School culture, leadership and relationships matter

The articles in this issue of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice focus on the relationships between teachers and principals, teachers’ well-being, and engagement within the school community as well as innovative pedagogical and teacher education approaches relevant to our continuously changing world. The studies reported here emphasise the central role of teachers and their well-being to promote student learning and pedagogical developments. In addition, some of the papers explicitly focus on leadership and school level factors, as well as various incentives which motivate teachers to work in the profession. They show the complexity of the school community and its importance for teachers and students to grow, learn and develop. The studies in this issue utilise a variety of research designs, and qualitative and quantitative data.

The first article, exploratory and multidimensional by nature, investigates teachers’ trust towards their principals and the implications for teachers’ well-being and their organisational behaviour. Izhak Berkovich considers the dynamics and associations that trust among teachers and principals generate in schools. Through the analyses reported in the article ‘Typology of trust relationships: Profiles of teachers’ trust in principal and their implications’, Berkovich confirms the trust profiles identified in earlier studies, and also shows the multidimensionality of and variation in relationships. Most of the teachers reported high or medium levels of trust towards the principals. The study showed how relational trust forms teachers’ well-being: teachers with high or medium trust reported high-positive affectivity. Furthermore, the results indicated that teachers whose profiles were characterised by high-affective trust also appeared to perform better in terms of their organisational behaviour. This offers a new perspective when compared to findings from earlier studies and sharpens thoughts concerning principals’ key leadership characteristics. The results of the study as a whole pave the way towards a more thorough understanding of the complexity and importance of the relationships between teachers and principals for the school, for well-being and the potential to cultivate high-quality learning among all members of the school community.

In the second paper, ‘Personal and contextual factors related to teachers’ experience with stress and burnout’, K. Andrew R. Richards, Michael A. Hemphill and Thomas J. Templin explore the ways in which teachers perceive and navigate stressors in their profession. Through a qualitative interview study, the authors aimed to understand how teachers with high or low levels of burnout experience their work in authentic environments at school. The roles of social context and schools in relation to teachers’ perceptions of stress were the main focus of interest. According to the study, all teachers had to cope with workplace stress. The results showed that low-burnout teachers viewed their environments as encouraging; they reported positive relations with colleagues, principals and administrators, felt empowered and supported at work, and experienced work with students as meaningful and making a difference in their lives. On the other hand, high-burnout teachers experienced confrontational and restricting environments. They felt demoralised and marginalised in their work, reported a lack of community, and felt frustrated by students’ and families’ nonchalance towards school. Teacher accountability and regional educational policies also made teachers feel limited in their work. As a conclusion, the article presents a model of the relationships between positive and negative teaching environments and their impact on teachers. This could be utilised when analysing and improving school environments in order to enhance teachers’ work—and further students’ learning.

The third paper considers aspects related to teacher identity. In ‘The relationship between teacher self-concept, teacher efficacy and burnout’ Mingjing Zhu, Qian Liu, Yao Fu, Tianan Yang, Xingli Zhang and Jiannong Shi investigated a representative sample of teachers (N = 1892) in seven different regions in China utilising established theorisations and quantitative measures (cf. Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1996; Villa & Calvete, 2001; Yu, Xin, & Shen, 1995) as appropriate to the focus of the study. They specifically examined whether teachers’ self-concept contributes to burnout through efficacy. The authors found that teachers’ self-concept had influence over teacher burnout via teacher efficacy, and that experienced teachers’ self-concept contributed more to efficacy than that of novice teachers. In contrast to previous studies, they did not detect any differences between female and male or novice and experienced teachers in the mediating effects of teacher efficacy linking self-concept and burnout. The study provides novel viewpoints on the mechanisms related to teachers’ self-belief and burnout, especially in a non-Western context. The results underline the importance of strengthening teachers’ self-concept and efficacy through multiple practices embedded in their everyday work in classrooms with pupils and even beyond. These may serve to increase their abilities to support their pupils’, colleagues’ and their own meaningful learning and wellbeing at school (cf. Heikonen et al., 2017).

