Session Information
01 SES 13 B, From Novice Teachers to Lifelong Learners. Teachers Reflection on Challenging Moments.
Symposium
Contribution
The background for this study was to develop an understanding for how teachers in a lower secondary school handle bumpy moments, and where they perceive they get help to cope with these situations. Three teachers with experience from five to nine years were taking part in semi-structured interviews (Kvale & Brinkman, 2009). Before the interviews and before they started to write log book entries for fourteen days to document these situations as they turned up during their work in school, they were told that bumpy moments were unforeseen situations they perceived as difficult during their practice. The study shows that the teachers have various experiences they perceive as difficult to handle, and that these situations are related to what experiences the teachers have before they started as teachers and to what their values and beliefs are. The study also shows that there are common situations that all the three teachers perceive as difficult. These are: situations where they experience that pupils do not perceive mastery, situation where they find it difficult to adapt the teaching to each and every pupil and situations where they are to handle expectations from parents. It becomes evident from the analyses of the data material conducted by using the constant comparative method (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) that the teachers think that good relations between teachers and pupils and between pupils and thus a trustful learning environment is a good fundament for being able to handle bumpy moments. They also agree on that sharing experiences and solving problems together helps them to handle difficult situations. They do not think that their basic education is relevant in this connection, but they emphasize that further education taken either at campus or at the school as the learning arena help them in their daily practice when confronting bumpy moments.
References
Kvale, S., & Brinkmann, S. (2009). Det kvalitative forskningsintervju. [The qualitative research interview]. Oslo: Gyldendal akademisk. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
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.