Educational Psychology Research on Teacher Assignment to a Classroom

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Educational psychologits have ignored for a long time the reason why both teacher assignment to classroom and teacher transfer to school are influencing a life range-development of teaching jobs. It was almost twenty years ago that I had noticed the big differences between the U.S.system and the Japanese system in terms of both teacher assignment to classroom and teacher transfer to school. This research has focused upon the fjrst factor, that is, teacher ssignment to classroom. I found in an American local elementary schoolthat classroom teacher sticks to a paticular grade for a long time, for example, 15 years assignment to 6th grade. In contrast, our experiences tell that in Japanese classroom, teacher tends to move up to next grade with children for at least two years. For example, teachers assigned to 2nd grade in the first year and then moved up to 3 rd grade next year. They did not stick to a certain grade for a long time. That means, in general, that, the carreer development mode of Japanese teacher is ' generalist ' in nature an d its counterpart would be ' specialist mode ', which typically appears in the American classroom mentione d above.This rearch have surveyed various cohort Japanese teachers, starting from just before world-war 2nd to the present in terms of classroom assignment. Our basic research findings confirmed that Japanese elementary school teacher was thought as a specialist, but actually she was generalist in nature. Furthermore, we thought that the teacher's nature as-a generalist did not give good influence to their life-long carrer deve lopment. The reason is that it takes long time to master various kinds of curriculum,teaching-methods and so on in a particular grade of an elementary school.