Reviews of Teachers’ Beliefs

Abstract

Beliefs refer to propositions that are considered to be true. Teachers’ beliefs refer largely to the beliefs teachers hold that are relevant to their teaching practice. Teachers hold beliefs about a myriad of things, as do all humans. However, specific beliefs about teaching, learning, and students seem to play a particular role in teachers’ practices and willingness to engage in professional learning opportunities. Teachers’ beliefs are relevant for issues in teacher education such as motivation for teaching, instructional practices, classroom management, and assessment activities. Beliefs that preservice and practicing teachers bring to professional learning experiences influence how and what is learned in those experiences and ultimately what is put into practice. To understand what is meant by the construct of teachers’ beliefs, one must consider the variation in definitions and the need for construct clarification. Any investigation into teachers’ beliefs must account for two fundamental aspects of this construct: the nature of belief as a construct and the content of belief under construction. By nature of belief, we refer to how the construct of belief is defined and understood, in particular the stance that researchers take with regard to the relationship between knowledge and beliefs. Belief content refers to what the belief is specifically about, such as general beliefs about teaching, learning, students, or more specific beliefs about an instructional practice (e.g., cooperative learning), classroom assessment, and diverse student groups. Without a clear conceptual understanding of the beliefs investigated, understanding empirical findings and drawing implications for practice may be misguided. Four themes frame the scholarship on teachers’ beliefs: (1) conceptualizing teachers’ beliefs, (2) teachers’ beliefs and teachers’ practice, (3) development of teachers’ beliefs, and (4) changing teachers’ beliefs. Teacher educators should consider the importance of teacher beliefs on teacher learning when designing and implementing learning experiences for preservice and in-service teachers. Specifically, teacher educators need to provide opportunities for teachers to reveal their beliefs, attend to identity and emotion with beliefs, and support belief enactment. A key finding across the field is the need to consider the whole teacher when examining teachers’ beliefs and facilitating change or development in them; that is, teachers’ emotions, identity, career stage, life stages, and the myriad of beliefs they hold about a variety of topics all influence how beliefs are aligned and enacted (or not) in practice.

Unpacking language teacher beliefs, agency, and resilience in the complex, unprecedented time: A mixed-method study

“…It has been extensively studied over the decades from multiple perspectives, including cognitive orientation ( Borg, 2003 , 2006 , 2009 , 2011 ), sociocultural theory (SCT) ( Johnson, 1994 , 2009 ), reflective practices ( Farrell, 2013 ), and complex dynamic systems theory ( Zheng, 2015 ; Gao, 2021a ). It has also been studied from methodological approaches (e.g., Kalaja and Barcelos, 2003 ; Borg, 2012 ), review or historical analysis (e.g., Gao, 2014 ; Fives et al, 2019 ), and tensions between beliefs and practice ( Borg, 2018 ; Gao and Bintz, 2019 ; Gao, 2021a ). Mapping out the existing literature on teacher beliefs over the decades, Gao (2021a) explained that teacher beliefs are in nature complex, non-linear, and unpredictable and may include different theoretical orientations of teachers’ subject matter, matrixing in different forms to inform teachers of their practices.…”

Teachers’ Conceptions of Fairness in Classroom Assessment: An Empirical Study

“…This conclusion is also supported by the findings in this study. In a meta-review of 17 prior reviews of teacher beliefs, Fives et al (2019) note that in-service teachers can be more resistant to change their conceptions due to multiple reasons including deeply held general values attached to identity and beliefs from prior K-12 school experiences. Preservice teachers seem to be less resistant to change their conceptions but have been found to complete their preservice education largely maintaining their initial conceptions at the beginning of the program (Pajares, 1992).…”

Unpacking pre-service teachers’ beliefs and reasoning about student ability, sources of teaching knowledge, and teacher-efficacy: A scenario-based approach

“…Teacher beliefs are individual interpretations and experience-based propositions held by teachers that influence their teaching (Fives et al, 2019;Ferguson and Lunn Brownlee, 2021). Given teachers' long apprenticeship of observation (Lortie, 1975) and, not least, participation in educational settings, their beliefs are likely to be rather deeply entrenched, and may act as a barrier to acquisition of new knowledge in the form of theories and research in teacher education (Guilfoyle et al, 2020;Menz et al, 2021).…”

“…In this study, we wanted to explore this problem space from a teacher beliefs perspective. Inspired by a broad framework of teacher beliefs (Fives and Buehl, 2008;Fives et al, 2019) and state-of-the-art methods for investigating beliefs (Bullough, 2015;Sabatini et al, 2018;Lunn Brownlee et al, 2021), we designed and tested an innovative scenariobased problem-solving approach in addressing how pre-service teachers enacted their beliefs about student ability, sources of teaching knowledge, and teacher efficacy, also looking for signs of evidence-informed reasoning in their written responses to those scenarios. Of note is that our focus on these three types of beliefs (i.e., beliefs about student ability, sources of teaching knowledge, and teacher efficacy) was based on the empirically grounded framework of teacher beliefs discussed by Buehl (2008, 2016), Fives et al (2019).…”

“…Inspired by a broad framework of teacher beliefs (Fives and Buehl, 2008;Fives et al, 2019) and state-of-the-art methods for investigating beliefs (Bullough, 2015;Sabatini et al, 2018;Lunn Brownlee et al, 2021), we designed and tested an innovative scenariobased problem-solving approach in addressing how pre-service teachers enacted their beliefs about student ability, sources of teaching knowledge, and teacher efficacy, also looking for signs of evidence-informed reasoning in their written responses to those scenarios. Of note is that our focus on these three types of beliefs (i.e., beliefs about student ability, sources of teaching knowledge, and teacher efficacy) was based on the empirically grounded framework of teacher beliefs discussed by Buehl (2008, 2016), Fives et al (2019). As parts of a belief system (Fives and Buehl, 2008), such beliefs may be more or less congruent, with beliefs in the malleability of student ability, formalized sources of teaching knowledge (i.e., educational theory and research), and their own ability to support learning for all students potentially indicating a congruent system of teacher beliefs.…”