Beginning University Teachers and Their Approaches to Teaching and Professional Self-Perception

The aim of this presentation is to describe approaches to teaching taken by beginning teachers at Masaryk University. There are many possible answers to the question of the characteristics of quality teaching in higher education. Lowman (1995) presented a two-dimensional model of good teaching in a university environment: 1) intellectual stimulation (includes instructional clarity and the ability to stimulate focus and interest among students), 2) building interpersonal relationships with students (communicating with students in a way that increases their motivation to work and their enjoyment of learning). Hativa, Barak, and Simhi (2001) studied excellent university teachers and identi ed four key categories of quality teaching: clarity of instruction, lesson organization, stimulation of student interest, and a positive climate in the classroom. Despite the differences among all concepts of good teaching, several repeating characteristics can be traced. Primarily, all of the mentioned concepts include dealing with both content and interaction with students. Dealing with content can be associated with the intel- lectual dimension in Lowman (1995), the rst two categories in Hativa et al. (2001), and the rst two categories in Bain (2004). The presentation stems from an analysis of 19 deep semi-structured interviews with beginning teachers from various faculties. We have identi ed beginning teachers with less than 5 years of teaching experience (Berliner, 1986) and have chosen those teachers whose teaching was evaluated in students’ feedback reports as above-average. Research questions: 1) What is the teachers’ thinking of the beginning university teachers at Masaryk University? 2) What is the relationship between the concept of teaching of the teachers and their self-esteem? We speci ed different approaches to teaching, transmission of knowledge and interaction with students were emphasized as the dominant approach established by the study. We speci ed different approaches to teaching while emphasizing transmission of knowledge and interaction with students, which the study established as the dominant approach. We further identi ed three types of self-per- ception among beginning teachers: they see themselves as research-oriented or teaching-oriented or else as universal teachers who manage both. The study’s main contribution lies in its ability to connect the different types of approaches to the different types of self-perception. The presentation thus shows that researchers, teachers, and universal teachers approach their teaching differently: beginning researchers emphasize transmission of knowledge, beginning teachers emphasize that good teaching should include devoting time and energy to students, and universal teachers emphasize the practical nature of knowledge and motivate students to seek self-improvement.