Investigation of the influence of professional competence on the quality of scripts

Past research on teacher professional development suggests that a profound professional knowledge is a prerequisite for high quality instruction. However, in the classroom teachers often do not build on their professional knowledge; instead they fall back on teaching routines – so called scripts. Ideally, these scripts develop from teachers’ professional knowledge. When planning lessons, teachers use their professional knowledge to create lesson plans. The implementation of these lesson plans and teachers’ reflection upon it leads to their refinement. Lesson plans that worked as expected are endorsed; lesson plans that did not work as expected will be adopted in future lesson planning. With the time, successful lesson plans develop into scripts that teachers can readily make use of during instruction. This process is affected by teachers’ beliefs, motivation and self-regulation abilities, as other aspects of professional competence. The study presented here aims at the analysis of the influence of aspects of professional competence on the quality of scripts. Professional competence and the quality of scripts were surveyed with an online-questionnaire. This instrument was administered to a sample of N=148 students, in-service teachers and teachers. The findings suggest that motivation and self-regulation are important factors for the quality of scripts and that professional knowledge plays a minor role.