Teachers’ emotions in the reconstruction of professional self-understanding

This research study explores teachers’ specific emotions and the reconstruction of teachers’ professional self-understanding during a comprehensive school reform initiative. Through interviews and archival material, this study seeks to examine teachers’ specific emotions during critical incidents that occurred during the period of reform and to explore the reconstruction of their professional self-understanding. The findings illustrate that the teachers experienced fear and intimidation when their professional self-understandings were challenged. However, with the support of a literacy coach and university faculty they reconstructed these self-understandings, leading to improvements in student achievement and their own instructional practices. These positive changes led to emotions of pride and excitement. The study provides recommendations for state and local school administrators and highlights implications for future research.     

Exploring School Principals’ Leadership Styles and Learners’ Educational Performance: A Perspective from High- and Low-Performing Schools

School leadership is fundamental to the educational functioning of schools and their improvements of results. The study employed a qualitative approach to explore school principals’ leadership styles and the educational performance of learners in high- and low-performing schools in Vhembe District, Limpopo, South Africa. The participants were purposefully selected from 10 secondary schools in terms of their performance. Focus group interviews were conducted with five teachers from each school. The interview data was transcribed and analysed, and identical patterns of coded data were grouped together under emerging themes. The overall results of the study indicated that the democratic leadership style together with the transformational leadership style contribute to high educational performance of learners. School principals from high- and low-performing schools employ a democratic leadership style and differ only in the sense that the latter are permissive or lenient towards learners’ behaviours or conduct. The study recommends that school principals engage teachers as members of a disciplinary committee in order to deal with those learners whose conduct is not conducive to successful teaching and learning. It is recommended that school principals from low-performing schools strengthen their democratic leadership by not being lenient to learners’ behaviour which is not conducive to successful teaching and learning.     

Administrative support and its mediating effect on US public school teachers

This study examined the effect of administrative support on teachers’ job satisfaction and intent to stay in teaching. The study employed a path analysis to the data of regular, full-time, public school teachers from the Schools and Staffing Survey teacher questionnaire. Administrative support was the most significant predictor of teachers’ job satisfaction, while teachers’ job satisfaction was the most significant predictor of teachers’ intent to stay in teaching. It was also confirmed that administrative support mediates the effect of teaching experience, student behavior, and teachers’ satisfaction with their salary on teachers’ job satisfaction and intent to stay in teaching.     

Teachers’ preferences for educational planning: Dynamic testing,teaching’ experience and teachers’ sense of efficacy

This study surveyed a sample of 188 elementary teachers with respect to their preference for information regarding educational planning, in particular information captured with dynamic testing procedures. The influence of teachers’ experience and sense of efficacy on teachers’ preferences was also investigated. Results indicated teachers’ preferences for dynamically gathered information regarding children’s learning processes, next to standard information such as a diagnosis. Appreciation for dynamic testing information appeared to be relatively higher for those teachers with longer teaching experience, but not related to teachers’ sense of efficacy. Findings are discussed with regard to their implications for both diagnostic and teaching practices.     

Identifying and evaluating teachers’ knowledge in relation to child abuse and neglect: A qualitative study with Australian early childhood teachers

Child abuse and neglect are serious social problems that make extraordinary demands on teachers’ knowledge and professionalism. Yet the field of education has been slow to develop a discipline-specific knowledge base about child abuse and neglect for teachers and teacher education programmes and there is a paucity empirical research into teachers’ knowledge in relation to child abuse and neglect. This paper describes a qualitative study of eight purposively selected early childhood teachers. To identify and evaluate their child abuse and neglect knowledge, Grossman's [(1990). The making of a teacher: Teacher knowledge and teacher education. New York: Teachers College Press; (1995). Teachers’ knowledge. In L. W. Anderson (Ed.), International encyclopedia of teaching and teacher education (2nd ed., pp. 20–24). Tarrytown, NY: Pergamon] typology of teachers’ knowledge is used as an analytic framework on which to map the teachers’ interview data. Findings reveal that, in the absence of preservice and inservice education specifically about child abuse and neglect, early childhood teachers held and deployed knowledge in resourceful ways. They used, as a basis, their existing early childhood knowledge and adapted this knowledge by augmenting it with a range of personal and professional knowledge resources to fit their particular challenges and situations. This approach, however competent and innovative, also reveals shortfalls in knowledge. Implications of this research are drawn for child abuse and neglect curriculum development in initial and continuing teacher education including the case for specialist knowledge needed to establish teachers’ professional reputation for dealing capably with cases of child abuse and neglect.     

