The purpose of this study was to examine the narratives of daycare teachers with team teaching experiences in an effort to understand the pattern of their interpersonal relationship with other teachers during team teaching in the classroom. A research...
The purpose of this study was to examine the narratives of daycare teachers with team teaching experiences in an effort to understand the pattern of their interpersonal relationship with other teachers during team teaching in the classroom. A research question was posed:
What is the relationship among daycare teachers in team teaching situations?
The subjects in this study were four daycare teachers who worked in public daycare centers in South Gyeongsang Province. They had provided team teaching with two or more teachers to an appropriate number of preschoolers over two or three years. The data were gathered during a three-month period of time from July to September, 2009. The participants and this researcher got together and gave and took letters, and the participants kept a reflective journal. In addition, this researcher kept a research diary. The collected data were transcribed, encoded and classified by theme. The triangulation and checks of the participants were utilized to produce reliable results.
The findings of the study were as follows:
There were three kinds of result about the relationship of the daycare teachers in team teaching situations.
First, the teachers who were involved in team teaching took a different view of other teachers with whom they provided team teaching according to whether they were well-experienced older teachers, whether they started to work with them, whether they were of the same age as them or whether they were less-experienced younger teachers. Basically, it's not easy to define their relationship with those groups of teachers. The older teachers served as role models for them, and they relied on those who started to work with them, though they weren't caring enough, and the less-experienced younger teachers put some strain on them but made them look back on themselves.
Second, the teachers who were engaged in team teaching felt that their relationship with those with whom they provided team teaching was under the influence of personal friendship, prejudice, chemistry, community mindedness, organizational climate and whether to have anything common to talk about or not.
Third, they thought that they should be courageous enough to talk to the other teachers first in order to create a friendly relationship among teachers in team teaching situations. They should be broad-minded enough to care about them, to made a concession, to approve of them and to embrace them, and they should make efforts to build a more amicable relationship with affection and view them as those with whom they should compete in good faith.
Given the findings of the study, the type of interpersonal relationship of teachers who offer team teaching together should be taken into account in order to ensure the success of team teaching, and daycare centers should try to create the conditions for friendly relationship building. At the same time, experienced older teachers should serve as mentors who provide less-experienced younger teachers with mentoring.