The encountered problems of educational projects prepared and implemented by teachers and school managers in terms of project cycle management (The sample of Elazığ)

As a concept, organization can be defined as a construction which holds communication and coordination among its members together; reserves conciliation, concordance and control conditions as a whole. In order to survive, organizations need to change and develop according to the time requires. Schools are the most important organizations for the development, progression and welfare of the societies. As being organizations, schools have also been improved so as to meet the needs of current age; education and training approaches have exposed to radical changes in the light of modern theories. While a lot of innovation have been occurring during the school improvement procedure; educational projects prepared by school managers, teachers and students have gained importance for the cognitive, emotional and academic contributions they have. Nowadays, it is known that project cycle management has to be benefitted in order to implement educational projects systematically, which are widely used in educational areas. Project cycle management is a conducting system which helps to reach project aims and goals effectively and productively planning project preparation, implementation and evaluation processes. Project cycle management contains definition the project idea, formulation the text, pre- evaluation, allocation of budget, implementation of the project activities and final evaluation. School managers and teachers who do not own professional adequacies about project cycle management encounter with different difficulties during the project preparation and implementation processes. These problems cause frustration among educators and decrease in the number of educational projects. The aim of the research is to classify the problems of school managers and teachers working in the educational organizations in Elazığ during the project preparation and implementation processes according to the project cycle management stages and to find solutions for these problems. By this way, it is believed that educational projects will be prepared more systematically and professionally developing "project cycle management" awareness among educational organizations across our city and country. The study was carried out according to the survey method that is one of the qualitative research techniques. As data collection tool, semi-structured interview form created by the researcher was used. The sample group of the study consisted of 50 school managers and teachers who worked in different grades of educational organizations in Elazığ. During the data analysis process, the answers of the sample group for the questions in the interview form were subjected to content analysis; frequencies and percentages were calculated. The results of the study indicate that: (1) The processes of project preparation and implementation gain experience, support cooperation among colleagues and students. (2) The most frequently encountered problems during the stage of finding project ideas are defining original subjects and doubting on whether the subjects are functional or not. (3) In the project formulation stage, there may occur some problems deriving from not having adequate information about project techniques. (4) Pre- evaluation is the unique stage that each participant has not any problems. (5) The most frequently encountered problem during the financial support derives from the inadequacies of sources. (6) There are some problems of material inadequacies and not having cooperation during the stage of project implementation. (7) While many of the participants declared they did not have any problems during project evaluation; the participants declared having problem during that stage believe that the evaluation processes are not executed objectively. (8) A great number of the participants declared that educators need to get detailed training on projects in order to solve the problems encountered during project preparation and evaluation processes. Key Words: School Development, Educational Projects, Project Cycle Management