Teachers’ Beliefs and Their Students’ Progress in Professional Development

Abstract

We respond to calls for more research to address whether and how successful professional development (PD) experiences (defined here in terms of student progress) are related to changes in teacher beliefs, specifically about effective literacy instruction for young struggling readers. We developed a measure, a Teacher Belief Score, to identify teacher beliefs present in interview data and we used student achievement data to create two contrasting groups of teachers, those whose students had lower progress and those who had higher. While initially in the fall, lower progress and higher progress teachers differed little in their alignment of beliefs with program features; over time, higher progress teachers trended toward beliefs that were aligned with program features, whereas lower progress teachers trended away. Findings suggest the need for an additional component to Guskey’s model of teacher change: attributing student progress to the new instructional practices learned in PD.

Epistemological beliefs and classroom practices of experienced physics teachers: are they related?

“…These teachers' practices indicated that teachers did not enact their constructivist or transitional epistemological beliefs since they tended to address students' expectations for quick and simple learning for the test preparation. These results aligned with the findings of Mansour (2013) and Rodgers et al (2022) that teachers might modify their beliefs and practices to address students' expectations or students' learning progress. Some teachers held transitional beliefs and suggested the diversity among students, but they rarely addressed the equity issues to address needs of diverse students.…”

Liderar el desarrollo profesional docente: perspectivas de un grupo de directivos chilenos

“…La formación permanente del profesorado se ha visto ampliada y diversificada en los últimos años. Ella es comprendida como un conjunto amplio que trasciende la noción tradicional del curso (Carrasco y Ortiz, 2023;Hill, et al, 2013;Hilel y Ramírez, 2022;Imbernón, 2020;D'Agostino, et al, 2022), plantean que dicho desarrollo se asocia tambien con la disposición hacia la transformación educativa, y Valillant y Marcelo (2015) señalan que se relaciona con la proyección de la inquietud intelectual del profesorado. Se reconocen otras formas de DPD: acompañamiento de pares expertos, las asistencias técnicas, y, principalmente, las instancias institucionales y sistemáticas de trabajo y aprendizaje colaborativo llevando a cabo procesos de investigación-acción en los establecimientos (Forde, et al, 2021;Harris y Jones, 2011;Vaillant y Marcelo, 2015;Woods y Roberts, 2018).…”