The fourth paper ‘Experienced teachers dealing with issues in education: a career perspective’, by Anna C. van der Wandt, G. L. M. Schellings and J. Mommers also investigates the tensions related to teachers’ identity and work. The authors here are interested in the characteristics of these tensions, how they change or remain the same, and the ways in which teachers cope with them in the different phases of their career. The study drew on qualitative data from 20 teachers collected by utilising the storyline research tool as the basis of a reflective questionnaire. It found that while some identity issues were experienced only by teachers at the beginning of the career others remained even after many years in the profession. Most of the teachers reported searching for balance in terms of caring, distance in relations to students, balance between private and professional life, and expertise on school pedagogy as issues in the early career phases. More experienced teachers still thought about the balance between their private and professional life. In addition, they were concerned about interactions with parents as well as the division of time for teaching and other tasks at school. Although teachers reported multiple strategies for coping with the tensions they reported, some issues were more difficult to handle and had negative influence on teachers’ work. The results of the study emphasise the importance of reflection and the use of a variety of coping strategies in helping teachers to maintain a strong and positive professional identity throughout their careers—for the betterment of student learning and their own professional development.

In the fifth article, Yipeng Tang, Wenjie He, Laura Liu and Qiong Li present a theoretical framework related to teachers’ well-being and resilience, and provide empirical evidence of the dynamics between well-being, professional learning, community engagement and pay conditions among Chinese rural teachers. The study investigates associations between pay satisfaction and teacher well-being, and focuses especially on the mediating effects of professional learning and community engagement. Extensive data (N = 3155) were collected from teachers working in relatively challenging contexts. The study showed the positive mediating effects of community engagement between pay level satisfaction and teacher well-being. Results also showed that higher salaries lead to more extensive community engagement and further enhanced teachers’ well-being. The study provides empirical evidence that can be utilised when improving conditions for high-quality learning and schoolwork in rural contexts, and in other contexts, by showing that investments in teachers’ work conditions and commitment really matter.

In the sixth paper in this issue, ‘Students as co-producers in a multidisciplinary software engineering project: Addressing cultural distance and cross-cohort handover’, David Foster, Filippo Gilardi, Paul Martin, Wei Song, Dave Towey and Andrew White investigated a real-life project to develop note-taking software and the student-staff collaboration embedded within the project. A broad range of data, including project notes, reports, student and project leader interviews as well as focus group interviews for all project team members, were collected during the project and analysed for the study. From these, the authors extracted four themes which characterised both the students’ and the academic staff members’ key experiences during the project. The academics’ role as clients in relation to the project raised questions and caused reflections and negotiations among both students and the academics themselves. Questions of ownership and copyright also emerged and presented new issues to be addressed. As the project took place in the context of a Sino-Foreign university (meaning that most of the students were Chinese while the academics were not), cultural distance, and thus, awareness of cultural differences and need for cultural knowledge were experienced. Handover between teams, a particular characteristic of software development projects, was also handled as a part of this project. Explorative results from innovative student development projects such as this are needed as these ways of learning and teaching become more regular, as they require agentic student and teacher roles, new pedagogies, infrastructure and strong commitment from the whole community in order to be successful (cf. Lakkala, 2010).

The final article by Bernadette Youens, Lindsey Smethem and Mark Simmons presents an analysis of an alternative route into the teaching profession. In ‘Move over Nelly: lessons from thirty years of employment based initial teacher education in England’ they analyse the entire history of one alternative, employment-based teacher education route in England from 1997 to 2012. In a broader sense, this is part of an international discussion on the recruitment and preparation of high-quality teachers, either at universities or elsewhere, in order to generate high-quality student learning. The authors emphasise that there is an ongoing debate about teacher education programmes, their ownership, the teaching profession, the regulation of teachers and the economics that influence the possibilities of developing sustainable teacher education programmes. The authors describe the characteristics of the programme as well as the pedagogical details of its design from the viewpoint of student teachers, teacher educators and schools. The article also shows how political decisions influence the development of teacher education. Through the case study and its results, the authors underline the importance of designing teacher education programmes systematically at a national level. This would require collaboration between teacher education providers and educational policymakers, obliging them to work in innovative ways to enhance education, schools and student learning.

The multiple aspects related to teachers and teacher education, the work of teaching, learning, principals and leadership, and school relationships reported in this issue emphasise the complexity of schools as communities which support learning for all their members. The articles demonstrate how well-being, agency and trust among and between teachers, students and principals contribute to learning, development and innovations in schools and beyond. Thus, both are worth investigating further and promoting practically within school communities. The issue as a whole emphasises the need for schools to engage with the changing world around them in order to be meaningful and relevant learning environments for all their members (cf. Niemi, Toom, Kallioniemi, & Lavonen, 2018).