AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF. TEACHERS’ DESCRIPTIONS OF THE “IDEAL” PUPIL

CHARLES SCHAEFER

The Children’s Village

The first step in the development of an effective educational program is the specification of behavioral goals for children. Ideally, all staff members, and par- ticularly classroom teachers, should be involved in the establishment of behavioral goals or objectives. One of the key factors that influence a teacher’s selection of behavioral goals is his or her personal value system. A promising technique to reveal and clarify teachers’ values is the Ideal Pupil Checklist (IPC) developed by Torrance (1965). The IPC contains 62 pupil characteristics or traits that cover a wide variety of positive and negative behaviors, e .g . , adventurous, bashful, courteous. These traits have been found through empirical studies to differentiate fully actualized or creative persons from less creative people. It should be noted that the word “Ideal” in the IPC title is used in the developmental and hierarchiz! context of Maslow’s (1954) theory, wherein the highly creative and autonomous person is considered to represent the highest level of self-integration and actual- ization.

The IPC provides a model of a systematic and standardized method to record teachers’ reactions to pupil classroom behaviors that should be reinforced and those that should be discouraged. The principal purpose of this pilot study was to in- vestigate the extent of agreement among teachers of emotionally disturbed boys with regard to behavioral goals for the classroom.

METHOD The main respondents in this study were teachers a t a public school located

on the grounds of The Children’s Village, a residential treatment center for emo- tionally disturbed boys. The population of the Village consists of more than 250 boys, aged 6 to 14, with a variety of diagnoses. Many of the boys are from broken homes and commonly are referred for problems related to “unmanageability,” which oft,en incltides aggressive and delinquent behavior. Severely brain-damaged and retarded children are not accepted a t The Children’s Village. For treatment purposes the Village is divided into four comparable treatment units. The five teachers and five teachers’ aidcs in this study all were assigned to work with boys from one of t.he four units. Tile special school a t The Children’s Village is organized SO that a teacher and an aide work with about 10 children in an ungraded classroom.

Each teacher and teacher’s aide was given the IPC and asked to check those characteristics that describe the ‘5deal” pupil in their class. They were asked to double check the five characteristics that they considered most important. In addition, they were asked to cross out those characteristics that they usually discourage in their classroom. They could check or cross out as many character- istics as they wished. For the “ideal” traits, a single check was assigned a score of + I by the author, while a double check received +2; the characteristics that were crossed out were scored -1. This is the scoring procedure recommended by the author of the IPC (Torrance, 1965). Thus for the 10 respondents the total possible range of scores for cach pupil characteristic was +20 to - 10. The higher the score, the more closely did the respondents associate the trait with the “ideal” pupil.

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446 CHARLES SCHAEFER

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Table 1 tabulates the responses of the teachers and aides to each of the 62

pupil characteristics listed on the IPC. It is apparent from Table 1 that sub- stantial agreement with regard to the favorableness-unfavorableness of the traits was reached for only 23 of the 62 pupil characteristics. For the purposes of this study substantial agreement was defined arbitrarily as 40% or more of the re- spondents in accord with either a 1 or 2 rating, i.e., a difference of 8 points between positive and negative points. According to this procedure it was found that a substantial number of teachers agreed that an “ideal” pupil should be altruistic, self-starting, considerate, courteous, curious, competitive, etc., while he should not be disturbing to the class, fault-finding, negativistic, etc. For many of the other traits the respondents showed little or no consensus about the ideal nature of the traits. Indeed, for several traits they revealed a clear disagreement with regard to the fundamental question of whether the characteristic was favorable or un- favorable (see emotional, regresses occasionally, stubborn, talkative). Such sources of disagreement clearly indicate the need for ongoing inservice seminars or workshops wherein differing values and opinions about pupil behaviors can be discussed openly in the light of such factors as institutional goals, situational factors, and normal personality development.

With a view toward contrasting some of the above findings with those from teachers of children in regular public schools, the author asked all of the fourth- and fifth-grade teachers from two public schools in New York City to complete the IPC. The student population in these two schools and at The Children’s Village contains about 50% Black, 15% Puerto Rican, and 35% Caucasian children. In the main, these children are from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Table 2 contains six characteristics of the “ideal” pupil that received the highest ranking from teachers in the regular schools, as well as similar data from the teachers at The Children’s Village. Table 2 reveals a remarkable consensus in the kinds of pupil traits that the three groups of teachers value most highly.

TABLE 2. DESCRIPTION OF “IDEAL” PUPIL BY THREE GROUPS OF TEACHERS

Children’s Village Teachers Public School Teachers, Public School Teachers, (N = 10) Bronx, N. Y. Queens, N. Y.

(N = 11) (N = 13)

Considerate of others Desires to excel Considerate of others Independent of judgrneiit Curious Determination Determination Self-starter Independent of thinking

Independent of thinking Considerate of others Sense of humor

Receptive t o ideas of others Determination

Sense of humor Independent thinking Versatility

Receptive to ideas of others

All three groups described the “ideal” pupil as considerate of others, indepen- dent in thinking, and possessing determination. Noteworthy is the finding that the teachers seemed to value the development of social skills (donsideration of others, receptive to the ideas of others) as much as intellectual and motivational

TEACHERS’ DESCRIPTIONS OF THE “IDEAL” PUPIL 447

variables. Thus, special education and regular classroom teachers of urban dis- advantaged youths appear quite similar in terms of the positive classroom be- haviors that they value most highly in children.

In future research it would be desirable to conduct a large-scale study of the relationship, if any, between teachers’ values and pupil behavior changes in both the academic and personal-social areas. One could examine the extent to which teacher values are shared by the parents of the classroom children. Such an in- vestigation would help to determine whether the values of teachers are related more to their personal background and philosophy or to the needs and cultures of the children whom they serve. In those instances in which teachers and parents are found to share common behavioral objectives for the child, the researcher might investigate the techniques whereby they could work together to achieve these common goals. For instance, Hawkins and Sluyter (1972) recommend that teachers send letters home that describe a child’s progress on certain behaviors. Parents then are to reward the child for appropriate behavior in these areas.

The Children’s Village Dobbs Ferry, N. Y. 10522

REFERENCES HAWKINS, 11. P., dz SLurrm, D. J. Modification of achievement by tl simple technique irivolving

MASLOW, A. H, Motivation and personality. New York: Harper, 1954. TORRANCE, E. P. Rewarding creative behavior. Englewood Cliffs, N. J . : Prentice Hall, 1965.

parents and teachers. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 1972,5,20-28.

IDEALS OF UPPER ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN THOMAS H. HAWKES

Temple University

In 1898 Darrah (1898) reported the results of a study in which she had asked 1400 children, ages 8 to 16, in the schools of San Mateo, California, and St. Paul, Minnesota, to name a person whom they would like to resemble. Four years later Barnes (1902)) a leading proponent of the child-study movement in the United States, asked great numbers of New Jersey school children to write essays that concerned persons about whom they had heard, read, seen or known, real or imagi- nary, and whom they would like to resemble m d to tell why. The Darrah and Barnes studies are the first of a series over the past 75 years conducted in the United States, England, New Zealand, and South America that have studied the ideal choices of children and reasons given for those choices. These data have been used as clues to an understanding of children’s ethical and moral development.

For heuristic purposes these studies can be subgrouped into three sets. The studies in the first set (1898-1946) (Darrah, 1898; Barnes, 1900, 1902; Goddard, 1906; Hill, 1911, 1930; Bateman, 1916; Phelen, 1936; Stoughton & Ray, 1946) essentially were replications of the Barnes study and were conducted in various