Teachers' Concern of Caring and Its Implementation in Practice

Background/Purpose:   Noddings (2005) defined “the ethic of care as a morality based on the recognition of needs, relations, and responses” (p.21) and argued that, “practice in teaching should be practice in caring” (1986; p. 504).  Teachers with caring teaching behaviors can potentially increase student engagement as well as enhance successful learning outcomes (Cothran & Ennis, 2000).  In addition, teacher candidates’ beliefs about caring have been shown to influence their teaching behaviors (Owens & Ennis, 2005).  Few studies, however, have investigated the relationship of teachers’ beliefs and practices in respect to caring.  What is known is that there tend to be inconsistences between teachers’ beliefs and actions (Tsangaridou, 2006).  The purpose of this study was to compare an experienced and inexperienced physical education teacher’s conceptions and implementation of caring.  Two research questions guided this study:

1) What were the differences in the two teachers’ conceptions of caring?

2) What were the differences in how the two teachers implemented their beliefs into practice?

Method :  Participants included a physical education student teacher and an experienced physical education teacher (greater than 30 years of teaching experience).  Data sources included four face-to-face semi-structured interviews, approximately 40-hours of observation with field notes, a teaching-videotape, informal conversational interviews (Patton, 2002), a stimulated recall interview, and documents.  Data were analyzed using open and axial coding (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) and cross-case analysis (Merriam, 1998).

Analysis/Results:  Analysis of data with respect to teachers’ conceptions of caring resulted in four themes: making students feel comfortable, caring for students’ skill learning, possessing caring internally, and helping students in personal growth.  The significant difference between their implementation of caring was the depth or focus of their caring.

Conclusions:  Results suggested the beginning teacher’s concern of caring was related to Fuller’s (1969) stage of self-concern and task concern.  In addition, there was inconsistency between the beginning teacher’s concern of caring and his actions (Tsangaridou, 2006).  Few of his beliefs about caring contained any concern for students’ personal growth.  In contrast, the experienced physical education teacher had a strong focus on how to help students grow by integrating caring in teaching.  Several implications may be ascertained from these finding.  First, caring behaviors may mature over time and second, these behaviors are related to the developmental stage of a teacher.  Thus, teacher education programs may want to consider how to foster this development.