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Constructivist teaching and intra-school collaboration among teachers in South Korea: an uncertainty management perspective

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Abstract

In an effort to understand how collaborative teacher interaction is contingent upon teacher characteristics and school-organizational contexts, this study conducts a series of hierarchical generalized linear modeling analyses based on a nationally representative sample of about 2,500 teachers across 149 middle schools in South Korea. The data are from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey 2008. The result from this study suggests that teacher collegiality may be understood largely as teachers’ collective effort to deal with uncertainties that arise from their approach to teaching as a constructivist endeavor to engage students in meaningful inquiry-based learning. This result is very robust as it holds after a range of other factors such as principal instructional leadership and teacher efficacy are simultaneously taken into account.

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Notes

  1. An exploratory factor analysis of these five items was conducted after an appropriate weight was applied to the dataset. The result showed that all of these items were loaded on a single factor (eigenvalue = 2.87). Cronbach’s α was 0.81.

  2. All these four items were loaded on a single factor (eigenvalue = 2.29) when an exploratory factor analysis was conducted with an appropriate weight applied to the dataset. Cronbach’s α was 0.74.

  3. When the dependent variable has M categories, only M − 1 cumulative probabilities are of interest because P(R ij  ≤ M) = 1 in all studies. Since M = 3 in this study, P(R ij  ≤ 3) = 1 is redundant. Note that when the number of categories of the dependent variable is M and the number of level-1 independent variables is N, the level-1 model can be generalized into the following form: \( \eta_{(m)ij} = \beta_{0j} + \sum\nolimits_{n = 1}^{N} {\beta_{(n)j} X_{(n)ij} } + \sum\nolimits_{m = 2}^{M - 1} {D_{(m)ij} \delta_{(m)} } \), where D (m)ij is an indicator for the mth category, and δ (m) is the threshold difference which equals η (m−1)ij  − η (m)ij . See O’Connell et al. (2008), and Raudenbush and Bryk (2002) for more details and discussions.

  4. Treating all slopes as random, however, did not meaningfully alter our findings reported in this study.

  5. In addition, it would also be a very useful line of inquiry to investigate the patterns of collaborative teacher interaction cross-nationally. Since there have been intriguing debates around whether teaching is a globally isomorphic practice or it is a culturally embedded activity (Alexander 2000; LeTendre et al. 2001; Stigler and Hiebert 1999), the simultaneous consideration of multilayered contexts around teaching across various countries will lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of teacher collegiality.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2011-330-B00159). The authors are grateful to the members of the SSK research project team in the College of Education at Hanyang University and two anonymous reviewers of APER for their constructive comments. Small portions of this article were adapted from the authors’ previous and ongoing research (Cha and Ham 2012; Ham 2011).

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  1. 508 College of Education, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea

    Yun-Kyung Cha

  2. 305 College of Education, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea

    Seung-Hwan Ham

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Cha, YK., Ham, SH. Constructivist teaching and intra-school collaboration among teachers in South Korea: an uncertainty management perspective. Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. 13, 635–647 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-012-9225-x

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