JOURNAL OF EDUCATION
Year:2024 | Volume:40 | Issue:3|Papers Count:12

Teachers’ professional development (TPD) plays an important role in the advancement of educational systems. On the other hand, knowledge of factors affecting such development could lead to the design of comprehensive models for professional development. To this end, the present study content analyzed a set of administrative and religious documents relevant to the topic. As a result, the main indices of TPD are identified along three main dimensions of behavioral, curricular, and organizational characteristics. The behavioral dimension includes the characteristics of both teachers and in-service instructors, the curricular dimension deals with the goals and objectives, new strategies and approaches to professional development, and the organizational dimension covers areas of supervision and assessment, human resources management, and support. Any attempt at designing a model for teachers’ professional development should attend to these indices.

To portray the overall culture of learning among Iranian students through identification of its components and suggesting a framework, the findings of all previous research, conducted prior to 2019, are synthesized through Roberts’ model herein. Based on the quality of the research, 13 reports were selected and their findings categorized. To validate the categorization, the categories were peer reviewed and externally evaluated. Data analyses yielded a high measure of agreement among reviewers (0. 81). The main components of the Iranian students’ culture of learning are identified as the following: learning supervision, learning activities, teacher’s instructional perspective, classroom management, students’ attitude, learning environment, students’ social interactions, and students’ learning habits.

To determine the characteristics of peace literate teachers from the experts’ perspective, a number of university professors, peace education activists, and high school teachers were interviewed. The interviews were semi-structured and the number of the interviewees reached 15 by the time a theoretical saturation was obtained. The collected data were coded and analyzed. To ascertain the validity of the findings, all aspects of the study were reexamined. The most important characteristics of peace literate teachers can be categorized in two: basic beliefs on peace, and personality characteristics. According to these experts, a peace literate teacher believes in peace and actively pursues it, while respecting others, the environment, the nature, and the beauty therein. They are also receptive to criticism while being able to critically evaluate situations and help students to do the same.

Pastoral care is a concept that was initially used among Christians and in their Church-dependent schools wherein the care of a group of students was given to an individual as their guardian who looked after their moral and social wellbeing. As such, three approaches to such guardianship have developed: one emphasizing discipline and control, the other focusing on eliminating personal and group abnormalities, while the third looks after the academic advancement of the pupils. Perusing through the underpinning concepts of these approaches, a fourth approach was developed and herein suggested: Humanitarian Pastoral Care. Recognizing both its advantages and threats, it is aimed at spreading of morality and benevolence, as well as a holistic look at both the student and education, individualization of teaching, and a breeze of love throughout school atmosphere.

With the expansion of electronic learning environments and their combination with the real learning situations, some teachers have utilized them to design learning activities. Such usage can help with the improvement of teaching and learning outcomes. To assess such improvements, a group of Hamadaani teachers active in the area of creating electronic content with the help of students was interviewed and continued to the point of saturation when 20 teachers were interviewed. Theme analyses of the responses yielded positive results all around. Technically, in the opinion of interviewed teachers, students learned skills related to work with the Internet and different software and hardware. Cognitively, they believe that their students have developed critical thinking and lasting learning skills. They also improved in the metacognitive area as they were able to better understand their own abilities, the nature of the tasks, and ways of evaluating their quality. Motivationally too, the students as a result of involvement in production of the content were much more interested in the learning of the subject, according to the teachers. Thus, further research and usage are suggested.

Religious training as a way of strengthening belief, has been an old approach, yet from around seventy years ago, it has been faced with some criticism in the West. Secular and pluralist critics claim that in religious trainings, understanding is neither the goal nor the outcome, because it is confession that is aimed at. Thus such religious trainings should be abandoned and replaced with un-confessional religious training or secular training in which instead of teaching a particular religion, lessons about all religions are taught. This very perspective is challenged herein by rereading the claim in the following three different ways: 1- religious understanding is impossible through religious training, 2- lack of understanding in religious exclusivism, and in 3- religious indoctrination, is necessary. Furthermore, through comparisons and criticism, it is said that: 1- being belief-based does not prevent understanding, 2- being exclusivist does not prevent understanding, 3- indoctrination is not subject-dependent, and religious training is not necessarily indoctrination. The Islamic approach to religious training is discussed where necessary.

