This facet has a direct influence on the quality of the teaching as well as on relationship between the teacher and the students.
Many of the fundamental problems that the new teacher may experience are related to the personal vision that the teacher has about what teaching means and what is expected of them. "One of the most powerful predictors of teachers' commitment to teaching is a "sense of efficacy --the teachers' sense that he or she is making a positive difference in the lives of students." (Hammerness, 2003) This sense of efficacy is related to the teacher's 'vision' or view of the nature of the profession and its expectations. Hammerness explains this concept of vision as follows;
vision may provide a means to surface and examine teachers' beliefs, providing teacher educators with a way both to validate and build on teachers' hopes and dreams.... vision may provide an avenue for teacher educators to help new teachers "plumb the depths" of their beliefs and goals examining, challenging, and further articulating their beliefs and assumptions through the sharing of visions."
As stated above, understanding a teacher's vision of his or her task is an important part of understanding and evaluating problem areas in the education of new teachers. Teacher educators often find that many of the problems that new teachers experience are due to the disparity between their hopes and vision and the realities of teaching practice. This means that often new teachers have expectations for themselves and the profession which are out of sync with the realities of the classroom. Young teachers often place unrealizable goals as their immediate aim and this often results in feelings of inadequacy when these goals are not achieved according to the particular "vision "of the teacher.
Part of the solution to this problem lies in assisting the teacher to "...understand and deal with the gap between their hopes and their practice." (Hammerness, 2003)
For many new teachers, "...vision consists of images of what teachers hope could be or might be in their classrooms, their schools, their communities, and in some cases even in society as a whole." (ibid). While vision can act as a motivational force for these teachers, yet it can also make the teacher feel despondent and inadequate if the "vision" is too extreme. Comparing their vision to the current realities of classroom and education sometimes "...leads them to learn that their visions are impossible and that they and their students are powerless to reach them. " ibid The study of vision in new teachers often reveals, that disillusionment may result in far more than deflated emotions and the attitude shift from progressive to conservative documented by researchers. The gap between vision and reality in fact lead some of these teachers to learn that their visions are impossible and that they and their students are incapable of attaining them. (Hammerness, 2003)
Dealing with this important problem usually requires the intervention and guidance of mentors - which will be discussed in more detail in the following section.
Experienced teachers and teacher educators can provide a number of techniques and methods to manage this gap between ideal and the real for new teachers. For example, teacher educators may be able to help teachers to recognize the steps they need to take to reach their vision and to come to terms with the time that may be required. Furthermore, teacher educators may be able to help new teachers to develop visions with an episodic character. Episodic visions are ones in which teachers recognize that their classes will not be ideal every day but rather that those instances may only occur once or twice a semester, after several weeks or even months of careful scaffolding...In so doing, teacher educators may be able to help new teachers prepare themselves to address the balance of ideal practice and ordinary work and, in turn, may be able to help new teachers recognize and celebrate the achievements that they do make (Hammerness, 2003)
3. Mentoring
As mentioned in the introduction to this paper, modern teaching has become an intensely complex and multidimensional profession, demanding considerable input and expertise from the new teacher. Hargreaves (1997) points out that, teaching is now difficult, complex, demanding, emotional work with teachers taking on many roles previously fulfilled by other social agents such as family and church. Teachers are also faced with increased diversity of student resources and needs in schools, and with hugely expanded curricula. (Martinez, 2004 p 95)
This situation has necessitated that new teachers usually require the input and assistance of teacher mentors. Recently...
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