Abstract
This study begins as an investigation of the ways in which teachers' work assignments had been critically altered by a specific event, the restructuring of secondary schooling in the Northern Territory. The event served to create three secondary school types, Year 8-10 'junior' high schools, 8-12 comprehensive high schools, and secondary colleges. The chosen vehicle for the investigation was a teacher satisfaction questionnaire based substantially upon Holdaway's (1978) 'Teacher Satisfaction Instrument'. The study addresses a number of theoretical, methodological and practical issues and discusses these in relation to literature on job satisfaction, morale, work motivation, stress and burnout.The study presents an analysis of the responses of 264 Darwin secondary school teachers. An item questionnaire required respondents to rate on a five point Likert-type scale their degree of satisfaction with 40 named facets related to their work and working conditions, and to rate their degree of overall satisfaction with their job. An open-response section of the questionnaire encouraged teachers to indicate those aspects of their work which contributed most to their overall satisfaction with teaching as an occupation. In this section teachers were asked also to indicate their perceptions about the ways that restructuring had changed their job assignments, and their own feelings about those changes.
Facet analysis of teacher responses by school type revealed much about the nature of teacher assignments in the school types and their affective responses to those facets. The open responses served to expand upon the information gained through facet analysis, and to identify those aspects of the work role that contribute most to one's satisfaction with the total work role. The analysis of teacher satisfiers and dissatisfiers according to school type, led to the identification of a number of significant teacher concerns. The concluding section of this study is devoted to a closer investigation of those concerns and of the professional issues arising out of that investigation.
| Date of Award | 1993 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Supervisor | Darol Cavanagh (Supervisor) |