The Influence Of Teaching Competition On Excellent Teachers' Professional Self-Understanding

Chongqing's Tenth Primary School Young Chinese Teachers Quality Class Competition was a teaching competition unlike anything else.It is a real-live form of China's competitive Open Class system.It puts the best young primary school Chinese teachers from all over Chongqing Municipal to compete in a multi-level selection process to find the best teachers,research teams,lesson plans and teaching methods.This competition aimed to find the forefront of educational philosophy and practice while providing teachers who engage in the competition the chance to exchange ideas and establish professional relationships.This study researched the technical aspects of the competition as well as the relationships among emotional elements found in the competition.However,the core of the research is the concept of teacher professional self-understanding and its five elements of self-image,selfesteem,job-motivation,task perception and future perspective proposed by Kelchtermans(2009: 261-263).Through a series of observation of the live competition,interviews with twelve participants of the competition and two Teaching Research Officers from the Chongqing Institute of Education,this study conducted a qualitative research in order to understand the participants' journey in the competition,to explore the influence of the teaching competition on the participants' self-understanding as educators,and to propose a grounded theory on how the competition influence the participants' professional self-understanding.In the competition,participants were exposed to performance-related and organizationalrelated stressors which inevitably resulted in various stressful situations,conflicts and negative emotions.Facing the emotional turmoil in the process,they had to frequently use various emotion regulation strategies such as situation modification,attentional deployment,cognitive change,and even response modulation when there was no time to conduct deep acting.The process of dealing with various pressures and negative factors had led the participants to conduct self-reflection.The negative emotions were monitored,targeted and restructured,and they boosted the participants' efforts to give the best performance.During the process of the competition,participants underwent and received both negative and positive experience and effects.Negative issues included the physical and mental burden that the participants had to go through and,to some degree,the students under their care were neglected.Positive ones included the actual growth and professional development the participants and their teams experienced during the process.The whole process also encouraged participants to pursue professional development even further and to establish a constructive relationship between them.In the end,though the negative issues were severe,most participants agreed that they were overweighed by the positive factors which had promoted their professional development.Through this study,I have discovered that the teaching competition affected its participants' self-understanding as educators by exposing the participants to factors in the competition,triggering emotional thought processes and facilitating self-reflection to occur,and therefore directly or indirectly influencing all five elements of self-understanding.Self-image would experience positive changes or negative changes influenced by the results of the competition(1st place winner or 2nd place winner)and other factors related the teaching competition such as the relationship among peers and teammates,the grinding process,the obstacles(able to be overcome or not),and the impact of obtaining the result.Self-image could also stay constant when the participants had established a more solid self-image created by doing the occupation for a long period of time.Self-esteem would also experience positive changes or negative changes influenced majorly by winning 1st prize or getting 2nd prize,which would have a positive or negative influence,respectively.It could stay constant,however,if the participant had no or minimum pressure to actually win 1st prize in the competition.Task perception would experience growth,as well as clarifications of professionalism aspects owned and professionalism aspects required(knowledge of the aspects they already had even before the competition and the aspects they still needed to pursue),which promoted the teacher professionalism aspect of continuous development.Realization of a certain level of task perception would trigger participants to reflect on future benefits(upon the realization of a further development that can be obtained)or future consequences(upon realizing their own shortcomings)and to create an achievable goal which is obtainable in the future.Job motivation was found only to have experienced positive changes as the hope of the actualization of these futuristic goals would boost the participants' job motivation.It mostly received influence from the self-image,self-esteem,task perception,and future perspective elements – other elements of self-understanding that were already been influenced by factors in the competition.Finally,future perspective would experience reaffirmation(the confirmation of the present situation as the future objective)or inspiration(the awareness of something new which influences the future objective),influenced by factors of the competition as well as from the other influenced elements of self-understanding(self-image,self-esteem and task perception),though reaffirmation mostly receives influence from the former and inspiration from the latter.Both influences in future perspective could change how they see themselves in the present and how they want themselves to be seen by others in the present and in the future,creating a type of future self-image.By exploring the experience of participating in the teaching competition and,comprehending the effect of emotion regulation strategies,the role of self-reflection and how the competition affected its participants' self-understanding as educators,I concluded that: Selfreflection is the dynamic core of teachers' professional self-understanding.