The present contribution presents findings on pre-service teachers’ beliefs about teaching. Teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning are considered to be an important aspect of their professional competence (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005) and have been found to be related to their classroom activities (Staub & Stern, 2002). In teacher education, beliefs play a twofold role. On the one hand, the beliefs students hold when entering their studies influence what and how they learn; on the other hand, teacher education aims to change potentially dysfunctional beliefs that students may hold and is supposed to provide the students with opportunities to develop a professional and evidence based conception of teaching and learning (Drechsel, 2001; Munby, Russell, & Martin, 2001; Richardson, 1996). Therefore, understanding and clarifying the beliefs held by pre-service teachers are considered significant by researchers and teacher educators (e.g., Chan & Elliott, 2004; Cheng et al., 2009; Richardson, 1996; Staub & Stern, 2002).

Beliefs about teaching can be understood as subjective conceptions about the nature of teaching that are considered true by the individuals but that are not necessarily valid from a scientific perspective (Richardson, 1996). Educational research on the structure of teachers’ beliefs indicates that conceptions of teaching can be described as student-centered and teacher-centered approaches or, correspondingly, as constructivist and traditional approaches (Chan & Elliott, 2004; Postareff & Lindblom-Ylänne, 2008, Prosser & Trigwell, 2006). The former approach conceives teaching as a provision and facilitation of the learning process, the latter as the transmission of knowledge. However, taking a person-centered perspective, less is known about different classes or types of teachers’ beliefs. As Brookhart and Freeman (1992) suggest, entering pre-service teachers should not be considered as an undifferentiated group. Indeed, there is some evidence that individual and group differences regarding conceptions and developmental levels of beliefs about teaching can be found (Chan & Elliot, 2004; Drechsel, 2001). However, there is still a lack of more thorough analyses, especially regarding pre-service teachers’ subjective conceptions of teaching. Moreover, an important question for further investigation would be how different learning opportunities during teacher education relate to changes in beliefs. Therefore, it is important to know whether qualitatively different patterns (i.e., classes) of beliefs about teaching can be identified.

The present study aimed to contribute to closing this gap by identifying typical profiles of pre-service teachers’ beliefs about teaching. For this purpose, we present findings from latent class analyses. Our study contributes to research on pre-service teachers’ beliefs by describing those beliefs from an international educational research perspective and by describing the student sample in terms of latent classes of teaching concepts. In a next step, a longitudinal study will enable the testing of longitudinal hypotheses. By taking a person-centered perspective, we want to investigate how the identified teaching conceptions develop during teacher education and how this development relates to individual characteristics and to features of different teacher education programs. Based on the findings, we aim at cultural comparisons that compare patterns of subjective conceptions of teaching among different systems of teacher education.

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