Международный научно-образовательный электронный журнал «образование и наука в XXI веке». Выпуск №20 (том 5)

 
Problematic aspects of professional development at universities in Uzbekistan
The bar chart highlights data concerning professional development activities and 
number of respondents voted that the mentioned activities have some problems. The 
highest number of teachers thought that “Teachers are not committed enough” (59), 
“Teachers cannot keep up with technological development” (57) and “Lack of support 
by school management” (58) are problematic. “Teacher educators are not committed 
enough” and “Teacher educators are not qualified enough” aspects are believed as the 
least problematic for university teachers (Figure 4.2.1). 
Figure 1. Bar chart of showing problematic issues for PD activities 
 
 
Barriers that prevented participating more professional development activities
To understand better the take-up of professional development and provide insight into 
potential policy levers, teachers were asked some relevant questions to indicate the 
reasons that best explain what had prevented them from taking part in more 
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PD activities concidered problematic
Which aspects of professional development are problematic in your workplace?

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professional development activities. They were entitled to select as many of the options 
as were appropriate (Figure 1). Across the participating teachers, the most commonly 
cited reasons were “No time because of over workload” (53.2%) and “Conflict with 
work schedule” (45% of teachers). In fact, these two factors were the most frequently 
cited barrier to take part in additional professional development.
Innovations and Limitations 
The research found out lots of innovative ideas to improve the professional 
development at universities in Uzbekistan. However, there are some limitations in this 
work. This is the first work done in English which is devoted to professional 
development of university teachers in my country and it causes to do further research 
in this field with deeper analysis. The current work highlighted the real situation of PD 
with both drawbacks and achievements. Establishing PD agency is a new idea for the 
Higher Education system that was mentioned by participants. Organizing different 
contests among teachers are believed as a great idea to motivate teachers to keep up 
their knowledge with state standards and rewarding them respectively based on their 
performances.
In terms of limitations of the research, I would say it was not able to cover all teachers 
who have been working at universities in Uzbekistan. Furthermore, as the research 
questions were in English, most of teachers faced difficulties in filling the 
questionnaire. Also, Covid-19 was a barrier to talk to more university teachers in real 
life like interviewing face to face.