School Self-Evaluation and Organisational Learning Approaches to Improving the Quality of Professional Learning of Teachers in School

This research involved 712 teachers and school leaders from 43 high schools in West Kalimantan Province, Indonesia, which spread from urban to rural areas. With adequate transportation and communication facilities, urban schools have advantageous in terms of learning resources, in contrast, school in rural areas tend to find access to such learning resources challenging. To promote teachers’ professional learning (PL) and, hence the pupils’ learning, school in both contexts, tended to face different challenge. Therefore, each school needed to be supported to develop more localised, contextualised learning and supports for learning. This thesis aimed at describing the potential and power of school self-evaluation (SSE) and organisational learning (OL) strategies for improving teachers’ professional learning (PL) in school and the nature of school supports that can be built in for improving PL in each school contexts. Particular detailed qualitative attention and a school evaluation intervention was implemented and studied at two schools following an initial survey study of teachers’ values and practices at 43 schools in both urban and rural schools in West Kalimantan province of Indonesia. The analysis of my quantitative data suggests that teachers assigned a high level of values and practices to every factor underlying PL and OL. There is no statistical evidence that teachers and school leaders, with different characteristics, were significantly different in terms of values and practices for each factor of PL and OL. The qualitative data analysis shows that the values-practice alignment data acted as a catalyst to provoke teachers and leaders to start thinking about making changes in their policies and practices in relation to PL and OL in their respective schools, though, due to a number of obstacles, made not all desires for such changes can be transformed into more concrete school improvements. The findings of this research provided more evidence for future researchers that feeding back data regarding values practice alignment, as an intervention stage in the school self-evaluation process, can be a powerful catalyst in facilitating new forms of critical whole-school communication, which lie at the heart of double-loop learning concept. Furthermore, for school policy and practice, the finding of this research can be the basis for school stakeholders to develop more differentiated professional learning policies and strategies, in their respective schools.