Teacher Perspectives and Educational Research Paradigms
The Teachers
Challenges and Perspectives
Teachers often experience guilt and frustration, leading to potential disturbances. Two main types of guilt affect teachers:
Persecutory Guilt: Stems from failing to meet perceived obligations, often pushing teachers to prioritize prescribed content over innovation.
Depression Guilt: Arises from the feeling of inadequacy in meeting students’ needs, often due to limitations in time, patience, or other resources.
These challenges manifest in four specific ways:
Balancing Care and Education: While commitment to student well-being is a source of satisfaction, an imbalance can lead to ineffectiveness and guilt.
The Unending Nature of Education: The continuous demands of teaching can blur the teacher’s role and contribute to guilt.
Accountability and Intensification: Increasing demands and the need to adapt to innovations contribute to persecutory guilt.
The Illusion of Perfectionism: Fear of judgment and the pressure to appear perfect can lead to anxiety and cynicism.
Potential solutions include reducing bureaucracy, balancing care and education, fostering collaboration, and acknowledging the limitations of accountability.
Individualism in Teaching
The architectural design of schools often isolates teachers, hindering collaboration and professional growth. Two interpretations of this individualism are:
Lack of Trust: A psychological characteristic of some teachers.
Job Characteristics: Limited time and resources restrict opportunities for collaboration.
Individualism can be categorized into:
Restricted Individualism: Imposed by administrative limitations like overcrowding or inflexible schedules.
Strategic Individualism: A coping mechanism for daily challenges.
Elected Individualism: A conscious choice to work alone, often related to personal attention, individuality, and the need for solitude.
Collaboration and Artificial Collegiality
Collaboration is spontaneous, voluntary, and flexible, while artificial collegiality is mandated, inflexible, and often linked to administrative requirements. Artificial collegiality can lead to:
Inefficient use of teacher preparation time.
Forced interactions that lack genuine purpose.
Imposed collaboration with incompatible colleagues.
Investigating Teaching Practice
Positivist View
This perspective views curriculum as neutral and objective, focusing on achieving optimal results through scientific methods. The hypothetical-deductive approach involves six steps: observation, recording, description, conceptualization, law formulation, and theory development.
Positivist models include:
Presage-Product Model: Examines the influence of teacher characteristics (e.g., experience) on student outcomes.
Process-Product Model: Seeks to identify effective teaching practices by analyzing teacher behavior and student achievement.
Interpretive View
This approach focuses on understanding the meaning individuals ascribe to educational experiences, exploring beliefs, intentions, and motivations. It emphasizes the subjective nature of reality and examines interactions within the teaching and learning process.
Interpretive models include:
Teacher-Centered Mediational Model: Focuses on teacher thought processes and how they influence decisions.
Learner-Centered Mediational Model: Explores how students perceive and engage with learning tasks.
Integrative Mediational Model: Combines both teacher and learner perspectives.
Ecological Paradigm: Views the classroom as a socio-cultural system with multiple interacting elements.
Critical View
This perspective challenges both positivist and interpretive views, advocating for educational change through active participation of all stakeholders. It emphasizes the emancipatory potential of education and promotes critical reflection and action.
Action research is a cyclical process involving observation, reflection, planning, and action, aimed at improving practice through collaborative inquiry.
Teacher as Researcher
Empowering teachers as researchers requires addressing limitations such as time constraints, resource availability, and research skills. Financial support and professional development can facilitate teacher-led research.
Problems in Teaching
Two key problems in teaching are:
The Problem of Purposes: Defining the ultimate goals of education and aligning external and internal purposes.
The Practical Component: Recognizing the influence of past experiences and institutional culture on current practice.