Teacher Resistance To Change

Abstract

The ultimate goal of Beeby’s progressivism was teachers with a style appropriate to his fourth stage of Meaning, and he unsympathetically viewed the ritualistic Dame School or Formalism teacher as “an unskilled and ignorant one who teaches mere symbols with only the vaguest reference to their meaning” (Beeby 1966, p. 52). In his view, five factors affected professional conservatism in both developed and developing countries: lack of clear goals in the system affecting teachers’ thinking, lack of understanding and acceptance by teachers of reforms, teachers as products of a system not being prone to innovate, isolation of teachers in their classroom slowing down diffusion of innovations, and a wide range of ability of teachers making diffusion rates uneven (Beeby 1966, pp. 35-47). This carried a pejorative implication for his third theoretical proposition that the key to a school’s movement through the stages is the ability of its teachers to promote change. Teacher inability to bring about the progressive changes necessary to raise a school system to the highest stage was the reason that gradualism was necessary.