The Relationship between Professional Development and Continual Improvement in Suburban National Secondary Schools

Professional development is an opportunity to improve teachers' instructional strategies and increase the students' achievement for school continual improvement. However, the short term courses and limited collaboration were ineffective in helping teachers to master their instructional strategies. Thus, teachers field competency problem affected the school continual improvement. Most of the empirical research in educational field in Malaysia focused on professional learning communities. The purpose of this research is to determine the relationship between professional development and school continual improvement. This survey research focused on two suburban national secondary schools which have the same characteristics in Subis. 97 respondents were selected randomly to answer the PDSCI instrument. The results showed that professional development and continual improvement had medium and positive significant relationship (r=.426, p