The Opinions of Teacher Trainer About Devoted Teaching Profession*

The purpose of this research is to determine the opinions of the faculty members about devoted teaching profession, from Ziya Gökalp Faculty of Education at Dicle University. This research is qualitative study exploring the views of teacher trainer about teacher devotion. In the study, phenomenological design was utilized. The participants of this study involved 30 teacher trainer working at Ziya Gökalp Faculty of Education, Dicle University in the academic year of 2016-2017. In the study, a semi-structured interview form developed by the researchers was utilized as a data collection tool. The results obtained from the research data are given within the framework of the research questions. The answers given to the questions were analyzed by way of content analysis method. Regarding the results of the research, the teacher trainers responded the question of “who is devoted teacher” through identifying a person who can go beyond their usual tasks, spare extra time for his/her students; who respects social values and profession; who has responsibility; who develops himself/herself in terms of academic and socio-cultural ways; who has empathy, good communication skills; and who does not expect any financial matters for the duties carried out.


INTRODUCTION
Teacher is the person who frequently interacts with his/her students, guides the students through his/her behaviors, implements educational programs to give the desired goals to the students, uses a wide range of methods and techniques to provide permanent learning for the students, prepares facilities in order to ensure effective participation of the students in the learning process, monitors the results of the implementations, and evaluates them (Yaşar, 2008). Teacher is the most important variable of the teaching-learning process. The development of our social, economic and political life depends on the qualities and abilities of teachers who are directly responsible for changing the behavior of the masses. Depending on the number and quality of teachers, the contribution of education to society becomes sufficient or insufficient (Kaya, 1984). In order to prepare students for social life and to contribute to the development of society, teacher must have some professional and personal characteristics.
The required professional qualifications of teachers are regarded by several authors as subject area knowledge, teaching profession knowledge and skills, and general culture (Demirel, 2014,176;Erden, 2014, 148). The professional knowledge and skills that teachers should have are as follows: planning instructional activities, utilizing instructional methods and techniques, communicating effectively, classroom management, effective use of time, evaluating learning, making guidance (Demirel, 2014). Having the basic task of socializing students and transferring social culture to the students, teachers need to know the cultural characteristics of the society where they live (Erden, 2014). In teacher training programs of our country, the main objective is to get prospective teachers to gain expertise in a specific field like mathematics teacher, science teacher, Turkish teacher. Consequently, it is intended that teachers should obtain subject area knowledge through some of the courses in the curriculum of the Faculty of Education. As for the professional success of teachers, teachers primarily need to know their own field of expertise (Şişman, 1999).
With respect to the personal characteristics of the teacher, it is evident that numerous studies have been conducted on this subject. The characteristics obtained from the respective researches are as follows; being tolerant and patient; being open-minded, flexible, and adaptive; being merciful, tactful, and humorous; expecting high success, being encouraging, and supportive; being able to investigate educational problems through the use of scientific methods; taking individual differences into consideration in education; openness to innovations and developments; constantly renewing oneself; understanding and interpreting social changes; respecting people's freedom of opinion, religion and conscience; acknowledging change positively and necessary in every institution, understanding anxiety and tension all the time and minimizing it; being motivating, fair, and devoted (Çelikten, Şanal, & Yeni, 2005;Demirel, 2014;Erden, 2014;Taşkaya, 2012;Varış, 1998;Yetim & Göktaş, 2004). As it is observed, devotion is one of the personality traits that a teacher should have.
Devotion which is defined as giving up one's own interests for anything that is sought or for the sake of an end, giving up one's own personal wishes, aspirations and desires, showing sacrifice, is one of the most important characteristics of the teaching profession like sacrifice, patience and tolerance (Bakırcıoğlu, 2014;Türk Dil Kurumu, 2017). Monroe (2002) asserts that devotion refers to acting for the sake of others. Engaged with people who are biological, psychological and sociocultural beings, a teacher should be compassionate, devoted, tolerant and patient towards people (Helvacı, 2016). Teaching is a profession that requires characteristics like altruism, tolerance, continuous self-renewal, fulfilling the profession with love as well as field knowledge and professional knowledge (Girgin & Baysal, 2005).
