Klaas van Veen

How does it feel? Teachers' emotions in a context of change

This exploratory study examines how teachers perceive their work within the current context of educational reform. A cognitive social‐psychological approach to emotions offers the theoretical framework for understanding what teachers have at stake within the context of the reforms. Six Dutch secondary school teachers with strongly differing professional orientations were interviewed. The results show the ways in which teachers appraise the relations between their professional orientations and the situational demands they face.

Professional orientations of secondary school teachers towards their work

Against a background of current reforms which involve a diversity of strong expectations with regard to how teachers should work, this study explores how teachers themselves view their professionality. Four hundred and fifty two secondary school teachers were asked about their professional orientations. Teachers were found to differ in their orientations and in the combinations of their orientations towards instruction, educational goals, and their role in the school organization. These findings are relevant to consider in the light of successful reform of schools and education. The article ends with a reflection on those combinations of orientations, and suggestions for future research into professional orientations are made.

Teachers’ Emotions in a Context of Reforms: To a Deeper Understanding of Teachers and Reforms

We begin our chapter by reviewing studies of teachers’ emotions in relation to reforms. We examine different theoretical perspectives and methods and elaborate on the strengths and weaknesses of this relatively new field of research, adopting a social-psychological approach to emotions. We argue that this field is still in need of a coherent conceptual framework for adequately understanding teachers’ emotions. Our central assumption is that reforms strongly affect teachers’ emotions due to divergent reasons, varying from feeling insecure and threatened, to feeling reinforced and enthusiastic. What those studies into teachers’ emotions show in general is that most reforms affect teachers’ professional sense of self or identity; teachers feel their core beliefs and assumptions are at stake. At a deeper level, teachers often feel that they are not recognized as professionals, rather as employees or executors of the ideas of others. We also attempt to provide an overview of the potential issues at stake for teachers in the contexts of reforms, referring to the content, process of implementation, and teachers’ agency

Looking for cohesion: the role of search for meaning in the interaction between teacher and reform

Teachers’ reactions to reforms are often perceived in terms of agreement or resistance. In this article, an alternative is explored. More specifically, the interaction between teachers and reforms within the school are explored in order to gain greater insight into the manner in which teachers make sense of the reforms confronting them: How do teachers relate their own frames of reference to the perceived frames of reference of the reforms. Based upon the relevant literature, four forms of search for meaning are distinguished: assimilation, accommodation, toleration and distantiation. The reform stories of four teachers are analysed in particular to show how different forms of search for meaning are employed and the role that this can play in the implementation of the reform. The results indeed show teachers to use different forms of search for meaning to construct a workable relationship between their own frame of reference and the perceived frames of reference of the reforms. The role of such search for meaning is to maintain a balance between continuity and change in the work of the teacher and a balance between pressure to reform and professional autonomy.

Exploring the relation between teachers’ perceptions of workplace conditions and their professional learning goals

Schools’ structural workplace conditions (e.g. learning resources and professional development policies) and cultural workplace conditions (e.g. school leadership, teachers’ collaborative culture) have been found to affect the way teachers learn. It is not so much the objective conditions that support or impede professional learning but the way teachers perceive those workplace conditions that influence teachers’ learning. Not much is known, however, about how teachers’ perceptions relate to the way they direct their own learning. Using a sense-making approach, we explored how four teachers’ perceptions of cultural and structural workplace conditions were related with how they direct their own learning. The four cases were selected from a sample of 31 teachers from two secondary schools, and differed in the extent to which the teachers perceived their workplace as enabling or constraining their learning. We found that the content of teachers’ learning goals is related to their perception of shared vision and professional dialogue in their schools, and driven by individual classroom-based concerns. Furthermore, teachers’ perceptions of cultural workplace conditions and supportive leadership practices seem to be more important influences for teachers’ self-directed learning than their perception of structural conditions.

