Browsing by Author "Lee-Piggott, Rinnelle"

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    Improving One Teacher’s Instructional Practice Using Clinical Supervision: An Action Research Study for Teaching In 21st Century Classrooms
    (School of Education, UWI, 2023) Medford, Georgette; Lee-Piggott, Rinnelle
    Teachers worldwide are responsible for facilitating student learning. Stakeholders, including 21st century students in today’s classrooms, place high demands on teachers to provide students with skills of critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, leadership, effective communication, and analysis. This action research highlights the use of a clinical supervision intervention to improve a teacher’s pedagogical skills in selected student-centred teaching strategies that were intended to promote teacher effectiveness. It also investigates the influence of these strategies on students’ learning. Findings reveal an over-reliance on traditional teacher-centred strategies by the teacher prior to the intervention. However, post-intervention findings show the teacher’s shift towards student-centred teaching, development as a reflective practitioner, students’ increased interest and participation in learning, and students’ improved perception of the subject taught. While there were challenges in implementing the intervention, one can conclude that the time and effort invested in this intervention made it a success.
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    New principals’ leadership and school culture: A study of three primary schools facing challenging circumstances in Trinidad and Tobago
    (2016-03-01) Lee-Piggott, Rinnelle
    The literature on new principals tends to focus on the challenges of incumbents. However, there is little detailed evidence of the nature of their attempts at reshaping or enhancing school culture, which may be their greatest single professional challenge. A significant number of primary schools in Trinidad and Tobago are currently headed by new principals and concerns have been publicly raised at the national level about these new principals’ fit to schools. This study was designed to investigate the nature of the interactions between new principals’ leadership and their inherited school cultures in primary schools of different effectiveness states—high, average, and low achievement—which face challenging circumstances. It also investigates the impact of these interactions on school processes, new principals’ emotions and professional development, and student academic outcomes. The study adopts an explanatory, multiple-case study approach, which conceptualizes principal leadership as relational; recognizing that while a new principal may wish to re-culture and restructure a school, the existing school’s culture and the new principal’s own professional judgment may combine to influence his/her ability to do so. The main research method used for engaging with this work was a critical incident technique. Findings reveal the complex nature of the leadership-school culture interplay and the factors that influence: (a) the various manifestations of the leadership-school culture interactions, and, b) the degree of change observed at the schools. Associated implications and areas for future research are also discussed.
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    Social Justice Leadership: Principals’ Perspectives in Trinidad and Tobago
    (2019) Conrad, Dennis; Lee-Piggott, Rinnelle; Brown, Launcelot
    The paper “Thinking of, Knowing, and Doing Social Justice Leadership: Principals’ perspectives” explores the understanding and practice of principals regarding social justice leadership. The study adopts phenomenography as its methodology and presents findings gleaned from the semistructured interviews of 11 principals in Trinidad and Tobago. Findings indicate that principals were generally unaware of a social justice leadership orientation, but values of fairness and equity, for instance, were common in their understandings. Social justice leadership roles were conceptualized as multifaceted, difficult and requiring strategy and caution, but emphasized a need for self-investment and collaboration. It was found that principals’ unclear conceptualizations translated into guesswork when practicing social justice leadership from which emerged unique ways of ‘doing’ social justice. Findings point to the need to place social justice atop Trinidad and Tobago’s school improvement agenda.
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    When teachers lead: An analysis of teacher leadership in one primary school
    (School of Education, UWI, St. Augustine, 2014) Lee-Piggott, Rinnelle
    While teacher leadership is a concept that lacks consensus in the literature and may be underexplored in schools, it is a practice that is worth pursuing for its many cited benefits to school improvement. However, the extent to which teacher leadership thrives in any school is dependent on school conditions such as principal support and school culture. This is evident in an analysis of teacher leadership episodes from one primary school in Trinidad, which the author undertook in order to identify the supportive structures as well as barriers to teacher leadership. Evidence on teacher leadership from developed countries such as the USA and the UK, where the concept is more widely known, was used to form the analysis, which revealed an emergent form of teacher leadership existing at the school.