To show the relation between creative thinking, social adaptation, and environmental accountability, emphasizing the mediating role of personality independence, a categorical sample of 358 high school students was randomly selected and then given four instruments, all of which are constructed abroad, yet their validity was confirmed when the opinions of experts were sought on their formal and content validity, while their internal consistencies have also been confirmed separately. Data analyses show that both creative thinking and social adaptation directly and significantly affect personality independence just as creative thinking affects, positively and significantly, the social adaptation factor. Furthermore, environmental accountability is also directly affected by the other three factors at 0. 01 level. All in all, the said three factors can explain %44 of the variance in environmental responsibility among students.

To extract the educational implications of student-teachers’ experiences of empathy and cooperation among people during the COVID-19 crisis, a questionnaire with open response questions was constructed by the researcher and then validated by ten experts at Farhangian University. 37 student-teachers who were among the top achievers and were selected by their professors, completed the questionnaire. The findings show that the respondents learned not only about the disease and ways of treating it, but also learned through observation how to be self-sacrificing. Behaviorally speaking, they became more patient, altruistic, group oriented, and verbally communicative. Attitudinally, religious beliefs, as well as a sense of social responsibility, commitment, and positive affects were strengthened.

To explore the experiences of teachers and principals with the concept of social responsibility, 18 of them were carefully selected and interviewed. The analysis of the responses yielded 6 main themes and 33 extensions thereof which included constructive interaction with  students’ environment, constructive interaction with colleagues, maintenance of appearance and behavior, lack of awareness and indifference within the school community, acting within the confounds of rules and regulation, and getting involved in students’ personal issues. The results show that teachers while improving their own behavior, can serve as models for students’ development and actualization. Nevertheless, acting within the confounds of organizational regulations is not all that social responsibility is about, rather its true meaning is going beyond the line of duty.

Given the extent to which statistics are used in today’s lives, any misguided utilization of numerical data can be considered a weapon of destruction and harm. Ways by which statistics are misused are known, and knowing them can help with the development of a critical view in regards to statistics. To assess the extent to which the coverage of Statistics in the high school textbooks includes familiarization of students with statistical fallacies, senior high school textbooks on mathematics in all three areas of study were content analyzed to determine the coverage of topics such as inaccurate explanations, unreasonable claims, and misguided relevancies. The findings show that from among the three areas of high school study, the textbooks for the experimental science area, as well as those for the Math & Physics area of study, have the least coverage of statistical fallacies. Given the fact that most of the junior high school graduates attend these two areas when attending high school, it can be expected that in the future most of our high school graduates would lack a critical view of statistics.

The theory of Social Welfare deals with the individuals’ behavior within the society and the quality of their relationships. It is of much importance for the school curriculum to incorporate such behaviors in its textbooks. In order to assess the extent to which such incorporation has been achieved within the Social Studies textbooks for junior high school, three of these books were content analyzed using a checklist constructed based on the said theory. As such, it defines Social Welfare as having five constituents, namely cohesion, solidarity, reception, cooperation, and actualization, the frequency of which was counted and then analyzed in terms of level of importance. The findings are indicative of high level of importance associated with cohesion, reception, and cooperation, leaving the other two components as low in significance. Nevertheless, it can be said the distribution of the components in the reviewed textbook is to an extent moderate and balanced, yet a review of the content and an increase in the coverage of less covered components is in order.

To estimate the desired and existing statuses of the senior high school Chemistry Curriculum, a group of experts, consisting of twelve Curriculum and Chemistry Professors, was interviewed; while a sample of 200 high school Chemistry Teachers was given a questionnaire with the internal consistency of 0.89, which was constructed on the basis of the experts’ views on desired status. According to these experts, literacy in Chemistry has many dimensions including knowledge, attitude, skills, and occupational areas; and any Chemistry curriculum should emphasize the scientific interpretation of the phenomenon, and skills development in the occupational areas. The Chemistry teachers rated the existing curriculum rather high on objectives and about average on the content. Eventually, it was recommended that both the content and teaching/evaluation methods be reexamined and improved.