In a previous study by our research group, parents and teachers of gifted children disagreed about the importance of group work in the inquiry-based classroom, with parents rating group work as less important than did teachers (Syer & Shore, 2001). The purpose of the present study was to attempt to understand this difference of opinion. Parents (n = 15), teachers (n = 11), and a group who were both parents and teachers (n = 5) of gifted children responded to a researcher-designed telephone interview. Teachers perceived parents as competitive and grade-oriented. Parents themselves, however, reported that their opinions of group work were based on their children's negative experiences. Teachers reported that their opinions were affected by their pedagogical knowledge regarding group work. Although parents' and teachers' opinions differed, they were aware of each other's point of view.

As spirituality first appeared in Australian curriculum documents in 1994, it was important to establish how educators thought it related to student well- being. In this research a description and four accounts of spirituality - spiritual rationalism, monism, dualism, and multidimensional unity - were developed from available literature. The literature also revealed four sets of relationships important to spiritual well-being. These were the relationships of a person with themself, others, environment, and Transcendent Other. / The model of spiritual health proposed here claims that these four sets of relationships can be developed in corresponding Personal, Communal, Environmental and Global domains of human existence, each of which has two aspects - knowledge and inspiration. Progressive synergism describes the inter-relationship between the four domains. / The quality of relationships in the four domains constitutes , spiritual well-being in each domain. Spiritual health is indicated by the combined effect of spiritual well-being in each of the domains embraced by a person. / The principles of grounded theory qualitative research methodology were used to investigate the views of 98 teachers from a variety of schools near Melbourne. Feedback from 23 Australian experts, on the researcher’s definitions, is discussed. / To encompass all the teachers’ views of spiritual health, to the initial categories of Personalist, Communalist, Environmentalist and Globalist, a fifth category was added for the small group Rationalists, who embraced the knowledge, but not the inspiration/transcendent aspects, of the first three domains of spiritual well-being. / All the teachers believed spiritual health should be included in the school curriculum, most rating it of high importance, two-thirds believing it should be integral to the curriculum. The teachers’ major curriculum concerns focussed on Self, Others, the Transcendent, or Wholeness. / Investigation of those teacher characteristics seen as important for promoting spiritual health, with associated hindrances and ideals, showed variation by gender, personal view of spiritual health, major curriculum concern, teacher and school type. Greatest variation was noticed when comparing school type. State school teachers emphasised care for the individual student from a humanistic perspective. Catholic school teachers were concerned for the individual, with religious activities being implemented by dedicated teachers. Other Christian school teachers focussed on corporate, not individualistic, activities, and emphasised relationship with God. Other non-government school teachers emphasised tradition, with attendant moral values. Implications of these variations on school choice are discussed. / Principals’ behaviour, speech and attitude were considered by the teachers to be vital in providing opportunities for spiritual development in schools. / A 30-item Spiritual Health Measure (of Humanistic and Religious Aspects of Spiritual Health) was developed using the researcher’s model of spiritual health and data from 300 UK teachers. / The SHM should be useful as a diagnostic for individuals or groups to provide base data from which to plan enhancement of their spiritual health. / This thesis contains an analysis of how well the Victorian Curriculum & Standards Framework provides guidelines for promoting spiritual health. / A position of responsibility, called Spiritual Facilitator, is proposed to help ensure that the rhetoric about spiritual well-being is put into practice in schools.

A current topic in Swedish schools is the use of computer games and gaming. One reason is because computers are becoming more and more integrated into the schools, and the technology plays a large role in the everyday lives of the pupils. Since teachers should integrate pupils’ interests in the formal teaching, it is of interest to know what attitudes teachers have towards gaming. Therefore the aim of this empirical study is to gain an insight into the attitudes Swedish primary teachers have towards online and offline computer games in the EFL classroom. An additional aim is to investigate to what extent teachers use games. Five interviews were conducted with teachers in different Swedish schools in a small to medium-sized municipality. After the interviews were transcribed, the results were analyzed and discussed in relation to relevant research and the sociocultural theory. The results show that teachers are positive towards games and gaming, mostly because gaming often contains interaction with others and learning from peers is a main component in sociocultural theory. However, only one out of the five participants had at some point used games. The conclusion is that teachers are unsure about how to use games in their teaching and that training and courses in this area would be valuable. More research is needed within this area, and it would be of value to investigate what suggested courses would contain and also to investigate exactly how games can be used in teaching.

