Sammanfattning
How do teachers think quality? This question is important since the teaching profession seems to be characterized by constant work intensification (Sarfatti-Larson, 1980). Repeated research show a steady increase in the number of tasks teachers are expected to perform (Apple 1989, Faber 1991, Hargreaves 1994, Day 2000, Grundy & Bonser 2000, Sutton 2007, Day & Gu 2007, Aili & Brante 2007, Chang 2009, Steen-Olsen & Eikseth, 2010). Teachers must therefore constantly prioritize between competing tasks and (to the extent they are pursuing quality of teaching) the question that arises is - how do they construct realtions between tasks that are performed before the lesson and the teaching quality.
In this paper we present an explorative study of how teacher formulate themselves about their daily work tasks in relation to the quality of their teaching. 60 teachers were invited to answer a semi structured web-questionnaire about work tasks they had perform during the day, once a day during two weeks. They were asked to choose two tasks that, from their perspective, had impact on the quality of their teaching in the nearest future. In addition to this they were asked to give each task a name, describe its content and under which circumstances it had been performed, and to specify in which way the task had impact on the teaching nearby. The material includes total 325 respectively 12 received questionnaires.
The analysis focus is on teachers’ meaning-making of what quality is, and the relation between the work before teaching and the outcome of the teaching. A grounded content analysis was performed. The seven tasks identified by the teacher teams in the second questionnaire were analyzed in conjunction with a random sample of answers from the individual questionnaire regarding the same tasks. These tasks are labeled by the teachers name for the work task: Work with individual development plans, Planning of next day’s teaching, Planning of thematic work, Planning a school cinema visit, Production of material and Pupils’ choice.
Some categories for the type of quality impact the teachers report have been construed such as for example “Absolute conditions” for links to a work task to the teaching such as the necessity to have ordered the groceries before a lesson in cooking or ordered a bus for the transport to a school cinema visit. Another example is “Quality in a presentation” for links between high concentration works such as putting pedagogical considerations into a specific content. The way the teachers construe the reasons for tasks being important to quality are discussed in relation to earlier research about teachers’ professional language, characterization of teacher work, and teacher thinking.
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Originalspråk | Engelska |
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Status | Publicerad - 2013 |
Evenemang | 16th Biennial Conference on Teachers and Teaching July 1-5, 2013 - Ghent, Belgium - Varaktighet: 1980-jan.-01 → … |
Konferens
Konferens | 16th Biennial Conference on Teachers and Teaching July 1-5, 2013 - Ghent, Belgium |
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Period | 80-01-01 → … |
Nationell ämneskategori
- Pedagogik (50301)