Defining and Observing Modeling and Simulation in Informatics

Computational Thinking (CT) is gaining a lot of attention in education. In this study we focus on the CT aspect modeling and simulation. We conducted a case study analyzing the projects of 12th grade high school informatics students in which they made models and ran simulations of phenomena from other disciplines. We constructed an analytic framework based on literature about modeling and analyzed students’ project documentation, recordings of student groups at work and during presentations, survey results and interviews with individual students. We examined how to discern the elements of our framework in the students’ work. Moreover, we determined which data sources are suitable for observing students’ learning. Finally, we investigated what difficulties students encounter while working on modeling and simulation projects. Our findings result in an operational definition of modeling and simulation, and provide input for future development of both assessment instruments and instructional strategies.

Pushing Too Little, Praising Too Much? Intercultural Misunderstandings between a Chinese Doctoral Student and a Dutch Supervisor.

Abstract To understand the challenges and their causes in interactions between Western supervisors and international doctoral students, we conducted a self-study of our experiences as a Chinese international student and her Dutch supervisor during her doctoral research project. We found the supervisor and the student to differ in their expectations of the learning goals and procedure for the doctoral program. We analyze three types of misunderstandings, regarding how formal the supervision should be, how feedback and assessment should be provided and understood (e.g. strict versus implicit critiques, open praise for excellence versus praise to encourage), and how the student is expected to learn (e.g. expecting answers versus providing questions, learning from modeling versus learning by trial and error). We also illustrate how implicit these misunderstandings were in daily supervision interactions and how deeply they were rooted in the cultural (i.e. power distance, individualism, masculinity, and indulgence) and educational (i.e. education oriented toward qualification versus personal development, level of competition, and degree of teacher regulation) differences between the supervisor and the student.

Teacher Perceptions of Bologna Reforms in Armenian Higher Education

The perceptions of the implementation of the Bologna reforms in Armenian higher education were examined in a questionnaire study with 279 university teachers, revealing how eight leading higher education institutions have adapted to the political directive to create alignment with the Bologna principles. The literature on educational change is used to evaluate the diffusion of Western European policies in addition to the perceptions of those university teachers who have actually implemented the reforms. The findings highlight the peculiarities of reform implementation in a post-Soviet country and the urgency of revising the approaches to reform implementation to achieve success.

What Do Leaders Think? Reflections on the Implementation of Higher Education Reforms in Armenia

Leader perceptions of higher education reforms in Armenia are examined in order to gain an insight into how they view the reforms, their role in the reforms and the roles of others. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six Armenian higher education leaders and analysed in terms of the following five aspects relevant to leadership: policy transfer and diffusion; change knowledge; emotional intelligence; leadership approach; and causal attribution. The leaders spoke positively about the reform efforts but blamed teachers, government, students and society for the failure of the reform efforts in Armenia. The conclusion is that, irrelevant of whether the change is top-down or bottom-up, it is destined to fail if the change knowledge of the actual implementers is not taken into consideration, an active dialogue does not occur with the actual implementers of the changes and the implements of change are thus not involved in the reform process.

Investigating Informatics Teachers’ Initial Pedagogical Content Knowledge on Modeling and Simulation

Computational science, comprised of modeling and simulation, is a new theme in the new 2019 Dutch secondary education informatics curriculum. To investigate the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) on modeling and simulation, we interviewed ten informatics teachers and analyzed their PCK, distinguishing its four elements - knowledge of goals and objectives, students’ understanding, instructional strategies and assessment - and investigated potential differential features of their PCK in order to typify teachers’ individual PCK. We charted the teachers’ PCK in terms of these four elements and found differential features related to knowledge of goals and objectives and related to knowledge of assessment, dividing these teachers into four distinct groups. However, these differential features do not lead to distinct types of PCK. Our findings will be used to explore the future development of teachers’ PCK and they will contribute to the development of teaching materials, assessment instruments and teacher training courses on modeling.