According to Burns and Carpenter (2008), in effective and successful schools, teachers should continue to work diligently against the challenges they experience, in order to be more useful for their students and to achieve the goals of the school more effectively and rapidly. With a similar fashion, as for contributing to their schools, it is crucial that teachers act with the spirit of the team and with the consciousness of being "we", and work voluntarily in devotion and sacrifice beyond what is expected of them (Bogler & Somech, 2005). In consideration of the fact that the teacher pursues his/her career not only within the boundaries of school but also in every phase of his/her life, teaching profession mandates a teacher to make sacrifices in terms of biological, psychological and social needs and desires (Yetim & Göktaş, 2004). Emphasizing that the new generation would be raised by Republic's dedicated teachers and educators, at the congress of Teachers' Association in 1924, Atatürk asserted that the value of the students as the works of teachers depended on the degree of devotion and altruism of their teachers (Atatürk, 1924).
A number of scholars have noted that teachers should be devoted while doing their duties, and that they are expected to be so. In their studies, Taşkın and Hacıömeroğlu (2010) have indicated patience and altruism as the qualities which prospective teachers are required to have in studentteacher interaction. Özgan, Bulut, Bulut, and Bozbayındır (2013) found that devotion, one of the components of spiritual leadership, is an important predictor of motivation for teachers. Investigating prospective teachers' attitudes towards teaching profession in their study, Akıllı and Seven (2010) found out that the participants identified the components of teaching profession with superior values such as honor, patience, and devotion. In his research to explore the views of teachers regarding teaching profession, who started teaching profession in the past (in 1942(in ) and in 2003(in , Semerci (2009 listed personal qualities that teachers should have, as the concepts like patience, dedication, empathy, prudence, love-respect, tolerance, care, embracing students. As it suggests here, devotion is one of the qualities teachers should have. Teaching has started to develop as a profession with the emergence of organized and formal schools, established as a result of becoming more important and better understanding of the function of education in the social life system. In the beginning, teaching profession who had been regarded as clergy and wise people. After the 18th-century, under the influence of social phenomena such as the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, the idea that it is a profession that requires special expertise, and knowledge, skills and competencies which can only be gained through formal education, has become widespread. With the spread of this opinion, in the first half of the 19th century, educational institutions providing teacher education in Germany, France, England and Belgium started to be opened, and it has become increasingly widespread in all countries in the 20th century (Sağlam, 2008). Our country, considering the establishment of Darulmüallim in 1848, can be regarded to have a history of about 150 years in teacher training. After the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, both the education system and the teacher training system for various types and levels of schools within the system have been restructured. Between the years of 1923-1954, village institutes were established to serve in village schools. Higher teacher schools, which were established to educate qualified teachers for secondary schools, are also a successful teacher training model. The developments in the field of teacher training are as follows; from 1974 onwards, the teacher training was taken into the higher education level, giving the responsibility of teacher education to universities in 1982; the training period for all the teaching areas became four years in 1989, and all teacher training programs were gathered in Faculty of Education in 1992; secondary education teacher training programs became 5-5.5 years in 1997; after 2013 the duration of education in all levels has become 4 years (Aydın, 1998;Sağlam, 2008).
In our country, the courses of teacher training are carried out by faculty members (Instructor, Lecturer, Research Assistant, Research Assistant Doctor, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor) in the faculties of Education. In that sense, it is important to know the opinions of the faculty members about the teaching of devotion in teacher training. The results of this research are regarded to contribute to the development of teacher education programs in various aspects. The purpose of this research is to determine the opinions of the faculty members about devoted teaching profession, from Ziya Gökalp Faculty of Education at Dicle University. In this context, the following questions have been sought.
1-"Who is the devoted teacher for you? Could you explain?" 2-"Have you ever done devoting behavior throughout your education life? Could you exemplify these behaviors?" 3-"What are your suggestions for raising devoted teachers while training prospective teachers?"

