Educational Psychology

Educational Psychology

Introduction

The role of school personnel in increasing student achievement has become a growing debate in many research studies. With dramatic changes taking place in today's world, the school personnel including principals, teachers and any other staff which are in charge of educating our children have significant and monumental role to play for continually increasing achievement of students (Berry, 2009).

Discussion

School personnel and leaders, perhaps know more than ever before, that they are serving in the midst of high-stakes accountability. The researchers further described these school leaders in details that these are those school personnel that are committed to establish a trusting relationship between federal, state and district authorities, parents, students, teachers and overall community, providing a safe and orderly learning environment in the school, building capacity of teachers by hiring those that are team members, supporting the collaboration between the teachers leading towards their professional development, consistently using student data to inform decision making and increasing instructional time for each and every student in the classrooms.

Moreover, there is significant of school leadership on student learning outcomes or achievements revealing that effective school leaders by following the intent leadership practices comprising of setting a clear direction, vision, mission and core, improving working conditions and teaching practices of teachers, promoting a stronger academic and differentiated instructional focus and redesigning the organization of school (Bandura, 1997).

Self-efficacy of teachers in this regard plays the most important role to raise the performance of all students regardless of students' previous experiences in other school settings. Moreover, it is found that teachers that have strong sense of self-efficacy are more inclined and determined to raise and nurture students towards the academic achievements and accomplishments. The reverse on the other hand is also true that indicated that teachers with low or weak sense of self-efficacy tend to quickly surrender their responsibilities and lose trust in their capabilities of raising the achievement of students in the presence of difficulty. This then leads to the question that how school administrators and principals promote the self-efficacy of teachers through professional and leadership development experiences they provide to them.

Enhancing and promoting the performance of students require that administrators or principals must facilitate teachers to increase the student performance beyond the level to which students are willing to perform.

He further argued that those students that want to impart and transplant ambition of learning into their students could not be achieved so that have not yet developed or adopted it to transplant in their teachers initially. In addition to that, Nettle (2006) found in their study that no matter how competent the staff is, how qualified the faculty is, how well funded, how modern facilities school have, how current instructional materials is provided or wherever the school is located, until and unless the teachers are not ready to adopt the belief in the capacities that they can improve the learning outcomes, students will not be ready to adopt the values of learning and hence achievement and performance of students would be ...