Wajeha T. Al-Ani, Thuwayba A. Al barwani and Sana S. Al-Balushi
This paper presents findings of a study which aimed at defining effective teaching in the Omani context as it is perceived by teachers (TE), students (ST), and school administrators and supervisors (AS) in government schools in Oman. Three main questions were addressed in this study: How is teaching effectiveness defined in Oman? Do teachers, students and school administrators define it differently? To what extent does the Omani definition differ from that of the other countries? To answer these questions, data were collected using a questionnaire developed by generating a list of effective teacher characteristics from the literature. The items of the questionnaire were piloted. The final version of the instrument comprised 85 items divided into six domains: personality traits, professional characteristics, teaching strategies, implementation skills, academic characteristics, and community relationships. Total reliability coefficient of Cronbach-Alpha, was found to be (0.982) for students and (0.978) for teachers, principals, and supervisors. The sample of the study consisted of a total of 3487 respondents. The overall results indicated that personality traits had the highest mean compared to other domains (3.66) for (AS), (4.06) for (TE), and (3.76) for (ST), while the community relationships domain had the lowest mean for all respondents. ANOVA was used to test if there were significant differences between the groups. Findings revealed significant differences in all domains in favor of (TE) compared to (AS) and (ST). In general the Omani data reveals significant agreements with International findings as they relate to priorities given to characteristics such as teacher personality traits (Rushton et al., 2007), classroom atmosphere (Glanz and Neville,1997) and link between content and real life of students (Kottler and Kottler,2000) among others.
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