Session Information
Session 3, Defining the Status of Teacher and School from the Viewpoints of Contextual Factors - Region, Location and School Size
Papers
Time:
2005-09-08
09:00-10:30
Room:
Arts A105
Chair:
Richard Thorpe
Contribution
To pursue common goals people cluster into communities as well as organizations. School is an example of such communities, organizations. Its activity is tied in with educational practice, values and interests of different education stakeholders. In the current world, where the most developed countries are concerned with fostering of the developing of the qualities of the information, knowledge and learning society, underlying attention is paid to education and the most special interest is related to secondary school that should assure "equal start" for all citizens. Since the issues of quality of secondary school and effectiveness of its educational performance are getting more and more relevant, the problem of school activity evaluation comes out. The following five groups of educational stakeholders have been most frequently analyzed: pupils, parents, teachers, school principals, society representatives including education policy makers. All of them express their specific opinions related to school organization and its performance. Different countries own unique traditions, social perceptions, understanding of learning and knowledge as value, life quality. Influenced by unique sociocultural context, each stakeholder group has its own attitudes on education and its opinion what is "a good school". Increasingly it is perceived, that one single answer cannot be expected, there are many of them, probably as many as the number of educational stakeholders. Many scholars approach this problem in their studies on evaluation of secondary school performance, namely, Barnet (1990); McLaughlin (1997); Fink (1998); Fullan (1998); Juceviciene (2001); Malik (2005) and others. The works of these scholars help concentrate on the following research problem: on what conditions different education stakeholders (pupils, parents, teachers, school principals, society representatives including education policy makers) with regard to their interests could come to agreement on their understanding what is "a good school"? Is it possible in a democratic society to have a single solution of some particular group of stakeholders how to evaluate school quality and effectiveness? If not - then, what are the differences among evaluations? Is consensus possible? Naturally, the context of the problem, namely, conditions and situations of a particular country should be concerned. Thus, the research problem in this study will be concentrated on the country that just has joined the EU and still is the process of social transition. Lithuania may be a good example. The aim of the paper is to estimate similarities and differences of the attitudes of education stakeholders on school and its performance ("what is a good school?"). The paper presents empirical research, performed in 2001-2002 in Lithuania. In total 1450 respondents from different stakeholders' groups were questioned. SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) software programme was applied to process the data. Also, the results of additional inquiry (2004) are presented about how different education subjects (pupils and teachers) evaluate implementation of active teaching methods in educational process and how this influences evaluation of school performance of good school, defined by various education stakeholders, are defined by five characteristics and their criteria. The paper discloses three groups of education stakeholders that hold sufficiently autonomous positions on school evaluation, namely, pupils and parents as users of educational services; teachers and school principals as service providers and education politicians and society representatives as policy makers of educational service. It is defined, that pupils and parents highlight learning results, teachers emphasize the process of teaching and learning, schools principals and education politicians accentuate school culture and management. Further, the paper discloses various reasons for diversity of different attitudes among education stakeholders on evaluation of school performance.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.