This study was conducted in order to understand how Grade 1 teachers teach reading in mother tongue with a focus, firstly, on teacher beliefs and how such beliefs influence teachers’ practice, and secondly, on the methods they use to teach reading. The study was carried out in the Caprivi Region of Namibia. It took the form of an interpretive case study. Three schools were selected for study: one urban, one peri-urban and one rural. The purpose of this sampling was to consider the influence of context on teachers’ practice. The data was gathered by using semi-structured interviews with open ended questions, as well as lesson observations and stimulated recall with the individual teachers after every lesson. This was important in order to have clarity on areas that were not clear during lesson presentations. The key findings are that the teachers I studied taught reading without using books, and there was an absence of shared reading with the learners. Other key findings are: teachers had great love for stories; they had a problem of language, and had no proper understanding of the concept ‘literacy’.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:24:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2007-12-19Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:31:18Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 duarte_rc_me_arafcl.pdf: 1195928 bytes, checksum: d66c828a24adbc887f487d7fe0322019 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Secretaria de Educação / Nesta pesquisa de caráter empírico, procuramos investigar a percepção de 30 professores que atuam nos dois segmentos do Ensino Fundamental e no Ensino Médio da Diretoria de Ensino do Município de São Carlos, sobre o desempenho do Professor Coordenador da Escola Pública do Estado de São Paulo na busca de ações coletivas que possibilitem melhorias na qualidade de ensino, e se essas ações estão relacionadas à existência de práticas democráticas no interior das escolas. A metodologia utilizada se deu com base na análise de documentos oficiais (leis, decretos, resoluções) bem como em diversas obras de análises sobre a Reforma Educacional implantada no Estado de São Paulo na década de 1990 sobre Gestão Democrática Educacional voltada para uma perspectiva de participação colegiada, na literatura que discute a precarização do trabalho docente e na visão sindical sobre o ponto de vista da APEOESP (Sindicato dos Professores do Ensino Oficial do Estado de São Paulo) enfatizando questões sobre salário e jornada de trabalho. Realizamos também uma investigação focalizada, utilizando 11 questões do relatório produzido pela SEE/SARESP/2000, que analisa o perfil do Diretor e do Professor Coordenador na Rede Estadual Paulista, bem como 12 questões por nós elaboradas, todas agrupadas em blocos. Para a coleta dos dados utilizamos dois procedimentos: um questionário com questões fechadas, voltadas para o professor, e outro, com uma questão aberta voltada para os Professores Coordenadores. A análise realizada aponta de ambas as partes um descontentamento em relação à atuação dos Professores Coordenadores em suas escolas, que são percebidos como profissionais frágeis burocráticos e sem uma identidade profissional com seus pares. A curto prazo apresentamos duas propostas voltadas para a melhoria da qualidade de ensino e conseqüentemente para o Professor Coordenador... / This research of empirical character investigates the perception of thirty teachers that act in two stages (elementary and high school) from São Carlos about the Coordinator Teacher´s work of a São Paulo state Public School in the search of collective actions that could improve the quality of teaching and if these actions are related to the existence of democratic practices into these schools. The adopted methodology was used considering official documents (laws, decrees, resolutions) as well as several analysis literature about the Educational Reform introduced in São Paulo state during the 90’s, about Democratic Educational Management turned into a perspective of collective participation and in the literature that discuss the teaching work as being precarious and in APEOESP (trade union of teachers from São Paulo state) point of view emphasizing questions about salary and work period. We have also made an aimed investigation, using eleven questions from the report produced by SEE/SARESP/2000, that analyses the profile of the head teacher and the Coordinator Teacher of a public school, as well, twelve questions elaborated by us, all of them in groups. For the two data collection we have two procedures: a questionnaire with closed questions to the teachers, and another one, with an opened question to the Coordinator Teachers. The analysis that we made shows that there are from both parts a discontent related to the way that Coordinator Teachers act in their schools. They are seen as fragile and bureaucratic teachers and without a professional identity with the other teachers. In a short period we present two ways to improve the teaching quality and with it the Coordinator Teacher will try to rescue his professional identity through yourself and the other ones by means of remodeling the educational meetings as while an important space of discussions about collective educational and in defense of a Political Educational Autonomous Project.

M.Ed.

M.Ed.

