The Ideal Educator: Investigating Teaching Culture and Teaching Styles through Teacher Self-Efficacy and Social Acceptance

• Main Author: Glenn, Jared R
• Format: Others
• Published: DigitalCommons@USU 2016
• Subjects: teaching styles; self-efficacy; social acceptance; teacher; Sociology
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/5170; https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6219&context=etd

Teaching styles used by educators throughout the world are diverse and complex, resisting simple comparisons between large groups, such as countries. To allow easier comparisons, data from the Teaching and Learning International Study (TALIS 2013) were applied to construct a picture of an “ideal educator” in each of eight countries: Australia, The Czech Republic, France, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, Singapore, and The United States. Principles of social acceptance and teacher self-efficacy were applied to teachers in each country in order to construct this ideal educator paradigm: first testing for (and finding) correlation between social acceptance and teacher self-efficacy, and then finding educators who were above average in both social acceptance scores and teacher self-efficacy scores in order to separate out a group of elite teachers from the general sample. Both linear regression and comparisons of median scores were employed to examine differences between countries. Scores revealed that each country displayed a distinct mix of Grasha’s Teaching Styles allowing for a simple comparison of teaching styles between countries.