Title: Preservice Teachers' Previous Formal Education Experiences and Visions about their Future Teaching
Abstract: The main purpose of this research is to determine the relationship between candidate teachers' views about their previous educational experiences and visions about their future teaching. A total of 190 preservice teachers from 4 programs of Primary Teaching Department in Education Faculty of �nonu University were taken into the sample. To collect data, a questionnaire developed by the researchers was used. The questionnaire included 68 items related to pedagogical instructional activities. The analysis revealed a significant association between preservice teachers' visions about their future teaching and their views about their previous education experiences but only at primary level. Also, significant differences were found in terms of gender and departments between preservice teachers' views about their previous educational experiences and between their visions of their future teaching. INSTRODUCTION The instructional activities in educational institutions at primary, secondary and higher education stages are centered around teacher, students, and curriculum. Among these three stakeholders of education, teachers' role is especially important. She is the one who actually implements the curriculum in order to process the human raw material. In VarFG's words (1973: 48), is the one who puts the state's educational policy into practice, and affects, in turn, this policy with practical results, and benefits from the researches about specialization in educational and provides problems to these researches as well. Always in close interaction with students, teachers are responsible for making changes in students' behaviors in accordance with Ministry's goals. Given such a critical role, students should be raised at educational faculties accordingly to become effective teachers. Yet, teacher training is a challenging process. While effective teaching can be defined in concrete terms based on the contemporary teaching theories and best practices, it might be highly demanding to have the prospective teachers acquire especially the cognitive and affective behaviors required to become effective teachers. Especially their pre-existing beliefs about teaching can be one of the major obstacles to deal with. In Bandura's words people's behavior is better predicted from their beliefs than from the actual consequences of their actions (as cited in Pajares, 1992). While teacher training process can be regarded as formation of a beliefs system about effective teaching, it may require diagnosing the pre-existing ones first and then modifying them when they do not suit with the effective teaching norms.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 6
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