Spiritual Intelligence of Teachers and Teacher Interns In Relation to their Socioeconomic Status

“Education is a means to an end”, the statement has taken a backseat in the present context of the techno world. The quest for knowledge and truth should be undertaken for its own sake, is becoming the motto of everybody. Education is not primarily for livelihood, but for life as is stressed by the UNESCO. A balanced development of many dimensions of human personality i.e., physical, intellectual, moral, emotional, aesthetic, spiritual and social is the key to true education. The whole purpose of education is to realize the inner dignity of man which ultimately leads to an integral development of personality. The present research aims to explore the spiritual intelligence of teachers and teacher interns in relation to their socio-economic status. A total of 400 teachers and 400 teacher interns were taken as respondents from 10 Senior Secondary Schools and 5 colleges of education through simple random sampling in the sample frame of the present study. To measure the spiritual intelligence of teachers and teacher interns in relation to their socio-economic status, a survey questionnaire was used for data collection. Mean, standard deviation and one-way ANOVA were employed to analyse and interpret the difference of data. After the analysis of data, it was found that the spiritual intelligence of teachers and teacher interns differs with regard to their socio-economic status.

PROMOTING TEACHER EFFECTIVENESS THROUGH A HOLISTIC WELLNESS MODEL

Research was conducted to determine if a holistic wellness model could promote teacher effectiveness with 54 teacher interns at a Mississippi campus. The purpose of this research was to determine whether holistic wellness as defined by creative self, coping self, social self, essential self, and physical self as measured by the 5F-Wel can be used to predict teacher effectiveness as measured by the STAI. The research question proposed for this study was: Is there a relationship between wellness as measured by the Five Factor Wellness Inventory and effective teaching as measured by the STAI? The research design was correlational. A convenience sample of voluntary participants among the 54 teacher interns was used. The predictor variables were the second order factor scores on the 5F-Wel. These factors are creative self, coping self, social self, essential self, and physical self. The dependent variable was the overall formative score on the Student Teacher Assessment Instrument (STAI). Effective teacher research supported the Student Teacher Assessment Instrument as a viable measure of teacher effectiveness. The results obtained show the predictor variables included in the multiple linear regression analysis did not predict teacher effectiveness as measured by the STAI at an accuracy greater than chance. A statistically significant relationship between the predictor variables and dependent variable was not found. Specifically, wellness as measured by the second order factors on the 5F-Wel did not predict teacher effectiveness as measured by the STAI in this study. Recommendations were to replicate this study using similar methodology in other geographical locations. Being that guidelines of state universities are of unison, it can be assumed that dissimilarities exist among the individual programs. Therefore, replicating this study at another university could provide dissimilar results or possibly indentify a specific characteristic from an intern population that would benefit from a holistic wellness model. Key words: teacher efficacy, teacher wellness, holistic wellness, student teacher.