Job Demand Appraisals of Beginning Teachers – the Impact of Contextual and Individual Factors

Author(s):

Manuela B. Keller-Schneider(presenting / submitting)Jasper Maas Uwe Hericks Elif Arslan

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 07 D, The Role of Pre-service and Beginning Teachers in Diverse Contexts

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-23

17:15-18:45

Room:

K5.07

Chair:

Marianne Maugesten

Contribution

In the important phase of career entry, teachers are challenged by new requirements, caused by experiencing the new role as a fully responsible teacher (Veenman, 1984; Berliner ,2001; Tynjälä & Heikkinen, 2011; Ingersoll, 2012). During pre-service education student teachers explore and train their teaching abilities and build up competences, with which they enter their career as a teacher. But the dynamic of the requirements of an entire school day is more complex than they could expect, based on their experience in pre-service education (Keller-Schneider & Hericks, 2014).

Beginning teachers are challenged to cope with the requirements of their first years of teaching. According to the empirical studies of Hericks (2006) and Keller-Schneider (2010) requirements of career entry phase can be described in four main tasks: (1) Role-taking, (2) Teaching relted to the students’ individual needs, (3) classroom management to build up a learning atmosphere, (4) becoming a staff member and cooperate with other professionals. Beginning teachers are challenged to deal with these four main tasks in their new position as a fully responsible teacher.

Based on the transactional model of stress and coping (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), individual’s appraisal of job demands is crucial. Based on primary and secondary appraisals of the relevance of the demand and the sense of competence to deal with them, beginning teachers are challenged to cope with these requirements. Individual preferences and factors of the context shape the perception of the requirements. In the present study the perception of requirements of beginning teachers from two countries and two school types will be investigated.

The following questions will be examined:

1) How do beginning teachers perceive these requirements with regard on its relevance, the sense of competence and the challenge, to master them? Which differences between teachers of the different countries and different school types can be identified?

2) How are the relations between the relevance, the sense of competence and the challenge, to master these requirements? Which task specific characteristics interplay can be identified? How does school-type or country matters?

Method

Method: To investigate these questions data from a binational study on beginning teachers from Germany and Switzerland were used. 822 beginning teachers from primary and secondary school answered the questionnaire (2x2 group design). The instrument of job demands of Keller-Schneider (2010) was used. The beginning teachers were asked to assess their perceptions of 80 job demands according to three dimensions of perception: relevance of the demand, the sense of competence to deal with them and the challenge they feel. By explorative and confirmatory factor analyzes the model on the four main task of career entry phase could be replicated. The four scales are: Role-finding (1), teaching related students’ individual need (2), classroom management to build up a learning atmosphere (3) and becoming am staff member and cooperate with other professionals at school (4). By multivariate (four scales of job demands) and multifactorial (2 countries, 2 school types) variance analyzes differences between the perceptions of beginning teachers from the two countries and the two school types were proved. The task specific effects of the perception of the relevance and the sense of competence on challenge will be analyzed by regression analyzes.

Expected Outcomes

Results show, that concerning the task of role finding (1) the beginning teachers of different countries and school type do not differ in their perception of challenge and relevance, but with focus on the sense of competence, Swiss teachers feel less competent than German teachers. In the perception of the task of teaching according individual students’ need (2) teachers of secondary school perceive the relevance, the challenge and the sense of competence lower that the teachers of primary school. Concerning classroom management to build up a learning atmosphere (3) an effect of the school type is identified: teachers of the secondary level perceive this task as less relevant and less challenging, but they feel as competent as the primary teachers. Concerning the task becoming a staff member and cooperate with other professionals at school (4) there is no difference between the four groups with focus on the relevance of, but concerning challenge and sense of competence, there are differences: Swiss beginning teachers feel less competent and more challenged than German ones. Results of the regression analyzes of relevance and sense of competence on challenge show a positive effect of relevance and a negative one of the sense of competence. The effects differ per task. In role-finding (1) and classroom management (3) the beta effects per group are similar, but concerning teaching according individual students’ needs (2) and becoming a staff member (4) there are differences between the four groups. School-type and country matters. The results show, that beginning teachers are challenged by new requirements, but the perceptions of challenge are influenced by the relevance and the sense of competence. Country and school type matters. Job appraisals of beginning teachers have to be discussed in relation to context factors, such as the country and/or the school type.

References

Berliner, D.C. (2001). Learning about and Learning from Expert Teachers. International Journal of Education Research, 34, p. 463 - 482. Hericks, U. (2006). Professionalisierung als Entwicklungsaufgabe. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Ingersoll, R. (2012). Beginning teacher induction: What the data tell us. Phi Delta Kappan, 93, 47-51. Keller-Schneider, M. (2010). Entwicklungsaufgaben im Berufseinstieg von Lehrpersonen. Beanspruchung durch berufliche Herausforderungen im Zusammenhang mit Kontext- und Persönlichkeitsmerkmalen. Münster: Waxmann. Keller-Schneider, M. & Hericks, U. (2014). Forschungen zum Berufseinstieg. Übergang von der Ausbildung in den Beruf. In: E. Terhart, H. Bennewitz & M. Rothland. Handbuch der Forschung zum Lehrerberuf, S. 386-407. Münster: Waxmann. Tynjälä, P., & Heikkinen, H. L. (2011). Beginning teachers’ transition from pre--service education to working life. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 14 (1), 11--33. Veenman, S. (1984). Perceived Problems of Beginning Teachers. Review of Educational Research. Jg. 54, 1984 H2, S. 143-178.

Author Information

Manuela B. Keller-Schneider (presenting / submitting)

Zurich University of Teacher Education

Frau

Zurich

Jasper Maas

Zurich University of Teacher Education, Switzerland

Uwe Hericks

University of Marburg

Elif Arslan