Teacher motivation and professional practice in the Ghana education service

This research explores teacher motivation towards professional practice in the Ghana Education Service. Specifically, the research investigates how teachers in public pre-tertiary schools in postcolonial Ghana perceive themselves as professionals working in the Ghana Education Service, taking into consideration working conditions that de-motivate or motivate them in their professional practice. My aim in this research is not to make generalisations based on the limited data that I collected, but to illuminate existing policies and programmes in place to motivate teachers; and to examine teacher-employer relations. Grounded in a postcolonial discursive framework, the research theorises and discusses how teachers at this level of education are de-motivated or motivated to practise professionally. The main method used was the qualitative approach. However, because of the complexity in mapping out the parameters of the field work, I conducted the research in two phases. The first phase was a scoping study using a survey questionnaire. After analysing the quantitative data obtained in the first phase using the SPSS, I used the results to identify key informants and items in the survey questionnaire which would guide the framing of questions for the second phase. The second phase adopted qualitative data generation approaches and formed the main data collection for this research. I conducted this phase in two parts. The first part involved three focus groups of five members in each. I selected the members of the focus groups based on information I obtained from the scoping study phase. The second part was an individual face-to-face interview with three participants, one drawn from each focus group. I used semi-structured and unstructured questions in the focus groups and the individual face-to-face interview sessions respectively. The research involved two sampling techniques. The first was the purposive sampling technique used in the selection of the Ashanti Region. The second was the simple random also adopted to allow the selection of three out of the 27 districts of the region. Unit of analysis was based on the qualitative data and it included postcolonial categories of agency, power relationships, voice/ representation and professional image. The research revealed that the ethos of the Ghana Education Service, structural and practice issues of the Ghana Education Service, the lack of strong school-community collaboration and the lack of societal appreciation for the teaching profession were the three main working conditions that de-motivated the teacher participants in their professional practice. The research also revealed that selfless and internal factors were the motivators in the teachers’ professional practice. However, a transformation of the ethos, structural and practice issues of the Ghana Education Service, a strong school-community collaboration and societal recognition for the profession in Ghana were also identified as potential motivators. Recommendations made focused on a proposed transformative postcolonial framework for improving teachers’ working conditions in the Ghana Education Service.