University Teachers' Views on Teaching and the Problems related to Their Professional Growth

― Overview of “Teacher Education in Universities”

Abstract

  The purpose of this study is to clarify the characteristics of the university teachers' views on teaching and to discuss them from a point of view of what professional growth as a teacher should be. A survey of 20 items about views on teaching was carried out, and the subjects were asked to express their opinions both idealistically and practically. The subjects were 72 teachers of the Faculty of Education in Yamanashi University. We mainly analyzed the discrepancy between the idealistic and practical opinions and compared the magnitude of discrepancy between: (1) the teachers of large and small classes and (2) the teachers of different subjects. We found several interesting results and discussed their implications from the standpoint of “teacher education in universities.”