| Summary: | Despite evidence that an understanding of the individual's interpretive framework is an important factor in understanding effective teaching, there is little research in higher education which addresses this variable. The purpose of the study was to facilitate an understanding of the personal context within which the behaviors and strategies of effective teachers exist. Designed as a case study of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Distinguished Teaching Award winners from 1962 to 1995 (N = 47, 69% of total population, representing all of the Schools/Colleges within the University), it employed a written survey to gain data about faculty backgrounds and adoption of teaching attitudes and activities which the literature has identified as characteristic of effective teachers, followed by in-depth interviews (N = 14) to explore the participants' personal constructions of the process of teaching. The major findings include: all participants' definitions of teaching reflected a constructivist orientation to the process; a consistency in participants' definitions of the major goals and processes of teaching, and motivations and rewards for teaching across age, discipline, and sex; close attention to their own and their students' experiences is the primary source of learning about and motivation for teaching; the goal of relating to students is to facilitate learning, thus participants define an appropriate faculty-student distance in their relationships with students; teaching is considered an activity with intellectual value; evidence of individual shifts in the construction of their goals for teaching and of their relationships with students, their content and the context that parallel established schema for epistemological and intellectual development, indicating the possibility of a psychological developmental aspect to the development of effective teachers. Some implications for further research include the need for efforts to clarify possible epistemological developmental aspects to the development of faculty as teachers, to research the connections between developmental stage and teaching effectiveness and conceptualization of efforts to improve teaching as incorporating more than attention to methods.
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