Teachers’ Professional Self-Efficacy for Collaboration: A Comparison Between European Countries

Abstract

Since the understanding of non-cognitive skills and their importance have grown, it becomes more and more significant to measure their impact on different areas of professional life. It has been researched that not only individual teacher’s professional self-efficacy, but also collective self-efficacy has a significant impact on both the teachers’ self-efficacy and students’ achievement. The purpose of this study is to select a set of factors that correlate with teachers’ professional self-efficacy and to analyse if teachers’ professional self-efficacy has an impact on teachers’ cooperation with colleagues and students. Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish data from the OECD TALIS 2018 teacher questionnaires were used. o analyse which factors correlate with teachers’ professional self-efficacy, the authors of this article selected such variables as the type of school, the type of urbanization, the number of special education students in the class, full time or partial time employment, professional development courses and the professional development at university level. The authors found that there were no significant correlations between the type of school, the type of urbanization, and the number of special education students in the classroom, but there was a significant correlation between professional development courses and the professional development during the university study period. The teachers who worked full time job were more self-efficient than others. To study the impact of self-efficacy on collaboration, the authors of this article selected variables that represented teacher – student collaboration and teacher – teacher collaboration. The professional self-efficacy scale was partitioned into four efficacy levels and each level was analysed with answers from each variable. The group comparison and the linear regression analysis showed that teachers with higher self-efficacy levels cooperated more and better with students and colleagues. Thus, this research adds supplementary evidence to studies showing the importance of professional self-efficacy development.