The local school is the level at which school improvement occurs. The key leaders of the local schools are the principals and they should be involved in improving the curriculum for school improvement. However, principals encounter difficulties. Their role is unclear. They do not possess the necessary skills. To acquire such skills, staff development programs are needed for principals. In this exploratory study, a staff development program was designed and implemented to assist principals to gain curriculum development competencies. A list of fifty-four activities was mailed to eighty-eight Pennsylvania principals to collect their perceptions on the role of the elementary principal in curriculum development. Seventy returned questionnaires were analyzed and the activity identified as most important to their role in curriculum leadership was evaluating classroom instruction. A review of literature was made to determine premises, competencies, and learning conditions to be included in a staff development program. Eight premises were used to construct eight lessons with twenty-four objectives. Seventeen principals completed a needs assessment and pretest to determine competencies they already had and those needing development. Principals participated in workshop sessions to correct weaknesses. After the sessions, principals completed a posttest to determine if they gained the desired competencies, and which aspects of the staff development program were most helpful. The analysis of the posttest data revealed that principals perceived the staff development program to have assisted them in gaining twenty-one objectives. Two objectives were not accomplished with the principals and, therefore, recommendations have been suggested on how to revise the lesson. One objective was previously obtained by all principals who participated in the lesson. Therefore, this objective needs to be evaluated with other principals to determine if it should be deleted or maintained. It was determined, then, that the staff development program benefitted selected principals in gaining curriculum development skills. A recommendation for future study is that this program be implemented with a larger group of elementary principals to determine if it assists them to gain crucial curriculum development skills in a significant and lasting manner.

Effective curriculum planning and decision making process is key to the success of educational programs. The problem with centralized educational systems is that, at the curriculum planning level, the system does not have sufficient data about the needs of the learner, teachers, and the expectations of the society at large for effective curriculum planning to take place. At the implementation level, the system does not give teachers the needed flexibility to implement the curriculum. The major purpose of this study was to investigate curriculum decision making process in Malawi. The research procedures used in this study consisted of systematic document analysis and interviews with selected educators. In addition, a survey of opinions of students, parents, teachers, and heads of schools was conducted. The findings of the study confirmed that the curriculum planning and decision making process in Malawi is centralized. It also found that curriculum planning and development process for the secondary school curriculum was not fully systematised. At the school level, heads of schools and teachers had very little say about the curriculum. The implementation of the curriculum was, therefore, not flexible enough to allow the curriculum to be modified to suit local conditions while at the same time meeting the nationally developed objectives. The following were some of the recommendations the study made: (1) Decisions about the curriculum should be broadly based. (2) The responsibility for national curriculum development should be vested in the hands of the Malawi Institute of Education. (3) The Ministry of Education and Culture should gradually institute a school-based management strategy in order to improve the effectiveness of schools. (4) Lines of communication between the school and the Ministry headquarters should be improved. (5) In order to encourage the application of knowledge and skills into practice, there is need to continue refining performance based assessment techniques for appraising student performance and for placement. It is hoped that the decentralization process now taking place within the education sector, will take into consideration the above recommendations in order to improve the quality of secondary education in Malawi.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-108).

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Toronto, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 528-560).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1927. / Vita. Published also as Teachers college, Columbia university, Contributions to education, no. 274. Bibliography: p. 93-102.

Thesis (MEd(Curriculum Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-108). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1935. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 1-5 at end.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed June 11, 2007). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.