools in Nyamasheke District, Rwanda”. This research was conducted with the purpose of analyzing the impact of Staff development on Curriculum implementation in secondary schools of Nyamasheke District. The study had three specific objectives. Firstly, it was designed to analyze the status of training related to Staff development in schools of Nyamaheke District. The second objective was to find out the challenges faced by schools of Nyamasheke District in curriculum implementation. Finally, the third objective was to analyze the relationship between staff development and curriculum implementation. The study established the relationship between independent variables (training; mentoring; coaching) and dependent variables (teaching methods and content coverage). The target population was made up of head teachers, teachers, and students from secondary schools of Nyamasheke District. The number of those schools targeted by this study was 10 secondary schools. The population was 5’425 people composed of 10 head teachers, 181 teachers, and 5.234 students. The respondents purposively sampled were 250 people composed of 10 head teachers, 160 teachers, and 80 students. Four boys and four girls were selected from every school for the purpose of gender balancing in the study. Data were collected using questionnaires and observation checklists and analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative techniques; data were analyzed using the statistical package for social sciences presented in tables. The study found that Staff development and Curriculum implementation have been more and more effective since 2016 according to Competence-Based Curriculum (CBC): 90% of teachers have been trained on the new curriculum since 2015; 80% of head teachers are bachelor holders in education and 20% of them are post-graduate diploma holders in education. The main challenge is that new documents applied to the new curriculum remain very few. Indeed, 30% of schools do not have well-equipped school laboratories with modern materials and SPSS has been used to analyze different data. The study concluded that there is hope that Curriculum implementation will succeed in the future. The research recommended that the Ministry of Education should help schools to equip all science and computer laboratories. The District Education Officer (DEO) and the school management were also advised to plan much training about new Curriculum implementation. The successful Curriculum implementation will benefit all stakeholders in education and the results of national examinations will be interesting in the future.  Article visualizations: