אתגר הסיוע למורים המתקשים בעבודתם

This study examines principals' views regarding the actions they take to assist struggling teachers on their staff, as well as successful, effective ways of coping with the dif ficulties experienced by these teachers. A total of 219 principals were asked to complete a quantitative questionnaire developed speci fically for the ,study. They were also asked to describe a typical case of a struggling teacher ,explain the nature of the dif ficulties, describe the intervention steps they took and estimate how effective they perceived those steps to be. In an open-ended question, the participants were further asked to describe the steps they had taken in a successful intervention. Findings show that the principals preferred to help struggling teachers mainly through inclusion activities rather than through organizational steps such as assigning the teacher to a different class. Very rarely did the principals choose to employ sanctions and threats. A strong correlation was found between the use of inclusion activities and the principals' perception of its ef ficacy. A content analysis revealed that it was not the type of actions taken that :made the intervention successful so much as the existence of certain conditions (a) the principal's willingness to intervene and invest efforts; (b) the diversity of the principal's actions and the types of help; (c) the teacher's willingness to change; (d) flexibility in managing the intervention. Due to their dif ficulties in taking assertive initiative, the principals preferred the use of sporadic and few measures in which they actually did not believe. These findings indicate the need to train principals to include skills for coping effectively with the phenomenon of struggling teachers as well as the need to encourage the principals to be proactive .rather than attempt to avoid dealing with this phenomenon