The importance of teachers’ implicit beliefs about students’ characteristics in teacher education. An exploratory study.
Author(s):
Valeria Rossini (presenting / submitting) Luciana Neglia (presenting)
Conference:
ECER 2017
Network:
10. Teacher Education Research
Format:
Paper

Session Information

10 SES 02 C, Exploring Teachers' Beliefs

Paper Session

Time:
2017-08-22
15:15-16:45
Room:
K1.04 Auditorium 3
Chair:
Rose Dolan

Contribution

Nowadays, teaching education has to face many challenges. Teachers have to acquire not only teaching skills but also psychological and social skills, that are very important to manage the diversity of students and the complexity of classrooms.

Since the last decades of the past century, research had highlighted the influence of the different teaching styles on students’ behaviors and academic outcomes. Teaching style refers to teacher’s needs, beliefs and behaviors in the classroom. Teaching style concerns how to present information, interact with students, manage schoolwork, and support learning (Grasha, 1994). Teaching styles depend on many factors, among which the implicit ones have a great importance. Social cognition theory suggests that these implicit factors influence teachers’ attitude and willingness to be engaged in professional activities (Pintrick & Schunk, 2002). As noted by Borko and Putnam (1996), «the knowledge and beliefs that prospective and experienced teachers hold serve as the filter through which their learning take place. It is through these existing conceptions that teachers come to understand recommended new practices» (p. 675).

According to Nespor (1987), beliefs assert that things (such as intelligence or personality traits) exist or do not exist. A part of beliefs is an image of the ideal or alternative that contrasts with current reality. Beliefs also are associated with evaluations and feeling about what is and what should be. In particular, teachers’ implicit beliefs about students address teachers’ behavior towards students and consequently can influence the teacher-student relationship and the school climate.

So, teacher education has to pay attention to these aspects of the teaching profession to improve the quality of teaching and to make it consistent with the current challenges of the continuing professional developmental system. In this perspective, the Eurydice Report "The teaching profession in Europe: Practices, Perceptions, and Policies" of 25th June 2015 defines the key components of initial teacher education: contents, theories and teaching practices. However, they are not sufficient to promote a mindful teaching profession, which requires feeling ready to teach. As the Italian “Plane for the teacher education 2016-2019” suggests, teachers have to be considered human and professional capital for school and society. To valorize this capital, teacher education has to bring up teachers’ needs, feelings and desires, because this is the starting point to learn to be teachers. In this kind of learning, teachers trace their history as students and build expectations about their new role as teachers. In other words, «they simply return to places of their past, complete with memories and preconceptions of days gone by, preconceptions that often remain largely unaffected by higher education» (Pajares, 1993, p. 46).

In this perspective, the present study aims to contribute to a deeper reflection on the characteristics of the teaching profession, starting from the dimension of implicit knowledge and beliefs. In particular, our exploratory study underlines the influence that teacher's anthropological imagination (Gonzalez et al., 1993) has on teachers’ attitudes to teaching. Inspired by Tuffanelli’s research on students’ diversity, we investigated the mental expectations that perspective teachers and experienced teachers have about the negative or positive students’ profiles in the classroom, asking if these implicit beliefs may affect their teaching attitudes.

Method

The methodology used is both qualitative and quantitative. We used a mixed approach for a deeper understanding of the different variables that influence the construction of mental representations and implicit beliefs about students’ characteristics. We administered a questionnaire to a first group of 69 futures teachers participants to a course of teaching specialization and to a second group of 75 in-service teachers participants of a master's degree in Learning Disabilities, both organized by the University of Bari in 2015. The questionnaire, entitled "My expectations about the student" (Tuffanelli, 2006), presents the image of two heads. The white one indicates the positive profile of the students or the positive characteristics that the "good student" should have. The black one includes the negative adjectives used to draw the negative profile of the student. Within each head, there are three concentric circles: in the smaller one, we find adjectives that indicate the "necessary" characteristics, in the intermediate one, those which are "important" and in the larger circle there are those "preferable, but not necessary". In the black shape, the characteristics of the smaller circle are the most difficult to bear, the "unacceptable" ones. The central circle includes adjectives "very negative", and the outer circle those "negative, but tolerable”. The tool helps to know how teachers imagine the students, identifying their implicit beliefs about the desirable and undesirable behaviors at school. We hypothesized that the teacher with several years of experience knows and accepts the diversity of students’ characteristics and behaviors. The experienced teacher has not a rigid concept of the "good student" and he/she is able to deal with students who misbehave. Experienced teachers base the success of their teaching on the ability to differentiate teaching. On the contrary, futures teachers have more expectations on the “ideal student”, because they have a mental model of appropriate school behaviors. Probably, they do not know how to adapt the educational strategies to those students who do not fit with their mental expectations. So, they may have difficulties in dealing with student’s diversity. To validate this hypothesis, we analyzed teachers’ answers. A descriptive analysis of variables (absolute and relative frequencies) has been realized. Then we used the focus group as a qualitative method useful to support quantitative results and to share ideas and feelings in the teacher's community.