M.Ed. (Educational Management) / Mokgalane (Mokone, 1999: 7) asserts that the implementation of the new PPN in 1998 represented different things to different people. For educators affected by the process, it represented a life of uncertainty, possibilities of being shifted from one school to another and a great number of sad stories of an uncertain future in education. However, for educator unions and the government, it represented the opportunity to redress past injustices by equitably and fairly distributing educational human resources. The motivation for the new PPN thus appears to have been political and not based on educational criteria — a situation that would be untenable. Although the implementation of the new PPN had good objectives in principle, namely to provide a fair basis for the staffing of schools to redress the injustices of the past, it directly and indirectly affected the educators' work values, namely security, good working conditions, a reasonable learner-educator ratio, good interpersonal relations, opportunities for advancement, a reasonable work load, the status of the teaching profession, good quality supervision, support by educational authorities, and good mental and physical health. During the implementation of the new PPN, newly appointed educators were appointed on a month-to-month basis, which meant their appointment was temporary. Even permanently appointed educators were not certain about their future in their schools because they could be moved whenever the new PPN indicated that some of them had to be declared in excess and had to be redeployed. In addition workloads had to increase in schools where the number of allocated educator posts decreased. The result of this was that relations between affected educators and principals became strained. Further to this teacher salaries could not increase reasonably because of the emphasis on cutting departmental expenditure. Affected educators felt the Department of Education did not have their interests at heart. All these factors reduced the work satisfaction of educators with the result that many teachers engaged in routinised defensive teaching to compensate for the lack of support, and to avoid criticism and possible termination because they did not have the necessary skills to perform alternative jobs (Steyn & Van Wyk, 1999:39; Weisberg 1994: 125). They were less dependable, less committed and often disloyal to the Department (Byars & Rue, 2000:304). This was indicated by, among other things, high rates of turnover, absenteeism, tardiness, excessive stress, burnout, and late coming among educators.

This study investigated teachers' attitudes towards four specific strands isolated from views propounded in recent literature and research on the teaching of written composition. Much discussion in this field has focused on a "new paradigm" in that educators and researchers alike have come to view writing from a new perspective. Certain aspects of this new perspective on the teaching of writing appear to be shared by various sources in the literature. From this body of writing the researcher identified and isolated four distinct, though interwoven, shared values or "strands." These concerned Control on the part of the student-writer, Respect for what the student-writer has to say in his or her writing, Sharing the writing process, and Learning from writing by using writing as a tool for learning. A questionnaire was constructed to probe teachers' attitudes to each of these strands. Two sample populations, one with a whole-language and one with a non-integrated orientation towards teaching language, were identified. Twenty-five teachers from each population answered a three-part questionnaire. The main body of the survey probed attitudes to each of the strands. T-test results indicate that, while the whole-language oriented group reacted more favorably to all four strands in general, statistically this was highly significant in only two of the strands. That is, CONTROL on the part of the writer, and SHARING the writing process as in a community of writers appeared to be valued more highly amongst teachers with a whole-language orientation. This suggests that there may be a relationship between a whole-language orientation and these two aspects of teaching writing. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

The purpose of this study was to investigate the dilemmas pre-service science teachers encounter in relation to their participation in a project which sought to establish a constructivist and collaborative model of teaching and learning. I also explored the strategies the pre-service teachers implemented to manage the dilemmas they encountered, as well as how they perceived those dilemmas to have influenced their teaching practice and their personal philosophies of teaching and learning (PPoTaL). Since the construct of voice was an important factor in this study, I used a research method that I refer to as intercontext. This method has three major components: stimulated linkage, reflexivity and the dialectical conversation. To enact this research method, I conducted five interviews with each of the six pre-service teachers over the 12-month period of their professional preparation. In addition, I had many informal conversations with them and observed them several times during their university and school practicum experiences. I argued that social constructivism provides a fruitful theoretical framework to interpret the results of this study, because this orientation to teaching and learning is based on the notion that knowledge is socially constructed and mediated by.cultural, historical and institutional codes. In this light, three broad dilemmas were identified in relation to the students' experiences with the teacher education program's course content and design and six dilemmas were identified in relation to the roles the participants felt they needed to perform during their school practicum. The variety of dilemmas the pre-service teachers encountered and the direct and indirect strategies they implemented to manage those dilemmas could be explained in terms of two overarching issues. The first had to do with the difficulties associated with bridging the theory and practice of learning to teach in two distinct communities of practice (i.e., in the university and the school communities). The second general factor had to do with the type of relationship the pre-service teachers established with their school advisor(s) or/and faculty advisor; that is, from the the students' point of view they wondered to what extent they could trust their advisors to allow them to take the risks associated with asking questions, trying innovative approaches in the classroom, and exploring their own teaching identity without any of these reflecting negatively in their final evaluation reports. Finally, a number of suggestions for practice and further research are provided. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate