Abstract:

For more than three decades, debates have been underway in Bulgaria to reform the education system. Although, robust evidence of the efficacy and attitudes of teachers about the changing environment in the reforming schools is limited. The present paper deploys a quantitative approach in exploring the strategies of professional thinking of teachers. In the paper are compered two studies. In the first are questionnaired about 260 teachers in the schools which are located in the outskirts of the cities; in the second one – about 90 in the Bulgarian villages. In both studies, the subject of the study are small schools in which the learning conditions are similar. This makes it possible to objectively compare respondents' judgments.

The two studies were conducted with scales developed by international scientific collectives: the scales for inductive development of the educational content and for the adaptive-supportive explanation (Max Planck Institute, Berlin) and the questionnaire developed within the COST Action IS1401 "Multilingual Classrooms". The scale for inductive development of the educational content covers four items related to learning concepts - through personal experience, example, rule, or problem solving. The scale for the adaptive-supportive explanation covers five items related to overcoming the difficulties in completing the tasks, the quality of learning, the understanding of the learning content, the efforts in the learning process and with the clear speech of the teacher. From questionnaire developed within the COST Action only some of the statements will be used in the analysis of the results such as curriculum instruction in the first language and its relationship with the proficiency in the target language, the emphasizing the positive connection between languages, if children should be encouraged to learn different languages and children who know several languages will achieve better results across disciplines.

To the extent that statistical calculations are forthcoming, we cannot specify specific numerical values. But, by comparing the percentages of frequencies and the means in the two different samples, we can find the answers of the following research questions:

- Which kind of pedagogical strategies we are needed to engage each child to quality education?
- How to orient the learning to the individual interests of the students with different cultural background?
- What “new professionalism” means for teachers working in difficult social conditions?

As a whole we expect, that the results indicate how much teacher pay careful attention to the multicultural diversity of the students. Based on statistical calculations could be detected some patterns of the teaching dispositions to the students who are motivated to learn and are ready to overcome the difficulties of establishing their multiple identities.

Keywords:

Multicultural, primary school, mathematic, teacher.