Browsing by Subject "työnsuunnittelu"

Objectives. There is only a little research on teachers' perceptions of planning; the prior research has been local and limited mostly to lesson planning. Teachers' views between Finland and the Czech Republic have not been studied. The objective of this study is to find out what are the teachers' views of planning in a basic school context. This study aims to find out what are the areas planning consists of, which factors affect them, how language teachers plan their work and what differences can be found in the language teachers' planning based on the country, teaching experience and the teaching context. Methods. Overall, 12 basic school teachers took part in the study. Five of them taught in the Czech Republic and seven in Finland. The research data consisted of recorded and transcribed semi-structured interviews that were held individually either in person or in distance via phone or video calls. The data were analysed through qualitative content analysis by coding the transcripts based on both theory and the collected research data. The codes were then categorised to five themes, and these themes were divided into subclasses. The chosen parts of the data were first analysed as a whole and then grouped based on the teachers' background information. Results and conclusions. The language teachers' work included both short-term and long-term instructional planning. Planning objectives, assessment, teacher's schedule and other work tasks were also included in planning. Besides, the teachers collected and created materials and took part in curriculum work or worked on other school-specific documents. Writing brief notes was the most common means of planning. There were no striking differences in teachers' planning based on their years of experience. Lower secondary teachers included the students' thoughts more, and teachers of more unusual languages or advanced groups created more materials than other teachers. The teachers working in Finland included more technology in their planning and plans, talked more widely about curriculum work and had more scheduled co-planning time in comparison to their colleagues in the Czech Republic.