The Everyday Professional Lives of Modern Homeroom Teachers

Abstract

The article describes the results of an interdisciplinary study of the daily professional activities of modern Russian teachers (homeroom teachers). We show that the absence of similar studies has created problems for understanding how innovative developments in modern Russian education are resisted in the classroom. The article analyzes how teachers perceive their professional actions when they organize class activities. We classify their in-class activities into two groups: those that call on students to more actively participate and those that encourage them to remain more passive. We describe these actions of the homeroom teacher, the structure of the research questionnaire, and the procedure that we used to validate it. We use various psychological methods to demonstrate the discrepancy between the expected and actual results of a large-scale sociological and educational study of homeroom teachers from 20 Russian regions. We study the prevalence of the “directional” and “cooperative” teaching styles in the modern classroom.