Quality in Teaching Across a Career: The Use of Personal Constructs Within a Fully Integrated Mixed Methods Design

This article outlines a fully integrated, sequential exploratory mixed methods research design developed to explore how physical education (PE) teachers across different career phases construct quality in teaching. Responding to calls for more complex and nuanced methodologies in educational research, the study adopts a pragmatic epistemological and ontological stance that enables the combination of qualitative and quantitative research approaches to capture both individual meaning making and broader professional patterns. Four complementary data collection methods were employed: informal professional dialogues, repertory grid interviews, lesson observations, and a rank ordering task. These methods were applied sequentially, with each phase building on the previous, fostering methodological synergy and enabling meaningful integration across data types.
The study demonstrates how personal construct psychology can be effectively embedded within a fully integrated mixed methods research framework. This contributes to the advancement of mixed methods research by offering a transferable model for exploring how personal beliefs, professional contexts, and career phases intersect to shape evolving constructs of quality in teaching. Findings reveal that teachers’ constructs of quality develop over time, influenced by personal experiences, professional learning, and shifting policy landscapes, and that tensions persist between teachers’ pedagogical values and externally imposed definitions of quality. By combining idiographic, qualitative research approaches with broader quantitative data, this study offers a nuanced, methodologically rich account of teacher development and practice. The design holds potential for application across disciplines wherein personal meaning making and professional identity are central.