PERCEIVED TEACHERS’ RESPONSIBILITY: A STUDY ON A SAMPLE OF ITALIAN PRIMARY AND MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHERS

Over the past twenty years, new responsibilities have been assigned to teachers as a result of education policies based on school autonomy and decentralisation. As a consequence, increasing attention has been placed on teachers’ changing professional role, including their formal level of accountability. However, little is known about teachers’ perceived personal responsibility in the context of their broadened professional roles. The present study was designed to examine professional personal responsibility perceived by a sample of Italian primary and middle school teachers, and the relations between teacher perceived responsibility and personal variables that are conceptually linked to personal perceived, such as: self-efficacy beliefs, motives behind the teacher career-choice and implicit theories of intelligence. Drawing on a sample of 220 teachers, multivariate analysis of variance (GLM – Manova) revealed that the sense of perceived responsibility of teachers is affected principally by the teachers’ school level (primary vs. middle),and by self-efficacy beliefs. The study increases our understanding of how teachers conceptualize their professional responsibility and the factors that shape their sense of responsibility. At the same time, the findings have relevance not only for theory development but also for practice, since teacher responsibility has implications for their well-being, approaches to instruction, and student outcomes.