Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemBeing an effective teacher: what do teachers in different contexts conceptualise? A contextualised study for improving teacher effectiveness( 2021)Effective teachers achieve far more in terms of student outcomes than do less-effective teachers. There are educational, social and economic reasons as to why high learning outcomes for students are needed system-wide, and effective teachers are necessary for the success of endeavours to improve educational systems. System-wide efforts to improve overall teacher effectiveness, however, have had only limited success, and school-level effects emerge as important. The work of teachers in schools is multifaceted and complex, and there are subsequent complexities in considerations of teacher effectiveness and ways to improve it. Research has identified that individual attributes of teachers and school-level, environmental factors impact upon the effectiveness of teachers. Further knowledge and shared understanding of how teachers can become more effective, individually and collectively, continue to prove necessary. There is little research into how teachers and school leaders conceptualise being an effective teacher in their own working context, and what enables their effective work, and what impedes it. This qualitative study investigated the ways practising secondary school teachers and school leaders conceptualised being an effective teacher in the environment in which they worked. Contextualised enablers of teacher effectiveness and impediments to teacher effectiveness were also explored. A multiple case study of three schools was designed. Participant schools were purposively selected to provide substantial contextual variation – one government school, one Catholic school, and one independent school were each a case explored. Five-to-six voluntary participants in each school were selected, each one a practising teacher, or a school leader who also had an active teaching role. Semi-structured individual interviews were utilised to produced rich, contextualised data on the attributes, knowledge, and behaviours necessary to be effective as a teacher at the school. Data evidenced that teachers’ own conceptualisations of being an effective teacher aligned with established research, yet with notable contextual variation in some emphases in the descriptions. Participants described detailed, contextualised knowledge of their working environment and what they understood was enabling effective work by the teachers at their school, and what impeded effective work. Contextualised collective teacher efficacy and the impact of a school ethos were evidenced to enable teacher effectiveness. Unintegrated, time-intensive managerial and policy directives impeded teacher effectiveness.
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ItemExamining Multiple Dimensions of Teacher Quality: Attributes, Beliefs, Behaviours, and Students' Perceptions of Effectiveness( 2020)This thesis focuses on the structure and relatedness of multiple dimensions of teacher quality. Specifically, two studies are presented as to how critical teachers’ beliefs are as a dimension of teacher quality in relation to teachers’ non-academic competencies, their observed practices in the classroom, and their students’ perceptions of effectiveness. The first study aimed to determine how various types of teachers’ beliefs empirically linked to quality teaching and learning relate to teach other, and whether these beliefs could be reduced into a set of higher-order teacher beliefs, utilising confirmatory and exploratory factory analysis. Primary and high school teachers in Victorian government schools (n = 663) completed an extensive teacher beliefs questionnaire that examined pedagogical beliefs, motivational beliefs, and beliefs about students. The second study aimed to explore the relationships between teachers’ non-academic capabilities their beliefs and measures of quality teaching. Participants and alumni from the Teach For Australia program, all current high school teachers (n = 68), completed a revised form of the teacher beliefs questionnaire from the first study and had their selection data for Teach for Australia accessed. They also utilised the Visible Classroom tool to audio-record multiple teaching episodes and administered the Tripod student perception survey anonymously to their students. Data from these four measures were examined through a combination of quantitative methods, including factor analysis, structural equation modelling, and hierarchical cluster analysis. Three higher order beliefs were identified: social/deep beliefs focusing on education for the purpose of improving society and/or addressing the needs, relationships, and support of individual students; surface/fixed beliefs, which combined the characteristics of fixed mindset in tandem with surface views of teaching and learning; and personal utility purposes for choosing to teach. Many types of teachers’ beliefs failed to predict their use of quality teaching practices or students’ perceptions of teaching, although self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation, beliefs about assessment, and surface/fixed beliefs were important exceptions. Teachers’ non-academic competencies assessed prior to becoming a teacher generally failed to predict their quality of teaching, even within the first 1-2 years of commencement of teaching. More frequent use of empirically supported instructional practices related to delivery of instruction predicted better student perceptions of teaching, while at the same time more frequent use of empirically supported instructional practices related to directing students and correcting both academic work and student behaviour predicted poorer student perceptions of teaching. Student perceptions of teaching primarily clustered into two categories, perceptions of the quality of student behaviour in the classroom, and of their teachers’ general instructional capability, at odds with prior research arguing that student perception surveys measure an array of key aspects of quality teaching. A profile of teacher quality emerged, which involved active, teacher-led instruction with a high ratio of explicit instructional practices to directing and corrective practices, with high levels of student satisfaction of quality of teaching, underpinned by pro-assessment beliefs and the strong rejection of surface/fixed beliefs. The research confirms what previous conceptualisations of teacher quality include a combination of inputs (such as beliefs), processes (quality teaching practices) and products (student outcomes, student perceptions, etc.) and that the process of teacher quality is not only multi-faceted, but multi-staged. The research also illustrates the benefits of utilising multiple measures or sources of feedback in efforts to improve teacher quality. There is an opportunity to improve teacher quality in policy, teacher education and teacher professional learning that emphases active teaching and a core set of high leverage practices that such teachers regularly employ, underpinned by a small but critical set of beliefs that support best practice. Attending to particular types of teacher beliefs may be essential to catalysing teacher change. The results of the dissertation call for further research drawing together teacher quality and teacher beliefs, with particular emphasis on multidimensional models, an effort that will ultimately serve to paint a fuller picture of what is meant by quality teaching, which in turn will fuel efforts to continuously improve it.