Individual instructor's perceptions of teaching context : identifying facilitators and barriers to completion of teaching projects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Frameworks seeking to explain teaching competency and development in higher education indicate that context and personal perspectives, as well as knowledge and action are crucial components in the understanding of how and why faculty teach as they do and how development may be encouraged and may be supported. This study sought to contribute to a deeper understanding of individual instructors' perceptions of context of higher education as it related to their teaching projects. This study investigated the daily pursuits and pre-occupations (teaching goals/projects) of an individual instructor, specifically, the instructional demands, departmental demands, the personal and professional pursuits of knowledge and the pursuits of pedagogical knowledge. More specifically, this study investigated perceived facilitators and barriers to the realization of individual teaching and other work projects. Nineteen full-time faculty members in the Departments of Physiotherapy, Occupational therapy, Nursing, Social Work, Educational Psychology and Education at a large research and teaching university in Montreal, Quebec participated in this study. The instructors were asked to complete an adapted version of Little's (1983) Personal Project Analysis (P.P.A.) instrument, which is designed to elicit an instructor's current pre-occupations or projects in his or her current context. The instructors were asked to rate these projects (seven teaching projects and seven other work projects) using a Likert scale (0 to 10) on twenty-one empirically supported dimensions. These dimensions included the following: enjoyment, difficulty, control, initiative, stress, time pressure, outcome, self-identity, others' view, value congruency, challenge, commitment, competence, support, self-worth, fun, others' benefit, self-benefit, supportiveness of culture (departmental level), hindrance of culture (departmental level), and overall current satisfaction. Instructors were asked to assess their perceived conflicts between two of their teaching projects and two of their other work projects in addition to completing a demographic questionnaire. The findings indicate that instructors identified five different types of daily pursuits that formed and defined their teaching context, as they perceived it. These five types of daily pursuits (projects) included: course planning and preparation projects; student investment, support and delegation of tasks to student projects; knowledge building and knowledge sharing projects; committees, faculty support and faculty teaching projects; and finally, teaching strategy projects. The instructors also identified five different types of daily pursuits that formed and defined their other work context. These included: publishing, conference presentation and research projects; grant proposals and funding projects; office organization projects; correspondence, university committees, outside mandates, departmental expectations and management of student and faculty projects; and finally, personal objectives and technical skill building projects. P.P.A. enabled the researcher to identify on an individual instructor level the instructor's perceived facilitators and barriers to the successful completion of teaching and other work projects. Furthermore, P.P.A. as a faculty development instrument or as an alternative to semi-structured interview methods is supported by the findings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".