Paul William Richardson

Current and future directions in teacher motivation research

Educational psychologists have, over the last half century or so, directed their attention to the study of student motivation. While teachers have not entirely been ignored, there has been little inquiry into teacher motivation that has been systematic and theory-driven. The concentration on students has tended to overlook the centrality of teacher motivations as integral to teachers’ goals, beliefs, perceptions, aspirations, and behaviours, and thereby to student motivations and learning. It is perhaps not surprising that those motivation researchers who have developed robust theories in relation to student learning in educational contexts would begin to turn their attention to teachers, to see whether those same theories might have explanatory power with regard to teacher motivations. Teacher self-efficacy research (e.g., Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2007; Woolfolk Hoy & Burke-Spero, 2005) has made important contributions to the study of teachers. Motivation researchers are now beginning to turn their attention to other aspects of the complex of motivational factors which demand greater attention and exploration. Robust theoretical frameworks already exist in the motivation literature, which can be applied to guide future research in this area. There has recently been a surge of interest, or what we have elsewhere described as a “Zeitgeist” (Watt & Richardson, 2008a) in applying well-developed theories in motivation research, to the domain of teaching.

Reading and Writing from Textbooks in Higher Education: A Case Study from Economics.

Reading and writing at university is infused by the cultural context of a particular discipline or field so that academic literacies are located, described, interpreted and studied in disciplinary contexts. This study explores the roles and functions textbooks have in the disciplinary culture of Economics in the academy, where there are many introductory‐level textbooks that are designed to formalize and standardize disciplinary induction. It uncovers how students learn to read and write in Introductory Economics, particularly when the textbook is positioned as an authoritative, canonical text, and interprets the ambiguities, unresolved tensions and anxieties concerning plagiarism that often accompany reading and writing from the textbook. Further, it scrutinizes teaching and learning from the learners perspective to reveal the complexity of the linguistic and disciplinary demands in the form of unfamiliar discourses, genres and literacy practices a student must accommodate to be recognized as a participant in the disciplinary culture of Economics.Reading and writing at university is infused by the cultural context of a particular discipline or field so that academic literacies are located, described, interpreted and studied in disciplinary contexts. This study explores the roles and functions textbooks have in the disciplinary culture of Economics in the academy, where there are many introductory‐level textbooks that are designed to formalize and standardize disciplinary induction. It uncovers how students learn to read and write in Introductory Economics, particularly when the textbook is positioned as an authoritative, canonical text, and interprets the ambiguities, unresolved tensions and anxieties concerning plagiarism that often accompany reading and writing from the textbook. Further, it scrutinizes teaching and learning from the learners perspective to reveal the complexity of the linguistic and disciplinary demands in the form of unfamiliar discourses, genres and literacy practices a student must accommodate to be recognized as a particip...

An introduction to teaching motivations in different countries: comparisons using the FIT-Choice scale

The FIT-Choice program of research (Factors Influencing Teaching Choice; http://www. fitchoice.org) began in 2001, prompted by two questions that had been forming for Richardson over the course of a decade: why do people from demanding, high-status and financially rewarding careers want to switch into teaching? and, what motivates people to choose teaching at all? Richardson directed a Graduate Diploma in Education program which attracted a large proportion of people intent on leaving their prior careers to become teachers. At the beginning of each year people from a wide variety of careers would competitively seek enrolment into teacher education, including women seeking to return to work and a new career following time out of the workforce to start a family, younger graduates who had decided on teaching after a ‘gap’ year or two travelling overseas, older recent graduates, people already teaching in private schools, and an assortment of engineers, practising medical doctors, veterinary surgeons, solicitors, accountants, psychologists and company executives. What was striking about this latter group was their intention to leave more prestigious and highly paid careers to pursue teaching. The severe downturn in employment opportunities in the petroleum industry seemed a logical explanation at one stage for why petroleum engineers were seeking other employment, but this was not the case for solicitors, veterinarians, medical practitioners, accountants and many others. Having to select from such people prompted Richardson’s reflection on his own decision to become a teacher, how it had happened and what motivated others to do the same. Did these aspiring career switchers into teaching hold values, beliefs, expectancies in common? Assumptions and explanations that circulate among those involved in teacher education did little to address the questions about what motivates a broad cross-section of people who have diverse experiences in work and life to want to become teachers, and what sustains them once they enter teaching. Their talents and demonstrated abilities undermined the simplistic notion often promulgated in the media that people who want to become teachers are those unable to pursue more prestigious careers, so that teaching is a ‘fallback career’. Were their reasons for switching to a teaching career as diverse as the individuals themselves, or were there core motivations shared by teachers in general? Why had the teacher education literature not been in dialogue with the literature on occupational choice and more importantly, why was no attention paid to robust existing motivational theories when examining teaching motivations? It was these questions

