Facilitative Actions That School Heads Performed to Help Teachers to Adopt Zimbabwe’s Implemented Primary School Performance Lag Address Programmes (PLAP) Innovation

Abstract

The key role of conducting facilitative interventions that School Heads as instructional leaders should play during the initiation of a new curriculum is all too often neglected. This study sought to investigate the facilitative actions that School Heads performed to help teachers to adopt Zimbabwe’s implemented primary school Performance Lag Address Programmes (PLAP) innovation from the perspective of teachers. Following the mixed methods research design, the researcher used the survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to collect data. The study involved a purposive sample of 100 primary school teachers who had converged at the Midlands State University as the researcher’s students on the BEd Block Release study programme from 100 schools in the Midlands Province. The study revealed administrative as opposed to instructionally-based and knowledge-oriented facilitative actions as the most prevalent interventions that most teachers indicated were performed by their School Heads to initiate teachers into this innovation. The majority of teachers indicated that their School Heads engaged in a wide array of facilitative actions towards this innovation to an insufficient extent. They applied a little degree of intensity of seriousness in initiating their teachers into this innovation by trivializing instructionally-based and knowledge-oriented facilitative interventions. It is recommended that School Heads create collaborative communities of learning among teachers about how to get conceptually ready to implement this new innovation.

Keywords: Performance Lag Address Programme (PLAP), adoption, facilitative actions