New Perspectives in Science Education

Being a teacher means not only to perform specific teaching tasks. Current school context characteristics require capabilities to handle different situations and relationships. Hence, communication and flow of information among involved informants become prior and worthy of attention. Integrated information of students’ parents and colleagues could facilitate teachers’ work.

Existing research has found that parents-teachers active communication is a fundamental component to a child’s quality education. Literature has already recognized the importance of communication among teachers and children’s parents, but little has been done in relation with colleagues’ communication.

This study aimed to explore the relationship between teachers’ communication with parents, teachers’ communication with colleagues and perceived general self-efficacy’s teachers. Several researches have showed positive effects of self-efficacy such as teacher’s well-being, good professional practices, and more positive students’ outcomes. Our focus was to analyze the effective capacity to deal with even more complex situations.

Participants were 562 teachers working in North-East Italy primary school, lower secondary school and upper secondary school. They completed an on-line questionnaire using a 7-point Likert scale which includes i) measures related to students’ parents: degree of communal language between parents and teachers, facility in communicating, relationship/collaboration, and two dimensions of mind perception; ii) measures related to teachers’ colleagues: self-efficacy on oral communication, trust, respect and objectives’ sharing.

The data was analyzed with SPSS.18 using descriptive and inferential statistics. The analysis of the data indicated that teachers communicated easily with parents (Average = 5.28; SD = 1.36), they established a good relationship with them (Average = 5.07; SD = 1.25) and they attributed Agency (Average = 4.38; SD = 1.05) and Experience (Average = 4.33; SD = 1.13) equally.

Teachers’ level of self-efficacy on oral communication with colleagues was high (Average = 5.34; SD = 0.79); they used to share goals and interventions with the other teachers (Average = 5.91; SD = 1.00) and they have trust in them (Average = 5.30; SD = 1.17).

General self-efficacy correlated positively with self-efficacy on oral communication with colleagues (r = ,580, p < .001), capability to establish a good relationship with parents (r = .360, p < .001), Agency (r = .280, p < .001) and Experience (r = .157, p < .005) attribution, perceived respect (r = .447, p <.001) and trust in colleagues (r = .379, p < .001).

Our results confirmed that a good communication with students’ parents and colleagues increases perceived general self-efficacy and facilitates teachers’ work.