One of the key aspects of any educational reform is planning, developing, and assessing teaching and learning processes, with a focus on student learning. Educational reforms have sustained transformations in the way that teaching-learning processes are conceived, where the importance has been centered the learning process, rather than on teaching, where knowledge is contextualized, and where learning refers to how to learn.
National and international results from different assessments in Chile, have revealed the critically low quality of Chilean education (Eyzaguirre & Le Foulon, 2001). One of the main difficulties that Chilean educational reform has faced, in terms of implementing a socio-cognitive type of model (Gómez Santa Cruz & Thomesen, 2006), is the distance between teachers’ beliefs about learning, knowledge, and teaching and the model in which the educational reform is based (Lortie, 1975, in Leal, 2005).
Since teaching, determines learning, it is important to understand teachers’ intentions, the strategies they use in the classroom, and how these factors determine how teachers perceive the learning needs of their students. From a phenomenographic perspective, understanding what teachers believe about teaching and learning in this context and developing a deeper awareness of the different ways in which teachers focus on teaching, is of great importance for developing possible new reforms and adjusting curriculums.
From a phenomenological standpoint we “live” and we “act” according to our intersubjectivities (Hofer & Pintrich, 2001). Entwistle and Tait (1990) and Trigwell and Prosser (1991), have investigated the relationship between teachers’ and students’ beliefs about teaching and learning and the type of work done in the classroom. Different studies have supported the notion that students tend to learn in accordance with the teacher’s conception of learning. Teachers face the classroom with their own conceptions and beliefs about learning and teaching, which, undoubtedly affects what they do and how they do it (Burns, 1992). Several studies have concluded that some teachers approach teaching with a focus on the content area and teach with the intention of transmitting information (ITTF); others approach teaching, focused on the learner, with the intention of developing conceptual changes in the understanding of their students (CCSF) (Prosser et al., 2005).
Our study aims to identify Chilean teachers’ conceptions about learning and teaching and to determine how these conceptions relate to the perceived learning needs of their students.
The research questions are the following:
How do Chilean teachers conceptualize teaching and learning in the school context?
How do teachers perceive the learning needs of the students?
What is the relationship between the teachers’ conceptions about the teaching- learning process and the perceived learning needs of the students?
The research objectives are:
1. Analyze the psychometric characteristics of the Approaches to Teaching Inventory (Trigwell, 1999) in the context of Chilean education.
- Analyze the teaching approaches of Chilean school teachers.
3. Analyze the coherence between the teachers’ teaching approaches and how teachers perceive the learning needs of their students.
