Teachers’ professionalism and relations with parents: teachers’ and parents’ views

ABSTRACT

Following the intensification and ambivalence of parent-teacher relations, this study examined the collaborative or conflictual relations, and teachers’ professionalism as perceived by both teachers and parents: 325 teachers and 655 parents from 21 Israeli Jewish primary schools answered a questionnaire. Using a structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis, similarities were found in teachers and parents’ perceptions of teachers’ work efficiency in increasing collaborative relations and decreasing conflicts. Teachers’ responsibilities and influence in schools reduce conflicts to varying extents for parents and teachers. The findings highlight the importance of developing professional competencies for building parent-teacher relations in schools. Emphasising the preparation of teachers for establishing their relations with parents is mainly important during in-service and pre-service teachers’ training, as it can contribute to increasing teachers’ professional confidence in their efforts to build collaborative rather than conflictual relations with teachers and schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Teachers
• Professionalism
• Parent-teacher relations

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Israeli educational system is divided along ethnic lines: about 75% of the pupils are Jewish who study in Jewish schools, while the rest of the students are Arabs (Muslims or Christians) who study in a separate educational system.

2. Based on categories 1 to 3 in the Nurture Index (Madad Tapaha) developed by the Ministry of Education. This index ranged from 1 (very high) to 10 (very low) based on an aggregate of parents’ educational level, family income, distance from the centre of Israel, and percentage of students who had emigrated from less developed countries.

3. After the Bonferroni-correction to account for multiple testing, the p value for rejecting Ho needs to be less than p < .016.

4. The rule of thumb for modelling two level data is n > 30 (Hox 2010).

5. In this case, the first-order factor functions as indicators of the second-order factor. Therefore, for each scale the measurement error variances were fixed to a = Var(x) * (1- rho), where Var(x) is the variance and rho = reliability of each scale (Brown 2006).

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by the Ministry of Education, Israel;the Ministry of Education, Israel [-];

Notes on contributors

Audrey Addi-Raccah

Audrey Addi-Raccah (PhD) is associated professor at the school of education at Tel-Aviv  University. She is head of the Department of Educational Policy and Management. Her research  is related to sociology of education with a focus on educational inequality, school effects and improvement, teachers and school principals' work and parental-involvement in education. In her research she uses mixed methodological approach including large scale data. She has published in education and sociology journals.

Yael Grinshtain

Yael Grinshtain, Ph.D., is a senior faculty member in the Department of  Education at Tel-Hai Academic College. Her research interests include gender and ethnicity in the teaching profession and in educational leadership; parental engagement at home and at school including  help seeking and help giving orientations; social and cultural aspects of rural education. In her research she implements   qualitative, quntitative and mixed methods approaches.