Analysis of the Best Teacher Awardee Teachers’ Lessons in Republic of Ghana

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to examine differences in the interaction between teachers and students in junior high school science lessons which are conducted by The Best Teacher awardee teachers and common teachers who haven’t been awarded in Ghana. 5 awardee teachers’ science lessons and 5 common teachers’ science lessons were analyzed with regard to IRF sequences (teacher Initiation- student Responseteacher Feedback/ Follow up; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975) and IRE sequences (teacher Initiation- student Response- teacher Evaluation; Mehan, 1979). And the questions asked by teachers in the lessons were also analyzed with a revision of Blooms’ Taxonomy which consisted of 6 dimensions: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating. The total number of questions of the best teacher awardee teachers’ lessons was more than twice as large as that of the common teachers. The number of IRE sequences was less than that of total questions, and the number of IRF sequences was considerably less. This means that even the best teacher awardee teachers could not extend and facilitate the classroom discourse fully because they did not take advantage of students’ responses; instead they just evaluated. In terms of a revision of Blooms’ Taxonomy, almost all the questions which the common teachers asked in their lessons were lower-order questions like “remembering” and “understanding”. On the other hand, the best teacher awardee teachers mainly asked lower-order questions. They did also ask higher-order questions like “analyzing” and “evaluating”, although not frequently.