This year the main focus of my internship was looking at the professional development practice at an independent school in New York City. Working in partnership with some of my cohort mates and also my research professors, I developed a metric for assessing faculty attitudes about PD practices and their behaviors based on the Theory of Planned Behavior developed by Icek Ajzen.
The thinking is that if you can assess people in these three areas--attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control-- then you can look at their intention and predict behavior. More importantly, you can clearly see where you need to apply interventions in order to foster the desired behavior.
After administering the questionnaire to the faculty (n=72), and getting support from my professors in looking at the data, there are some meaningful conclusions. As my amazing professor wrote in her summary of my data analysis:
People who like/think PD is important and those who have peers or administration encouraging them and those who have high intentions, end up investing themselves into PD-related activities more.
It is both heartening and a little bit annoying to look at these results. The fantastic thing is that my metric worked at telling us something meaningful about the faculty population. The other side of me can't let go of the fact that the conclusion is so obvious (to me anyway). I guess that is what good research does (not that I put myself in that category)-- it gives real and concrete data to support people's hunches about what works well in schools. And that is all I could have hoped to do!
My next step will be making some suggestions for interventions at this school given the fact that these factors are significant in shaping behavior. Finally, I will work to refine the tool so that it can be used at other schools.
