Profiling teachers based on their professional attitudes towards teaching responsible research and innovation

Abstract

In order to facilitate policy-driven reforms in science education, it is important to understand how teaching innovations diffuse among teachers and how that adoption process can be catalysed. Little is known about the set of attitudes that makes teachers early or late adopters. In this study, the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (C-BAM) was employed as a framework for analysing teachers' interests, concerns, worries and enthusiasm. We argue that the questionnaire typically used with C-BAM suffers from a ceiling effect and has unbalanced variables. An improved version of the questionnaire was developed and implemented in the project IRRESISTIBLE with 180 science teachers in ten countries at all school levels. The case of educational innovation in this project was Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), a concept offered by the EU for science education to orient towards socially and ethically sensitive and inclusive processes of science and technology. Using cluster analysis we found four concern profile types: the Carefree, the Pragmatic, the Uncertain and the Worried. With their relatively high positive interests, the Carefree and the Pragmatic profile types are most likely to be early adopters. The high number of Uncertain teachers calls for better conceptualization of RRI in the school context. Furthermore, teacher professional development and additional resources are needed if this innovation is to be diffused widely across European schools. The improved questionnaire provided elaborate information on teachers' concerns and interests, and could help in understanding and facilitating other top-down educational reforms as well.

Teacher profiles in higher education: the move to online education during the COVID-19 crisis

“…The distinction between positive teachers (Profile 2 and 4) and critical teachers (Profile 1 and 3) corresponds with the education innovation literature (Kopcha et al, 2016;Scherer et al, 2020;Vocht & Laherto, 2021), and it could reflect more-general attitudes toward educational technologies (Garone et al, 2019;Jimoyiannis & Komis, 2007;MacIntyre et al, 2020). However, in this case, teachers' attitudes toward online education are likely to be coloured by their experience of the crisis, such as the involuntariness of the transition to online education (Anderson et al, 2006;Debuse et al, 2008;Garone et al, 2019) and the experienced level of stress (Akour et al, 2020;Hew et al, 2020;Hodges et al, 2020).…”

The Pedagogical Shift in the Emergence of Digital Technology: Transforming Teaching Practices

“…14 Education innovation projects are driven by both top-down management decisions and bottom-up local initiatives. 15 However, studies have shown that many of these projects fail to generate comprehensive and sustainable innovation. 16 Lembani, et.al., caution against the unsupervised and ill-conceived use of education innovation projects for technological implementation, as it may lead to stagnation and false claims of innovation by organizations.…”

Teacher Agency and Futures Thinking

“…Most teachers' professional development programmes and courses aim at diffusing educational innovations, and research-based development of such programmes has typically addressed teachers' beliefs, attitudes and concerns facilitating or hindering that diffusion [11][12][13]. Although these studies tend to focus on teachers' adoption of a reform/innovation, several studies on teachers' professional development have acknowledged teachers' role, not only in putting an innovation into operation but also changing and refocusing it [12,14]. However, these studies still frame the role of the teacher as a sort of "fidelity" [9] to a reform imported from elsewhere.…”