The primary responsibility for the teacher’s adjustment lies with

Concept

Adjustment, in educational psychology, is the continuous process by which a person modifies their own attitudes, behaviour and expectations so as to keep a workable balance between personal needs and the demands of the surrounding environment.

Because the attitudes and behaviour being modified belong to the person who is adjusting, adjustment is a self-regulated process. Outside agencies can create favourable conditions, but they cannot carry out the adaptation on someone else’s behalf, so primary responsibility rests with the individual who has to adjust.

Application

1. The stem asks about the teacher’s adjustment, so the individual who has to adjust here is the teacher.

2. It is the teacher who perceives the demands of the classroom, the institution and the society around the school, and who appraises those demands against their own needs, temperament and professional capacity.

3. It is then the teacher who modifies their own methods, expectations and emotional responses to meet those demands; this appraisal and modification cannot be handed over to anyone else.

4. Hence the primary responsibility for the teacher’s adjustment lies with the teacher himself.

Contrast

Everyone around a school influences the conditions a teacher works in, but influencing the conditions is not the same as owning the adaptation:

• The principal can provide supportive conditions — induction, a reasonable workload, grievance redress — which is administrative facilitation, not the teacher’s own internal adaptation.

• The children shape the day-to-day classroom climate a teacher responds to, so they form part of the environment being adjusted to rather than the agent doing the adjusting.

• The community supplies external expectations, cooperation and resources, which is a contextual influence on the school and again lies outside the teacher’s own adaptive process.

• The teacher himself owns the needs, attitudes and responses that are being adapted, so responsibility for the process begins and stays there.

Cross-check

Note the word “primary”. All four parties can affect how easily a teacher settles into a school, but “primary responsibility” asks who owns the process, and ownership of a self-regulated process cannot be transferred to another party.