METHOD Design of the Study
This research is qualitative study exploring the views of teacher trainer about teacher devotion. In the study, phenomenological design was utilized. Phenomenology, a method of examining and identifying ontology of objects, seeks to answer the question of "what is real" (Baş & Akturan, 2013;Creswell, 2007). In this type of studies, in fact, we focus on phenomenon which we are aware of, but no deeper understanding of them (Şimşek, 2012). In this context, it is thought that the participants experienced devoted teaching, because all of the participants teach actively.

Participants
The participants of this study involved 30 teacher trainer at Ziya Gökalp Faculty of Education, Dicle University in the academic year of 2016-2017. The inclusion criteria to the study depended on the conditions that teacher trainer gave classes and were volunteer to participate during the period of the study. Each participant in the study was coded as "Participant 1 (P1), Participant 2 (P2), etc. Demographic characteristics of participating teacher trainers are displayed in Table 1. Instructor 2

Data Collection Tool
In the study, a semi-structured interview form developed by the researchers was utilized as a data collection tool. A semi-structured interview is a sort of interview for the purpose of gathering similar type of information about the studied subject from the participants (Şimşek, 2012). The draft prepared by examining the extant literature was finalized through taking the opinion of five experts in the field of educational sciences. Three questions were addressed to the faculty members through the interview form prepared in accordance with this approach.
In this study, the data collection process was carried out by the researchers. The interviews took approximately 15-20 minutes. The researchers were careful not to influence the participants during the research and to be neutral in conveying the obtained results to the reader. To end this, the data were collected from the participants in written form and evaluated as it was collected. Some direct quotations are included in the data analysis stage.

Data Analysis
The results obtained from the research data are given within the framework of the research questions. The answers given to the questions were analyzed by way of content analysis method. The responds are descriptively displayed as well. In the descriptive analysis, the data is summarized and interpreted according to the categories or dimensions that were previously defined. However, content analysis is the process of gathering similar data around specific concepts and themes and arranging them with comprehensible scheme (Yıldırım & Şimşek, 2011). In this research, the questions are regarded as themes and the answers to each question are coded under these questions. The reliability of the study was calculated through the formula of Miles and Huberman (1994); (Reliability: Consensus / (Consensus + Dissent). According to Miles and Huberman (1994), the criteria that the consistency of the codes done by experts in researches should be 70% or above, is an indication of reliability. Depending on this formula, the reliability of this study was calculated as 95 %. Hence, this study can be regarded as reliable.

Ethical Procedure
In the study, participants were informed about the purpose of the research and their voluntary consent was obtained for the administration of interviews. The opinions of the participants were expressed in the findings section as it was transcribed. No misleading data collection process was applied to the participants. The data obtained did not include any information about the identity of the participants. No information was requested to reveal the identity of the participant. During the analysis of the data, different encoders were involved in order not to manipulate the results and the reliability between encoders was provided.

FINDINGS
This section contains the findings obtained from the analysis of the data and comments based on the findings.

