What is the Worth of a Teacher if Central-European? Effective Teachers in Two Central-European Countries Teaching Low-Status Students

Author(s):

Katinka Bacskai(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

28. Sociologies of Education

Format:

Poster

Session Information

28 SES 04.5 PS, General Poster Session

General Poster Session

Time:

2017-08-23

12:00-13:30

Room:

W4.corridor (Poster Area)

Chair:

Contribution

Researches concerning teachers’ (and school) effectiveness have a history of almost fifty years. Researchers have tried to find answers to questions like when the teacher is effective, what makes this job effective. Most of the researchers agree that teachers’ effectiveness- which means first and foremost the teacher’s influence on students’ academic success- has no clear, easy to grasp indices. While searching for explanations, researches focus on the teacher as an individual in the first place, examining his or her qualifications, experience, methods used, etc (Hanushek et all 1992, 1999; Darling-Hammond 1999, 2000; Monk 1994; Wenglinsky 2000; Sleeter 2008). The other group of researches, which studies school effectiveness, concentrates on the school as a whole, examining everything from infrastructural conditions to learning environments, paying particular attention to the headmaster (Coleman 1966). However, while searching for explanations, only a few researches integrate the following factors into the analysis: the teaching staff as a corporate body, the joint work or its consequent result, the development of pupils and classes as a collective outcome (Hargeraves 1993). As a matter of fact, though, it is impossible to assess the effectiveness of teachers’ work on its own, without context.

Several researches emphasize that the success of primary school pupils is mainly determined by the parental status (Bourdieu 1966; Coleman 1966). Since the sixties some remarkable findings have pointed out that the social composition of schools has a strong influence on students’ performance in many respects. The school composition has also come to the fore in researches concerning teachers’ work and its effectiveness. The English-speaking technical literature refers to the schools examined by us as ’hard-to-staff’ (Castro et al. 2010; Darling-Hammond 2000), ’most challenging schools’ (Rice 2008) or ’at-risk schools’(Castro et al. 2010; Darling-Hammond 2000) too, where the majority of students have worse socio-cultural environs than the average. The expressions also suggest that the teachers have to meet much more challenges here during their work, and it is important to draw a distinction between schools of low-status student composition and average schools.

In this study we relate to the examination of two fields of issues. On the one hand, we explore the features that can make a teacher and a given school dominated by low-status students successful. The success, as we understand it in this study, is that the students are more effective in academic and non-academic aspects than students from schools with similar composition. On the other hand, this study considers a type of international analyses as a model, namely the comparisons based on statistical analyses, as we compare and contrast data and results of Hungarian schools and teachers with features and achievements of Slovakian schools and teachers.

Our explanatory variables are based on the theory of human and social capital. We studied the traditional sources of human capital (qualifications, experience, etc.), but we also studied the various levels of the social capital resources (Coleman 1966, 1988; Robin–Xanglei–Gideon 1999; Brookover 1976, Pusztai 2015). Researches generally lay emphasis on teacher-student relationship out of the resources of social capital. We also dealt with it concerning both structural aspect and content. A less frequently examined resource of capital is the intra-generational group of capital resources based on the teacher-teacher system of relationships (Ruus et al 2007). We included both its structural features and its content elements in our analysis. The structural side is represented by the indicator based on the frequency of certain joint activities, while the content side is represented by the variables expressing the level of common values.

Method

In this poster the method of contextual statistical analysis was used. Contextual analyses can be applied to out-of- school and in-school conditions. We deal with mainly the latter, and examine the school’s inter-generational and intra-generational systems of relationships. We examine the composition and characteristics of both the teaching staff and the pupils. We approach the entire social characteristics of a school from the social capital and the theory of school climate. The empirical study was actually a secondary analysis of the databases of the 2008 TALIS (Teaching and Learning International Survey), carried out according to a new, individual concept. TALIS is a research examining the conditions of teaching and learning, which was conducted in spring 2008 by OECD. During the research, teachers and headmasters were asked about their job, methods and working conditions in 23 countries. The survey was conducted at ISCED level 2 in each country, among the teachers teaching at the second stage of basic education (grades 5-8). The sample units were the schools. 20 teachers were interviewed from 150 schools each, so altogether about 3000 people got into the sample per country. In the course of the domestic research, we linked TALIS data to the student data of the 2008 National Assessment of Basic Competencies (NABC) survey, from which we gained outcome variables and background information. Then we formed indicators from these independently. Since there is not a similar survey in Slovakia to our National Assessment of Basic Competencies (NABC), the analysis was carried out there only on the basis of TALIS data. In our thesis we want to focus on teachers who teach in schools where they have to play extended roles, and where the students’ home environment, scale of values are supposed to be left behind the ones appearing in an average school. What stands in the forefront of our interest is the teachers’ characteristics, their work and results in schools characterized by low-status parental composition.

