Hamid Ashraf

EFL teachers’ commitment to professional ethics and their emotional intelligence: A relationship study

Abstract Emotional intelligence is the capability to realize, to create, to comprehend emotions and sentimental knowledge, and to reflectively control emotions and to improve emotional and mental growth. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between EFL teachers’ commitment to professional ethics and their emotional intelligence. To collect the data, 357 EFL teachers—selected based on Krejcie and Morgan’s table of sample size (1970)—participated in this research. Validated and reliable scales of assessing emotional intelligence and professional ethics were utilized. In this study, descriptive statistics as well as inferential statistics of each principle was performed. Also, for estimating the results, Pearson Product-moment Correlation analysis was utilized. According to the results, there is a significant positive relationship between 9 and 10 the professional ethics principles especially dual relationship with students principle and emotional intelligence. Since there is an increase in commitment of teachers to professional ethics, their emotional intelligence has increased too.

Continuing Professional Development Strategies: A Model for the Iranian EFL Teachers’ Success

Throughout the past decade, evaluating teachers’ success has become a crucial issue due to the increased motivation on teacher accountability. In view of that the purpose of the present study is to determine EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers’ success in the Iranian institutional context based on students’ perspectives. More specifically, the present study surveyed any significant correlation between teachers’ practices of continuing professional development (CPD) strategies and teachers’ success. For this purpose, a CPD model was suggested and verified using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), to examine CPD factors contributing to EFL teachers’ success. A total of 316 English-major institutional teachers in Iran completed the CPD questionnaire. Besides, about 30% of their students, 828 students, are asked to fill in teachers’ success questionnaire, which intended to check students’ opinions on how successful they measured their teachers in teaching. Findings specified that practice of CPD strategies had a strong direct predicting power on EFL teachers’ success. It was illustrated that “updating” construct strongly affects both “collaborating” and “reflecting.” Moreover, “reflecting” moderately influence “collaborating” and “collaborating” intensely affects “decision making.” The results, specifically, highlight the fact that one to be a successful teacher in the field of EFL should be a good decision maker in the field too.

University Instructors’ Teaching Experience and Their Perception of Professional Ethics: Postulating a Model

As Campbell (2008) skillfully explains, “the field of ethics in teaching as a moral profession is a robust and compelling one. It captures the interest and imagination of scholars, researchers, and practitioners alike because it is very important and integral to the world of education” (p.21). Similarly, in many EFL countries including Iran, professional ethics has recently turned into a crucial topic. Consequently, further researches regarding the notion of ethics, its components and whether experience plays a role in this regard, need to be carried out. Throughout the current article, the researchers, at first place, illustrated the importance of professional ethics in teaching through a thorough review of literature. Afterwards, a previously localized code of professional ethics, which was transformed into a validated instrument for data collection, was deployed to gather data from 200 EFL male and female university instructors. Pearson Correlation was administered to investigate the probable relation between EFL university instructors’ teaching experience and their understanding of professional ethics. Also, to prioritize the components of professional ethics based on EFL instructors’ perspective, Friedman test was deployed and the results are disused according to EFL teaching learning context.

Developing, localizing & validating code of professional ethics through PLS-SEM: EFL university instructors’ perspectives

Abstract “The field of ethics in teaching as a moral profession is a robust and compelling one. It captures the interest and imagination of scholars, researchers, and practitioners alike because it is so very important and integral to the world of education”. For the same purpose, the major aim of the current paper was to come up with a code of professional ethics for the academic context of universities through the available literature and to later on localize (50 EFL, English as a foreign language, university instructor-participants) this code through a semi-structured interview so as to adapt it according to the needs of Iranian English as a foreign-language university instructors. Afterwards, the code was utilized to design an instrument for the aforementioned instructors’ understanding and commitment to professional ethics. Finally, partial least square variance-based structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed to establish the reliability and validity (80 Iranian English language university instructor-participants) of the already designed instrument. The thorough analysis of the literature resulted in 4 major components (commitment to profession, learners, society and organization) for the code along with relevant items for each. The localization process of the code revealed that to Iranian university instructors, only two of the four components of professional ethics stand as crucial (commitment to profession and learners) and there needs to be abundant awareness-raising measures regarding the other two aspects of professional ethics. Overall, this study concerns Iranian English as a foreign-language educators/teachers and the results exhibited that educators display commitment to learners and profession but should become more aware of commitment to organization and society. The availability of the postulated code at universities can be one such measures which also stands as one of the important implications of this research. The instrument also turned out to be reliable and valid and there existed only two items which needed to be eliminated out of the instrument through the validation process.

A Latent Variable Analysis of Continuing Professional Development Constructs Using PLS-SEM Modeling.

Abstract Continuing Professional Development (CPD), in the area of teacher education, refers to the procedures, programs or strategies that help teachers encounter the challenges of their work and accomplish their own and their learning center’s goals. To this aim, the purpose of this study is to propose and validate an appropriate model of EFL teachers’ CPD programs, and more specifically to examine the latent variables of the model to illustrate how and to what extent constructs of CPD explain and interact with each other. A total of 151 Iranian EFL teachers were asked to participate in this survey. The statistical analyses validated a 20-item CPD questionnaire used for measuring teachers’ practices of CPD programs and explicitly specified that the three latent variables “Updating, Collaborating, and Reflecting” moderately explain 67.7% of the variance in “Decision-making” construct of CPD. Moreover, the study’s inner model explained that “Updating” construct has a big significant effect on “Reflecting” construct. Accordingly, “Reflecting” and “Updating” variables were shown to have a strong impact on “Collaborating” variable. Our study’s outcome highlights the need to take into account different constructs in planning and implementing CPD programs, including not only programs relating to reflecting teaching but also those strategies that assist teachers to cooperate with each other, keep themselves up to date and more importantly, help them to be better decision-makers.