Teachers’ discourse during cooperative learning and their perceptions of this pedagogical practice

This article describes the types of discourse seven high school teachers used during cooperative leaning. One classroom lesson where students worked in cooperating groups was audiotaped and fully transcribed for each teacher and a vignette of two of the teachers and one of the groups in his or her room are also provided. The data from the audiotapes showed that the teachers used a range of mediated-learning behaviours that included challenging students’ perspectives, asking cognitive and metacognitive questions, and scaffolding students’ learning. In turn, the students used many of the discourses they heard their teachers use in their interactions with each other. Follow-up interviews of teachers’ perceptions of cooperative learning as a pedagogical practice that had efficacy revealed that they believed it was important to structure the groups (i.e., tasks, composition), teach the appropriate social skills, and present tasks that encouraged students to think critically and reflectively about their learning.     

Achievement goals for teaching and teachers’ reference norms: Relations with instructional practices

This study is connected to recent research that introduced achievement goal theory as a framework for research on teacher motivation. We aimed at investigating teachers’ goals’ indirect effects on their instructional practices through their reference norms. Drawing on a sample of 206 teachers, structural equation modeling revealed that mastery orientation was connected to more adaptive forms of reference norms and instruction, whereas less adaptive patterns were recorded for ability-approach orientation, ability-avoidance orientation, and work avoidance. Thus, school should not only focus on the enhancement of students’ mastery goals but also on fostering teachers’ mastery goals.     

The contribution of action-research to training teachers in intercultural education: A research in the field of Greek minority education

The article describes the framework, the methodology and the results of an educational research in the field of Greek minority education. The aim of the research was to explore whether action-research can help educators from the majority develop empathy for their minority pupils. The schools where the research took place are placed in Thrace, an area of North-Eastern Greece, which borders with Turkey.The research showed that the teachers’ training brought changes in their perceptions and attitudes related to their general ideological beliefs concerning otherness, their professional role and their educational work.     

Predicting intraindividual changes in teacher burnout: The role of perceived school environment and motivational factors

Based on self-determination theory, this study proposes and tests a motivational model of intraindividual changes in teacher burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment). Participants were 806 French-Canadian teachers in public elementary and high schools. Results show that changes in teachers’ perceptions of classroom overload and students’ disruptive behavior are negatively related to changes in autonomous motivation, which in turn negatively predict changes in emotional exhaustion. Results also indicate that changes in teachers’ perceptions of students’ disruptive behaviors and school principal’s leadership behaviors are related to changes in self-efficacy, which in turn negatively predict changes in three burnout components.     

Teachers’ roles in infants’ play and its changing nature in a dynamic group care context

Using a qualitative research approach, this article explores teachers’ roles in infants’ play and its changing nature in an infant group care setting. Three infant teachers in a child care center were followed over three months. Observations, interviews, ongoing conversations, emails, and reflective notes were used as data sources. Findings revealed that the teachers took on various roles: observer, play follower/play partner, facilitator, commentator/interpreter, play supporter, play leader, play interrupter, safety/conflict manager, multiple-responder, and multiple-role taker. The nature of the teachers’ roles developed and changed over time in relation to the infants’ rapid growth, group dynamics, and infant–teacher relationships. This study suggests that infant teachers’ practice is complex, changing, and developmental as the group care context is dynamic and multilayered.     

Exploring teacher trust in technical/vocational secondary schools: Male teachers’ preference for girls

This article explores whether teachers’ trust in pupils in technical/vocational schools is associated with teachers’ and pupils’ gender. As for the teachers, besides gender, age, socioeconomic origin, and subject taught are considered and, as for the pupils, the gender composition of the school (proportion of girls at school), the socioeconomic context of the school and the grades teachers instruct. Multilevel analyses of data of 391 teachers in a sample of 19 technical/vocational schools demonstrate that initially none of the teacher features relates to teacher trust. Adding gender composition to the model yields an effect of teachers’ gender: Female teachers have less trust in their pupils than male teachers have. Also, teachers’ trust increases with the proportion of girls at school. Finally, a significant interaction effect indicates that male teachers seem to prefer female pupils.     

Safety in Science Classrooms: What Research and Best Practice Say

Turnaround leadership concerns the kind of leadership needed for turning around a persistently low-performing school to one that is performing acceptably as measured by student achievement according to state tests. I first treat this question in the narrow sense, i.e., as a strategy for targeting low-performing schools, and then place it in a larger context—namely, how such turnaround can be part of an overall approach to sustainable system change. The sequence I will consider moves from the school to the district to the system as a whole. My conclusion, which I state upfront, is that what looks like apparent success in turning around schools is actually quite superficial and indeed illusory.     