Expected Outcomes

The research has methodological results, namely the variables that we worked out, as firstly, most of them are generated by us, the examination of which has not been common so far. Secondly, the way we treated the rest of the variables went beyond their traditional interpretation. We proved in our research that the teachers in schools characterized by low-status student composition- the number of whom is almost one-fourth of all the teachers in Hungary- are different and struggle with different problems from the teachers in schools with different compositions. In the fight against inefficiency, there are also other factors to help, the effect of which is negligible in institutions where students probably have a more favourable attitude towards school and learning, due to their background. First and foremost, it is extremely important to have a good quality social milieu in school, to have a balanced teacher-teacher and teacher-student relationship. However, in Slovakia with a similar educational system, in schools with similar background, the composition of teachers is different, but the problems they face are still the same. A good social milieu, which makes it possible to transfer cultural and human capital, proves to be efficient means to solve these problems. The basis of this milieu is the system of relationships which acts as an inter-generational social capital resource, and the intra-generational teachers’ resource of capital, which gets less attention, but it is clearly tangible. Given the same conditions, what separates effective and less effective schools of disadvantaged composition is just these characteristics.

References

BOURDIEU, PIERRE 1966. L'école conservatrice: Les inégalités devant l'école et devant la culture. Revue française de sociologie. 7, 3, pp. 325-347 BROOKOVER, WILBUR B. ET AL. 1978. Elemntary School Social Climate and School Achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 15, 2, 301–318. CASTRO, A. J. – KELLY, J. – SHIH, M. 2010. Resilience strategies for new teachers in high-needs areas. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26, 3, pp. 622–629. COLEMAN, J. S. 1988. Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 95–120. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2780243 DARLING-HAMMOND, L. 2000. Teacher Quality and Student Achievement. A review of State Policy Evidence. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 8, 1, pp.1–46. http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/392/515 DARLING-HAMMOND, L. 1999. State Teaching Policies and Student Achievement. Teaching Quality Policy Brief, Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, University of Washington. http://depts.washington.edu/ctpmail/PDFs/Brief_two.pdf HANUSHEK, E. A. – KAIN, J. F. – RIVKIN S.J. 1999. Do Higher Salaries Buy Better Teachers? Working Paper No 7082, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA. http://www.nber.org/papers/w7082.pdf HARGREAVES, A. 1993. Changing Teachers: Changing Times: Teachers’ Work and Culture in the Postmodern Age. Cassell, London. MONK, D. H. 1994. Subject Area Preparation of Secondary Mathematics and Science Teachers and Student Achievement. Economics of Education Review, 13, 2, pp. 125–145. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0272775794900035 PUSZTAI G : Pathways to success in higher education, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag, 278 p. (Higher Education Reserch and Policy; 7.) RICE, S. 2008. Getting good teachers into challenging schools. Curriculum Leadership, 6, 14, pp.1–3. ROBIN R. HENKE – XIANGLEI CH. – GIDEON G. 1999. What Happens in Classrooms? Instructional Practices in Elementary and Secondary Schools, 1994–95, U.S. Department of Education, NCES 1999, 348, Washington, D.C. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs99/1999348.pdf RUUS, VIIVE-RIINA ET AL. 2007. Students’ Well-beeing, Coping, Academic Succes, and School Climate. Social Behavior and Personality, 7, 35, 919–936. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/sbp/sbp/2007/00000035/00000007/art00007 SLATER, HELEN – DAVIES, NEIL M. – BURGESS, SIMON 2011. Do Teachers Matter? Measuring the variation in teacher effectiveness in England; Centre for Market and Public Organisation Working Paper http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0084.2011.00666.x/full WENGLINSKY, H. 2000. How Teaching Matters: Bringing the Classroom Back Into Discussions of Teacher Quality. Policy Information Center Report, October, Educational Testing Service. http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/PICTEAMAT.pdf

Author Information

Katinka Bacskai (presenting / submitting)

University of Debrecen

Institute of Educational Studies and Cultural Management

Debrecen

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