Factors Influencing Teaching Choice in Turkey

Why choose to become a teacher in Turkey? The authors examined motivations and perceptions among preservice teachers (N = 1577) encompassing early childhood, primary and secondary education. The Factors Influencing Teaching Choice (FIT-Choice) instrument was translated into Turkish and its construct validity and reliability assessed. Altruistic ‘social utility values’ were the most influential, followed by the desire for a secure job. Intrinsic value and perceived teaching abilities came next, contrasting with higher ratings in Western studies, alongside prior positive teaching and learning experiences. Family flexibility, job transferability and social influences were moderate, and the negative ‘fallback career’ motivation lowest, although not far below the scale midpoint. Science-related teacher candidates scored more highly on fallback career, had chosen a teaching career the most recently, and were lower on almost all other teaching motivations, demonstrating a less positive motivational profile. Findings are interpreted in light of the economic development and role of the teaching profession in Turkey. Less adaptive motivations belonging to preservice teachers in scientific fields highlight potential risks and recruitment strategies to optimise teacher quality in those priority fields which further research could fruitfully examine.

Literacy, Learning and Teaching

ABSTRACT By taking Australia as a case study site and with findings from the new literacy studies and new theories of learning, this paper sketches a perspective on contemporary issues in English literacy education. While research from a number of fields and disciplines advises abandonment of traditional skills‐based views of literacy and literacy learning, governments with neo‐conservative agendas are moving to institutionalise a model of literacy learning embodied by psychometric measures and benchmarks. Increasingly literacy, learning and teaching are being seen by governments as too important to the state and the market to be left only in the hands of teachers and literacy educators.

Language as Personal Resource and as Social Construct: competing views of literacy pedagogy in Australia

Abstract During the 1980s in Australia considerable attention and effort was directed to literacy education, particularly writing pedagogy. In the late 1970s and early 1980s process writing was promoted into schools by a group of teachers, teacher educators and academics. Teachers were encouraged to take a renewed interest in the teaching of writing and something of a ‘revolution’ was taking place in primary schools by the early 1980s. By the mid‐to‐late 1980s process models of literacy education were rejuvenated by the development of whole language. As process writing spread into the schools and became a new orthodoxy in many places, another group of academics, linguisticians and teachers began to offer critiques of process pedagogy. Throughout the 1980s this group has attempted to identify and linguistically describe the various genres children are asked to write in schools and to propose a curriculum model for the teaching of this genre‐based view of writing. The two groups have often locked horns in d...

Types of Professional and Emotional Coping Among Beginning Teachers

Teaching is increasingly recognised as a complex, demanding career. Teachers experience higher levels of stress and burnout than other professionals. The career is subject to heightened levels of public scrutiny and yet offers only modest rewards in the form of social status and income. Drawing on a typological model of coping styles among a diverse sample of German health professionals, we identified six types of emotional coping (Good health, Sparing, (healthy) Ambitious, (path to) Burnout, Diligent, and Wornout) among a longitudinal sample of 612 Australian primary and secondary teachers. A significant outcome of our study was the empirical differentiation between burned out and wornout teachers. This extends the literature on teacher burnout and offers new directions to the study of ‘at risk’ beginning teachers.

Factors Influencing Teaching Choice: Why Do Future Teachers Choose the Career?

Teachers constitute a large, heterogeneous workforce which has been the subject of policy measures designed to raise the quality of the pool of those seeking to enter, and remain, in the profession. The essence of these recruitment and retention interventions has been the desire to attract academically able and committed people who will be inspirational, effective teachers of children and adolescents (Schleicher A, Building a high-quality teaching profession: lessons from around the world. International Summit on the Teaching Profession. OECD Publishing, Paris. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264113046-en, 2011). Across several decades, educators and public policy-makers have been faced with the recurring issue of how to attract and retain the highest quality teachers as a vital resource in the advancement of student learning and achievement (Greenwald R, Hedges LV, Laine RD, Rev Educ Res 66(3):361–396, 1996). Yet, identification of this need has not meant the problem has been easily addressed.

Relations among beginning teachers' self-reported aggression, unconscious motives, personality, role stress, self efficacy and burnout

Disturbing evidence documenting some teachers’ aggressive classroom management (mis)behaviour is growing. Relative to the importance of this issue, the level of research activity into the area is small (Sava, 2002). Writing about teacher aggression is widespread in the non-English literature: in France, Romania, Russia, and Spain (Sava, 2002). Reports have also appeared in Australia (Lewis & Riley, 2009), China and Israel (Lewis, Romi, Katz, & Qui, 2008), Poland (Piekarska, 2000), Scotland (Munn, Johstone, & Sharp, 2004), and Japan (Treml, 2001). In Europe, the term didactogeny has been coined for the experience of “a faulty education that harms children” medically, psychologically, or educationally (Sava, 2002, p. 1008).

Literacy and Genre

The word “genre” was rarely used with respect to literacy, at least in the sense of composition theory and pedagogy, until the late 1980’s. “Genre,” as a term, was reserved largely for literary texts, and was understood to refer to “text-types” — categories of texts marked by linguistic and formal similarities.