Impact of Teachers’ Acquaintance on Fidelity Implementation: Views of Senior High School French Teachers in Ghana

Abstract

Curriculum illiteracy on the part of teachers has over the years posed a lot of threat to success of programme implementation in many parts of the world. In Ghana, the centralized curriculum design system even tends to alienate teachers the more from the syllabus they are supposed to implement. This study, first of its kind in Ghana, therefore seeks to examine the impact of teachers‟ acquaintance with the syllabus on fidelity implementation from the view point of teachers of French at the Senior High School level. Data was collected via questionnaire from 88 French teachers sampled from four districts of the Western Region of Ghana. The purposive sampling technique was used to select the participating districts for the study. In the selected districts, census was used to select teachers in both public and private SHSs. The study revealed that a majority (91.7%) of French teachers did not make notes from the syllabus and only 94% of them intimated that they did not often refer to the syllabus as a source of information in teaching. It was again discovered that a significant positive correlation exists between teachers acquaintance with the syllabus and fidelity implementation (r(72) = .45, p < α since α = .05 and p = .040). Based on this, it was recommended that as a policy, the Ministry of Education (MoE), the umbrella body of the Curriculum Research and Development Division (CRDD) of the Ghana Education Service (GES), come out with forums that would help French teachers have access to national curriculum design platforms where their interventions could be considered. This new proposal when pursued would improve the degree to which the French curriculum is implemented with fidelity in Ghana.