1-
"Who is the devoted teacher for you? Could you explain?" The codes and frequency distributions obtained from the answers of faculty members to the question are given in Table 2.  -interests  3  Patient  3  Tolerant  3  Thoughtful  3  Organized  3 With respect to the examination of Table 2, the most frequent codes from the responds provided by the faculty members for the question of "who is the dedicated faculty member for you?" are as follows; "Able in allocating time", "Good communication skills", "Providing financial and moral support to the student", "Self-improving (social, academic, cultural)", "Showing empathy (towards parents and students)", "Love (Human-Profession-Student)", "Respectful to societal values", "Responsible", "Disregarding materialistic benefit", "Going beyond the duties". Some of the answers of the faculty members are given below as examples.
P2. It is the person who performs his/her duties without expecting any materialistic benefit during teaching profession, tries to undertake the duties despite the challenges and does not have any materialistic expectations in achieving these responsibilities. (Disregarding materialistic benefit) P3. Starting from the first day of the profession, the dedicated teacher is responsible for the student group s/he has raised and his/her family; never forgets that s/he always respect the values of the society where s/he has grown up; enhances his/her knowledge and constantly updates themselves without depending on the knowledge capital gained through undergraduate education and the classes given, and do their best. (Respectful to societal values-Self-improving (social, academic, cultural) P6. He/she should be responsible; should take care of their students out of the class as well; should be in contact with the families of the students; should be aware of the fact that the students who will be educated, will teach their children in the future; and they should be aware that the students have an important role in the training of qualified personnel who will work for the future of the country. (Good communication skills (parents-students-colleagues)).
P11. Should be self-confident; be competent; be able to devote additional time to students; investigate the causes and outcomes of low student grades; have knowledge about their family as much as possible; reflect their mother or father's compassion in balance with the boundaries of respect zone. (Helpful-Love (Human-Profession-Student)) P18. Devotion means giving up and sacrificing your own interests for a purpose or anything that needs to be accomplished; while devoted teacher make more effort for their students and profession, they have to allocate more time by sacrificing sleeping time and materialistic interests; they have to allocate time for the students learning late and hard while they have to focus on the gifted students, as well. In short, they should be able to sacrifice for their students and society in all legitimate issues. (Able in allocating time)

2-
In Table 3, the obtained responds of faculty members for the question "Have you ever done devoting behavior throughout your education life? Could you exemplify these behaviors?" are displayed in accordance with the frameworks of "yes" and "no" codes.

Table 3. Codes and frequency distributions obtained from the answers of faculty members for the question "Have you ever done devoting behavior throughout your education life? Could you exemplify these behaviors?"
Codes Frequency Yes Sparing extra time 9 Supporting (Psychological, economic) 7 Doing voluntary work 5 Guidance (career, course etc.,) 5 Professional self-renewal and development 3 Having close communication with students 3 Doing preparation for lessons in advance 2 Educating devoted teachers 2 No 3 With respect to the examination of Table 3, the examples associated with the devoting behavior of faculty members throughout their education life are as follows; "Sparing extra time", "Supporting (Psychological, economic)", "Guidance (career, course etc.,)", "Doing voluntary work", "Professional self-renewal and development", "Having close communication with students", "Doing preparation for lessons in advance", "Educating devoted teachers". Some of the responds of faculty members are provided below.

P1. Educating one requires effort, tolerance, and patience. You need to exert empathy with students, help them, outside of classroom hours. I believe that I have these qualities. Also, you should renew and improve yourself professionally. (Doing voluntary work -Professional self-renewal and development).
P9. I suppose that I have also reflected devoting behaviors during my career, especially in those years of being teacher. I tried to support students and solved their problems outside of formal schooling time, like especially allocating more time for them and helping them financially (Sparing extra time). P11. Yes. Lots of times. For instance, many students came into my office and shared their problems outside of classroom time such as health and family problems or girlfriend/boyfriend problems, financial constraints, spiritual problems. As far as I could, I listened to them for a few hours, then they left my room with a mood of happiness and relation. Even, one student who I directed to a psychologist, told me that s/he became relaxed much more in my room than that of a psychologist, and added "Could I talk with you". This made me happy, which meant that I can help my students. (Supporting (Psychological, economic)).

3-
In Table 4, the codes and frequency distributions obtained from the responds of faculty members for the question "What are your suggestions for raising devoted teachers while training prospective teachers?" are displayed. Through the analysis of Table 4, the highest frequency codes obtained from the responds of faculty members for the question "What are your suggestions for raising devoted teachers while training prospective teachers?" are observed as; "Role model/ Reflecting an exemplary profile", "Selection of lower socio-economic level schools for teaching practice and school experience classes", "Constructing teaching entrance system within the context of personal characteristics of being teacher", "Restructuring the system in the light of national and moral values", "Sharing good practices", "Empathy/sharing grief", "Giving the moral values of society", "Enforcement/ incentives", "Love/love of profession", "Performing additional classes", "Educating good people". Some of the examples associated with the codes are below.

