Reflection on critical incidents for teacher professional development: A narrative inquiry

Abstract

This research study entitled Reflection on Critical Incident for Teacher Professional Development:A Narrative Inquiry was carried out to find the nature of critical incidents that occur in the classroom and to identify the role of critical incidents for teacher professional development. Keeping the objectives into consideration, six college level English teachers were selected as the sample by using purposive non-random sampling strategy. Data for this study were collected by conducting semi-structured interview with the selected teachers/participants. The researcher visited and revisited the study area to collect and validate the data. After the collection of the data they were categorized into two themes and analysed and interpreted by using thematic analysis. The researcher categorized all the finding into two themes: critical incidents that occur in the classroom and role of critical incidents for teacher professional development. It was found that there were different nature of critical incidents such as related with classroom management, related with understanding of the learners, unusual question as critical incidents and teachers' behavior related incidents. Similarly, it was found that critical incidents analysis have numbers of benefits such as to create self-awareness, understanding the learners, developing collegiality and providing an opportunity to conduct action research. This thesis has been divided into five chapters viz. introduction; review of related literature and conceptual framework; methods and procedures; analysis and interpretation of data; and findings, conclusion and recommendations. The first chapter consists of background of the study, statement of the problem, objectives of the study, research questions, significance of the study, delimitations of the study and operational definitions of the key terms. Similarly, the second chapter deals with the review of the theoretical literature, review of empirical literature, implications of the review for the study and conceptual framework. Likewise, the third chapter sheds light on the methods and procedures of the study under which methods and design of the study, population, sample and sampling strategy, research tool, sources of data, data collection procedures, data analysis procedures, and ethical considerations. The fourth chapter presents the analysis of data and interpretation of the results. Finally, the fifth chapter encompasses overall findings, conclusionand recommendations related to policy level, practice level and further research.