Over time, it appears there has been a mounting anxiety about the state of teacher education and the adequacy of teachers in the school system at all levels. Attempts have been made to improve on the quality of teacher education, with interventions ranging from various forms of pre-service provisions through distance learning strategies to short-term training packages in the course of improving teachers’ development, yet no appreciable improvement has been made. This study therefore, investigated the effect of School Based Teacher Development Programme (SBTD) on the enhancement of pre-service teachers’ pedagogical skills acquisition and performance during teaching practice exercise. Two research questions and two hypotheses guided the study. This study employed multi-stage sampling technique which involved the purposive and stratified sampling technique to select the respondents with a sample size of 120 from a population size of pre-service teachers in the faculty of education 2019/2020 academic session. The instrument used in the collection of data was Pre-Service Teachers’ Skills Acquisition Questionnaire (r = 0.83). The teaching practice assessment scores of the respondents were obtained and adopted to ascertain the achievement level of pre-service teachers after being exposed to the SBTD. The study lasted for 12 weeks divided into two equal halves of six weeks training and six weeks of observation period of the enhancement of the school based teachers’ development strategies on the teaching skills of pre-service teachers. Descriptive statistics (means and standard deviation) and Analysis of Covariance at 0.05 level of significance were employed in analyzing the data collected. Findings revealed that there was significant main effect of SBTD on pre-service teachers’ skills acquisition ((F(1, 111) = 74.147, p < .05, ɳp 2 =.444). There was no significant main effect of gender on preservice teachers’ skills acquisition (F(1, 111) = .283, p > .05, ɳp2 =.003). Based on the findings, it was concluded that the students who used SBTD intervention performed better than their counterpart. It was recommended that SBTD programme should be introduced to teaching practice to raise a generation of qualitatively bred teachers in our educational institutions.

Keywords : Pre-Service Teachers, Pedagogical Skills, School-Based Teacher Development Programme