P5. For training devoted teachers, teachers who raise them must exhibit exemplary devoting behaviors in their roles and actions. (Role model/ Reflecting an exemplary profile)
P16. First of all, we have to check student admission criteria to faculty of education; we may take YGS and LYS scores (university entrance scores) into account, but not enough. Along with these, psychological tests and attitude tests may be important. Unfortunately, we appoint teachers who actually do not like to be with students. After high school, a mid-selection period can be organized or all fields may administer psychological tests in this term. (Constructing teaching entrance system within the context of personal characteristics of being teacher)

P14. It is necessary to assess whether the expectations, skills, and personality of the students are appropriate for teacher training; prospective teachers should be able to deal with real-time teaching situations during professional training; it is important to support prospective teachers with extra (out of class) activities for their individual and professional development. For instance, it's like they take a role in giving voluntary complementary-education to financially low-level students.
(Constructing teaching entrance system within the context of personal characteristics of being teacher) P2. We should especially focus on community-service practices, teaching practice. These course should be done in city-centers, but village schools. (Selection of lower socio-economic level schools for teaching practice and school experience classes).

CONCLUSION, DISCUSSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Regarding the results of the research, the faculty members responded the question of "who is devoted teacher" through identifying a person who can go beyond their usual tasks, spare extra time for his/her students; who respects social values and profession; who has responsibility; who develops himself/herself in terms of academic and socio-cultural ways; who has empathy, good communication skills; and who does not expect any financial matters for the duties carried out. As an example of devoting behavior in educational life, the faculty members gave the practices as sparing extra time for students, volunteer work, and all kinds of material and moral assistance. According to the faculty members, devoted teacher behaviors should be; to allocate extra time for students, to be in communication (parent-student colleague), and to be helpful. The suggestions of the faculty members for educating devoted teachers are as follows: "being a role model/reflecting an exemplary profile; in teaching practice and appropriate classes (school experience/teaching practice) selection of disadvantaged schools outside of school-neighborhood, -if possible-especially requiring devotion, reconstructing teaching entrance system within the context of personal characteristics of being teacher.
According to the faculty members, the devoted teacher is the person who gives up his/her financial interests and who does not care about personal interests. According to Topçu (2004), teaching is not an issue of money but a matter of spiritual profession. The teacher is not a merchant. A person who gives importance to his profession in accordance with the scarcity and abundance of wages and salaries, cannot be considered to be doing this holy duty.
According to the faculty members, the devoted teacher is the person who provides material and spiritual support to the students. As a living being, people experience a number of family-related, professional, social, and personal problems in their daily lives. It can be challenging to deal with these problems for students who are still in the youth period of life (Hatunoğlu & Hatunoğlu, 2006). In this respect, teachers' interests in these problems out of the classroom can provide a solution for students with this type of problem. Klem and Connell (2004) report that teacher support is important in student school attendance and success. Gerler and Anderson (1986) state that teachers' classroom guidance plays an important role in students' achievements. Croninger and Lee (2001) emphasized that teacher support and guidance for students is important in preventing student retention. In his research, Lee (1993) concluded that teacher guidance positively affects students' academic success.
A teacher who develops oneself in academic, social and cultural issues is a devoted teacher, according to the faculty members. Can (2004) notes that the objective of teacher development is to demonstrate effective teaching behavior of teacher. Rauth and Bowers (1986) state that the basic characteristics sought in qualified human-power are the type of person who does his job well, learns to live with information, develops herself/himself continuously. It is observed that evaluations of a good teacher refer to "the teacher who continuously develops himself/herself professionally and personally, explores and makes use of opportunities for developing himself" (Seferoğlu, 2004). It is obvious that a self-improving teacher will contribute more to the achievement of the goals of education by doing more than expected.
Faculty members considered allocating extra-curricular time to students as one of the characteristics of a devoted teacher. Today, crowded classes have shortened the time that teachers devote to each student. It is known that students can reach the specified learning level when additional time and learning opportunities are provided for each student (Senemoğlu, 2011). This makes time an important factor for learning. It can be said that teachers' acting with dedication and allocating extra time to the students whom they think they need, may increase the quality of education.
