The benefits for a teacher researcher: A case of teaching philosophy

Charles S. Masoabi

Dr., Central University of Technology Free State, South Africa

cmasoabi@cut.ac.za

 

Abstract

Teaching philosophy could be regarded as one’s convictions (Fusaro, 2009) about best teaching practices that would help learners to be successful in their learning journey in a particular subject and context. Therefore, a teacher jots down all the aspects, such as the teacher’s and learners’ roles he believes are most suitable classroom practices for effective teaching and learning guided by the objectives and expected outcomes (Casteel, 2012) of that subject. Moreover, as a teacher, one is not clueless or tabula rasa regarding various teaching methods even if one may not have concrete knowledge of them. Therefore, there is a possibility that earlier generations of teachers have had similar beliefs and have done research on the matter.

Therefore, a teacher researcher began a journey of literature review regarding educational philosophies (Stremmel, 2002) and to find the one closest to his beliefs of a conductive teaching environment. In this study, the teacher researcher found his position in social constructivism as a philosophical paradigm that embraced his believes on using collaborative teaching and learning methods to improve learners’ knowledge acquisition, related skills and values (Driscoll, 2000 as cited in Brada,2015) as well as teacher’s professional enhancement in Technology classroom.

In order to strive to achieve the attributes in the previous paragraph, the researcher studied cooperative learning approach and chose to employ student teams’ achievement divisions (STAD) as vehicle towards obtaining above mentioned benefits. Due to globalisation, the researcher intended to prepare the learners and himself for future collaborative ways at work places.

The study used a single case study design for collection of data and inductive analysis of the results. The results have proven the study to have yielded positive outcomes for the teacher researcher.

Keywords: Social constructivism, STAD, teacher researcher.


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CITATION: Abstracts & Proceedings of ADVED 2017 - 3rd International Conference on Advances in Education and Social Sciences, 9-11 October 2017- Istanbul, Turkey

ISBN: 978-605-82433-0-9