DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP, TEACHERS’ DEVELOPMENT, AND EFFICIENCY OF SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS IN BORIPE LOCAL GOVERNMENT, OSUN STATE, NIGERIA.

Abstract

Distributed leadership has been an effective strategy for managing human capacity in every administrative structures, despite this, a lot of school administrators (principals) continue to use authoritarian methods that exclude teachers from decision-making by not allowing them to partake in leadership roles. It is against this backdrop that this study investigated the influence of distributed leadership on the professional development and efficiency of secondary school teachers in the Boripe Local Government Area of Osun State. The study has 2 specific purposes, research questions, and corresponding hypotheses. Researchers used a descriptive survey research design. The population was 105 public secondary school teachers. The sample size was 105, using the census sampling technique. A self-structured questionnaire was used as an instrument of data collection. The instrument has a reliability index of 0.84. Researchers retrieved 84 copies of the questionnaire, making approximately a 20% mortality rate, and statistical analyses were based on the copies retrieved. Mean rating and standard deviation were used to answer research questions, and hypotheses were tested using an independent sample t-test at the 0.05 level of significance. Findings showed that the influence of distributed leadership on the professional development of teachers in public secondary school was of very high extent (x̅=3.90; SD=0.303) and efficiency of teachers (x̅=3.74; SD=0.315). Additionally, there was no significant difference in the mean rating of male and female respondents on the extent of influence of distributed leadership on professional development (t82 = -2.432; P = 0.438, > 0.05) and teachers’ efficiency (t82 = -2.628; P = 0.854 > 0.05) of public secondary school teachers. The study concluded that principals or heads of public secondary schools that adopt distributed leadership will benefit from professional development and teachers’ efficiency for the betterment and achievement of the school’s objectives. The study recommended that distributed leadership practices should be integrated into the secondary school management structure to drive teacher professional development.