Discursively complex identities of New Zealand teachers of writing in times of contestation and change

Changes in political, social and educational curriculum policies over the past four decades have created discursive shifts in writing theory and practice for New Zealand primary teachers. While these policies have historically privileged a particular view of writing over others, very little is known as to how teachers engage with experienced discourses of writing.Three broad conceptual metaphors, taking a ‘writer’, ‘text’ and ‘social’ perspective, frame the writing theories and practices and provide a context for the development of heuristic markers used to analyse the teachers’ interviews. Discourse analysis revealed teachers’ complex identities and knowledge or lack of, available writing discourses.     

Changing roles in sustaining successful charter school leadership in high poverty schools: Voices from the field

Effective educational leadership is essential for the success of schools and ultimately student achievement. The impact of school leadership may be even more pronounced in charter schools. Due to current and unprecedented growth, unique design, and complexities of political, financial, and governance issues they face, there is a need for more highly qualified charter school leaders and perhaps even “differently” prepared leaders. In this qualitative study, the authors documented the characteristics and skills of two successful, sustained charter school leaders who retrospectively described their evolved and evolving roles over twenty five years. Each transformed high-poverty, low-performing schools with at-risk populations and led with vision, passion, and a relentless desire to positively influence their organizations and ultimately improve student success in their communities. Although many of their skills and characteristics fall within existing theories, such as situational leadership, transformational leadership, and distributive leadership, they embodied a level of dedication and commitment to the original communities in which they founded charters lasting over a quarter of a century. The findings suggest that founding a charter school and seeing it through to success over time may more closely resemble missionary work than traditional school leadership.     

Improving commitment to basic education for the minorities in Botswana: A challenge for policy and practice

This paper is part of a study that assessed the level of commitment of primary schools of remote area dwellers (RADs) to basic education between October 2004 and April 2005. The research question focused on the level of commitment of schools to universal basic education, school–community partnership in school governance and parental involvement in the way the curriculum was delivered. Questionnaire and interviews were used. The results show a significant relationship between teachers’ perceptions and variables such as district, qualifications, age, location, and experience. There is consistency between teachers’ perceptions and children's academic performance. It has been found that learner achievement in RADs schools is low and that parents are not actively involved in their children's education due to the policy environment and school management practices.     

Teacher-perceived principal leadership styles,decision-making styles and job satisfaction: how congruent are data from Indonesia with the Anglophile and Western literature?

School leadership is seen as important for both schools and for government and private policy-makers. The relationships between teacher-perceived principal leadership styles, teacher-perceived principal decision-making styles and teacher-perceived job satisfaction in schools in Lampung Province, Indonesia were examined. Data were collected by questionnaires from 475 teachers. This paper uses Indonesian data, but the relationships studied will be of wider interest to school stakeholders in Indonesia and to a wider global readership. Considerable effort was placed on the collection of robust data to address existing gaps in the literature about these relationships. The data are available to be shared with other interested parties. Findings suggest that five variables (of the nine variables that were studied) can significantly (p?相似文献   

How teachers’ values affect their evaluation of children of immigrants: Findings from Islamic and public schools

This study examines the implications of how teachers’ views of immigrant parents predict their ratings of first-grade students’ academic competence and behavioral problems. Teachers rated 191 first-grade immigrant students attending Islamic and public schools in the Northeast United States. The results showed that when teachers perceived parents as having discrepant value differences, they rated students more negatively both in terms of academic competence and behavioral problems, even after controlling for student gender and ethnicity, parental education and parental school involvement. Surprisingly, teachers in Islamic and public schools did not differ in their perceived value differences with parents. The type of school students attend, however, moderated the effects of teachers’ perceived value differences on their academic ratings, but not on their behavioral ratings. While both Islamic and public school teachers rated students’ academic competence equally high when they perceived little or no value differences with parents, public school teachers held lower academic expectations than Islamic school teachers with increased value differences. These findings suggest a mechanism by which children from immigrant families enter a path of diminished expectations, albeit through slightly different levels in Islamic and public school settings.     

Guided work-based learning: Sharing practical teaching knowledge with student teachers

Building quality work-based learning opportunities for student teachers is a challenge for schools in school-university partnerships. This study focused on the guidance of student teachers by means of a mentoring approach aimed at sharing practical knowledge, with student teachers’ learning needs as an emphasis. The approach was built on collaborative lesson planning, enactment, and evaluation.The study followed three triads (student teacher, mentor, school-based teacher educator) and examined participants’ appreciation of the effectiveness of the approach and their perception of relevant conditions. The approach was considered effective: deeper conversations appeared and new issues emerged earlier than in regular mentoring conversations.