Expected Outcomes

The data analysis shows that the results of the first sample have a lower variability respect to those of the second sample, for both the positive and the negative profile. In the first group (pre-service teachers) the implicit beliefs about the student profile are stronger than in the second group (in-service teachers). In fact, 27% of the first sample includes the curiosity among the most important characteristics of student positive profile. In-service teachers also prefer: "cooperative" (14%), "curious" (13%), "intuitive" (12%). For the negative profile, 21% of pre-service teachers has marked as unacceptable the "bully" student, unlike in the second group, the choicest adjectives are "quarrelsome" (17%), "aggressive" (16%), "bully" (13%). These data suggest that teachers’ expectations of students’ school behavior may influence the quality of the teacher-student relationship. Students who behave according to the expectations of their teachers would have better outcomes and positive attention. Students classified as "disturbed" or "refused" are likely to have more contact with the teachers, but in a negative way, that is through criticism and punishment (Tuffanelli, 2006). In this direction, pedagogical research should pay attention to teachers’ tacit knowledge about student, learning, teaching and schooling, highlighting their imagination and desires, in order to build an authentic "professional personality" (Santelli, 2004), which contains invisible aspects such as the representations and the expectations about school behaviors. There are several reasons to investigate teachers’ implicit beliefs. First, they may influence teachers’ self-efficacy in dealing with students’ diversity. Second, implicit beliefs give rise to explicit attitudes and behaviors toward students. Third, analyzing negative implicit beliefs is particularly helpful to face teachers’ difficulties in the classroom management. In conclusion, what the teacher expects to find in the classroom influence his teaching attitude and for this reason should be a key content for teacher professional development.

References

Borko, H. & Putnam, R. (1996). Learning to teach. In D. Berliner & R. Calfee (Eds.). Handbook of educational psychology (pp. 673-708). New York: MacMillan. Deemer, S. (2004). Classroom goal orientation in high school classrooms: Revealing link between teacher beliefs and classroom environments. Educational Research, 48 (1), 73-90. Fang, Z. (1996). A review of research on teacher beliefs and practices. Educational Research, 38 (1), 47-65. Gómez-López, F. (2005). Filosofía institucional, teorías implícitas de los docentes y práctica educativa. Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios Educativos, XXXV (1-2), 35-88. González-Peiteado, M. (2010). Los estilos de enseñanza y aprendizaje como soporte de la actividad docente. Revista Estilos de Aprendizaje, 11, 51-70. Gonzalez, N., Moll, L. M., Floyd-Tenery, M., Rivera, A., Rendon, P., Gonzales, R. & Amanti, C. (1993). Teacher Research on Funds of Knowledge: Learning from Household. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Grasha A.F. (1994). A Matter of Style: The Teacher as Expert, Formal Authority, Personal Model, Facilitator, and Delegator. College Teaching, 42, 4, 142-149. Meirieu, P. (2011). Faire l’École, faire la classe, Démocratie et pédagogie. Paris: EFS. Nespor, J. (1987). The role of beliefs in the practice of teaching. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 19, 317-328. OCSE (2014). TALIS 2013 Results. An International Perspective on Teaching and Learning. Paris: OCSE. Pajares, F. (1993). Preservice teachers’ beliefs. A focus for teacher education. Action in Teacher Education, 15 (2), 45-54. Perrenoud, P. (1999). Dix nouvelles compétences pour enseigner. Invitation au voyage. Paris: ESF. Pintrich, P. R & Schunk, D. H. (2002). Motivation in education. Theory, research, and applications. Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Merrill. Rossini, V. (2012). La «personalità professionale» dei docenti tra compiti di cura e competenze relazionali. In A. Chionna, G. Elia. Un itinerario di ricerca della pedagogia. Studi in onore di Luisa Santelli Beccegato (pp. 475-489). Lecce: Pensa Multimedia. Santelli Beccegato, L. (2004). Dal profilo professionale alla personalità professionale degli insegnanti. Una ricerca in corso. Pedagogia e Vita, 4, 115-120. Strømsø, H. & Bräten, I. (2004). Epistemological beliefs and implicit theories. The British Journal of Educational Psychology, 29, 371-388. Tuffanelli, L. (2006). Le diversità degli alunni. Utilizzare le differenze cognitive e affettive per l’apprendimento. Trento: Erickson. Woolfolk Hoy, A., Murphy, P. K. (2001). Teaching Educational Psychology to the Implicit Mind. In B. Torff & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.). Understanding and teaching the intuitive mind (pp. 145-186). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Author Information

Valeria Rossini (presenting / submitting)
University of Bari
Educational Science, Psychology, Communication
Bari
Luciana Neglia (presenting)
University of Bari
Palo del Colle

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