Faculty members have suggested role model/exemplary teacher model in the process of educating dedicated teachers. Students tend to adopt their teachers' dressing styles, speeches, democratic or rigid attitudes, problem solving methods, and values (Demirtaş, 1999). Depending on this conclusion, Kumral (2009) reported that positive behaviors for role modeling of faculty members by prospective teachers were listed as being prepared and on time, good communication with the student and sharing, appreciating them, respecting them as a human being, proficiency in his/her field and profession, applying more flexible rules in his/her lessons. These behaviors overlap with the behaviors that a devoted teacher should have, reported in our research. Şen and Erişen (2002) also emphasized that especially the faculty members of faculty of education who are "educating teachers" should have the characteristics which they consider to bring to prospective teachers.
According to Cetinkanat (1998), the teacher's communication process is two-way and can be accomplished by ensuring the participation of students, which is of great importance for the realization of learning. In our research as well, according to the views of the faculty members, communication is one of the characteristics that should exist among a teacher who defines himself as devoted. Güçlü (2001) concluded that the student's loving a course and gaining habit of working had a positive relationship with teacher student communication (Dilekman, Başçı, & Bektaş, 2008). Majid, Jelas, Azman and Rahman (2010) state that teachers' communication skills have an impact on students' success, creativity and motivation.
Faculty members stated that administering the respective courses in schools of lower socioeconomic levels where infrastructure (equipment, physical structure, etc.) is insufficient will play pivotal role in training prospective teachers with the characteristics of a devoted teacher. The courses existing in the curriculum of Faculty of Education like community service practices, school experience and teaching practice classes can be considered under this category as they are administered outside of the faculty. However, research shows that the selection of practice schools is usually taken into consideration in terms of ease of access to schools (Göktaş & Şad, 2014). This necessitates the location of practice schools to be in the province/district center. However, since the graduates are assigned to schools in the rural and relatively less developed regions of Turkey, especially in the central regions of the eastern and southeastern regions, a hard transition can be experienced in terms of school opportunities and teacher candidates can experience difficulty in adapting. A similar practice is observed in village institutes program as a solution to the adaptation problem. Training at village institutes was carried out based on village needs (Kaya, 1984).
The restructuring of the teaching entrance system in the context of teacher's personal characteristics is one of the main suggestions of the faculty members for raising devoted teachers. Since student admissions are based on the central examination and weighted grade point average, it is obvious that there is no standard. The examination and weighted grade average are criteria that measure the cognitive skills of individuals and there does not currently exist any practice that measures affective skills of candidates who want to be teachers, as much as cognitive skills of them. Therefore, it is necessary to take into consideration the affective skills of the students as well as the cognitive sides while accepting students to the teacher training institutions (Kahramanoğlu, 2014).
In Finland, for instance, the selection process for teachers consists of several stages, and not only the written exam results, but also the evaluation processes that measure other characteristics of the candidates are taken into account. Primarily, teacher candidates are selected depending on university exam results, high school records, and out-of-school achievements. Then, the candidates complete a written exam on the books given. After this stage, to explore social interaction and communication skills of the candidates, they are subjected to a clinical observation where the typical conditions that may be encountered in school are created. Those who are selected at the end of these processes are interviewed about why they decide to become teachers (Sahlberg, 2011). As it can be seen, a multidimensional selection phase is being carried out.
In the context of the research results, some suggestions are presented below; Since prospective teachers spend a period of four years in the faculty of education before starting teaching profession, faculty members need to be role models for prospective teachers.
Considering that good communication skills are an important component of devoted teaching profession, instructors must be careful in communicating with prospective teachers. If necessary, communication skills training for faculty members can be arranged.
Despite all their busyness, faculty members can devote time to their students and show them a devoting attitude.
During teaching training period, courses like school experience, teaching practice and community service practices, which are usually performed outside the faculty building, can be carried out in rural schools that require more commitment, and prospective teachers can be prepared for teaching in a more realistic environment.
This research can be expanded to other faculties other than the faculty of education, and the views of other faculty members can be included.