Combinations of Personal Responsibility: Differences on Pre-service and Practicing Teachers’ Efficacy, Engagement, Classroom Goal Structures and Wellbeing

• Main Authors: Lia M. Daniels, Amanda I. Radil, Lauren D. Goegan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2017-05-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: personal responsibility for teaching; teacher engagement; teaching efficacy; instructional practices; pre-service teachers; practicing teachers
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00906/full

Pre-service and practicing teachers feel responsible for a range of educational activities. Four domains of personal responsibility emerging in the literature are: student achievement, student motivation, relationships with students, and responsibility for ones own teaching. To date, most research has used variable-centered approaches to examining responsibilities even though the domains appear related. In two separate samples we used cluster analysis to explore how pre-service (n = 130) and practicing (n = 105) teachers combined personal responsibilities and their impact on three professional cognitions and their wellbeing. Both groups had low and high responsibility clusters but the third cluster differed: Pre-service teachers combined responsibilities for relationships and their own teaching in a cluster we refer to as teacher-based responsibility; whereas, practicing teachers combined achievement and motivation in a cluster we refer to as student-outcome focused responsibility. These combinations affected outcomes for pre-service but not practicing teachers. Pre-service teachers in the low responsibility cluster reported less engagement, less mastery approaches to instruction, and more performance goal structures than the other two clusters.