Professional competencies of teachers and job satisfactory with an emphasis on constructivism

Instructors are one of the main pillars of teaching-learning process that play an undeniable role in improving the quality or disqualifying the educational system. UNESCO sees education as the key to the development of societies and a path that empowers individuals to realize competencies and increase control over the decisions that affect them. However, in order to teach and create sustainable learning, teachers in the education system must have a set of knowledge and skills that are called professional knowledge or professional competencies of the teacher (teacher competencies); at the same time, training capable students is one of the concerns of the education system. In order to have professional and entrepreneurial people, they must be properly and scientifically trained in schools so that they can play their role in the labor market and society properly. This requires improving teaching methods and increasing the skills of teachers. Given that countless people are studying and wanting to do a good job, governments and most likely the people hold the education system, especially teachers and administrators, directly responsible for their learning or non-learning. In this regard, one of the learning strategies in the national curriculum is to benefit more from active, creative and uplifting methods, by innovative and creative organization of the process of collecting and cumulating facts, to provide the basis for science and knowledge. The purpose of this article is study about the relationship between middle school teacher’s job satisfactory and their competency; also measuring the level and amount of this professional competency based on constructivism approach.

The study type is applied research and descriptive (mean and frequency) and in inferential statistics part, mean, independent t-test, single t-test, and Pearson correlation coefficient methods has been used. The competency for constructivism test was used by means of questionnaire. Reliability of the constructivism professional competency questionnaire based on Cronbach's alpha was 0.98 and for questionnaire of job satisfactory based on Cronbach's alpha was 0.81. Middle school teachers (164 male and 177 female teaching during 2016-2017) in Baharestan area were the participants. For sampling, Census method has been used.

Results of independent t-test showed that teachers have an average amount of constructivism professional competency. Based on Pearson correlation coefficient between job satisfactory and constructivism professional competency is 0.37.  In whole, results showed that teachers who have higher job satisfactory will have a higher amount of constructivism professional competency.

Overall, this study showed that teachers have a moderate level of professional competence and in fact a constructive attitude, and this competence is related to teachers' job satisfaction. Therefore, it is suggested to the authorities that appropriate in-service courses be held to familiarize teachers more with the constructivist approach. Also, since job satisfaction is related to the competence of constructive professionals, to make this approach more effective they have to try to provide conditions for job satisfaction of teachers.