Name of Reporter : Julie F.

Colarina
Course : Master of Arts in Education
Major in Administration and Supervision
Subject : ED 204- SUPERVISION OF INSTRUCTION
Topic : Psychological Dilemma and Frustration
Professor : Judith Bayos Maigue, Ed.D.
Date of Report : March 20, 2022

PSYCHOLOGICAL DILEMMA AND FRUSTRATION

Psychological Dilemma- situation where a choice between desirable or undesirable alternatives is

needed.

Frustration- is a common emotional response to opposition, related anger, annoyance and

disappointment.
- arises from the perceived resistance to the fulfillment of an individual’s will or goal
and is likely to increase when a will or goal is denied
or blocked.

The Teacher…
 Teachers have thousands of such psychological encounters in a normal school day
(Jackson,1968)
 Teacher must instruct, manage, discipline, reinforce, socialize, and attend to multiple
occurrences.
 Sarason (1996) describe this incessant demand as a psychological dilemma.

Routine
 Teacher’s routine is imposed by administrative fiat, school board policy, and state guidelines.
Every classroom teacher is required to be at school before students enter and to remain until
they have departed.
 Sarason(1996) raises a question concerning the effects of routine on teachers and students.

INADEQUATE INDUCTION OF BEGINNING TEACHERS

Beginning teachers in many schools are faced with a number of environmental difficulties:
1. inadequate resources
2. difficult work assignments
3. unclear expectations
4. a sink-or-swim mentality, and
5. reality shock
(Gordon,1991; Gordon &Maxey,2000; Colley,2002; Johnson &Kardos,2002)

1. Inadequate resources

The neophyte teacher with the least amount of experience often steps into the physically
least desirable classroom to the school, with discards for furniture and equipment, and few
instructional materials.
2. Difficult Work Assignments
A teacher's first year on the job is often difficult. According to research, student achievement
tends to be significantly worse in the classrooms of first-year teachers before rising in teachers'
second and third years (Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005

15 percent leave the profession and another 14 percent change schools after their first year, often
as the result of feeling overwhelmed, ineffective, and unsupported (Ingersoll & Smith, 2003;
Smith & Ingersoll, 2004).

3. Unclear expectations
“the condition of not knowing”- Corcoran,1981

4. Sink-or-swim mentality
 Administrators and teachers tend to view the first year of teaching as a necessary “trial
by fire” through which all neophytes must pass.
 Many experienced colleagues are reluctant to provide assistance because of norms of
individuals or privacy and some think that it is only fair that new teachers should pass
through the same trials and tribulations that they navigated when they were beginners.
 Some see it as a process that “weeds out” weak teachers, allowing only strong teachers
to survive.
 Novice teachers often do not ask for help because they fear that a request for
assistance will call into question their professional competence. So they often go to
great lengths to conceal their classroom problems(Newberry,1978)

5. Reality shock
Veenman (1984) defined as “the collapse of the missionary ideals formed during teacher
training by the harsh and rude reality of classroom life.”

6. Effects of environmental difficulties

 Stress
 Physical and emotional problems
 Negative attitude
 Leave teaching profession

o Many of the most promising teachers are the ones who leave the profession early in their
careers (Harris & Colley,1990).

o However, many teachers who stay in the profession develop a survival mentality, a narrow set
of teaching methods, resistance to experimentation and change that may last through their
teaching careers (Romatowski, Dorminey, and Van Voorhees,1989; Huling-Austin, 1986)

o In recent years, many school districts have initiated beginning teacher assistance programs or
TIP (Teacher Induction Programs) to address the problems.

7. Inequity

 The inequity between experienced and beginning teachers is not the only type of disparity
often found in conventional districts and schools.
 Schools located in lower-income communities often are not provided the same resources as
other schools in the same district such as physical facilities, textbooks and instructional materials.
8. Unstaged career

 More prestigious professions avoid such an abrupt transition from student to full professional.
 Teaching on the other hand, has been unstaged from entry to exit. Education majors take
courses, spend time in schools, perform as student teachers, and then graduate from college into their
own classrooms as teachers. And no matter how many years they continue to teach, they do not move
into another stage.

9. Lack of dialogue about instruction

 People in school do not talk about their work teaching with each other.

 DeSanctis and Blumberg (1979) found that the length of instruction-related discussion among
teachers in a typical school day in a high school in New York was 2 minutes.
 For teachers to talk often and seriously with each other about the core of their job-instruction
and curriculum-is a rarity in many schools.

 Faculty meetings are information giving, and when school concerns are raised, they are often
deflected to non-instructional matters such as schedules, district policies, extracurricular
responsibilities, and building maintenance.

 The lack of dialogue is related to the one-room school house legacy, which accepts isolation,
privacy, and lack of career stages as the norms of teaching.

“The duties of a teacher are neither few nor small, but they elevate the mind and give energy to the
character”-Dorothea Dix