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Article Excerpt
Since the seminal work of Clark and Peterson (1986) was published, interest in the study of teacher thinking has been a prominent field of inquiry in the research on teachers and teaching. Three categories of studies on teachers' thinking are evident in this body of research: (a) descriptions of the content of teachers' thoughts, (b) studies of teachers' judgments and actions, and (c) research into the domains of teachers' knowledge. Also, many researchers have investigated teachers' beliefs and theories and studied the practical tasks and contextual nature of teachers' work (Schwab, 1983). Taking the practical context into consideration, several researchers focused their research on teachers' practical knowledge (Clandinin, 1986; Elbaz, 1981, 1983) and practical theories (Fenstermacher, 1986; Sanders & McCutcheon, 1986), and also studied the relationship between teachers' beliefs and actions (Clandinin, 1986; Elbaz, 1983; Pape, 1992).
Elbaz (1981) coined the term "practical knowledge" and defined five sources of teachers' practical knowledge: situation, personal, social, experiential, and theoretical. Elbaz also described how the structure of teachers' practical knowledge included rules of practice, practical principles, and images that guide actions. Other researchers have used similar terms to describe analogous interactions between knowledge, beliefs, and practices including such terms as "personal practical knowledge" (Clandinin, 1986; Connelly & Clandinin, 1985), "practical arguments" (Fenstermacher, 1986), "practical theory" (Handal & Lauvas, 1987; Sanders & McCutcheon, 1986), "practical reasoning" (Fenstermacher, 1986), "practical philosophy" (Goodman, 1988), "theory of action" (Marland & Osborne, 1990), "schema" (Bullough & Knowles, 1991), and "personal practical theories," or PPTs (Comett, Yeotis, & Terwilliger, 1990).
More than a decade ago, Frank Pajares (1992, 1993) argued that teachers' beliefs should become an important focus of educational inquiry. Since then, Virginia Richardson (1996, 2003) has summarized much of the research about teachers' beliefs, showing that prospective teachers' prior beliefs influence what is learned during their teacher preparation program by acting as a filter through which teacher candidates acquire and interpret new knowledge. Because we know that teacher candidates' beliefs influence their subsequent judgments and actions in the classroom (Chant, 2002; Chant, Heafner, & Bennett, 2004), understanding more about the content and the source of teachers candidates' beliefs is essential for teacher educators, especially if we want to try to influence or change their knowledge and practice (Pajares, 1992; Richardson, 1996) during their teacher education program.
In this study, the content and the sources of 94 teacher candidates' self-reported belief statements are identified and categorized as the first stage in (a) determining the types of beliefs that teacher educators may be able to influence and change during a teacher education program and (b) developing a model to show a way to categorize beliefs and the relationship between the content and sources of teachers' beliefs. The research questions that guided this study are: What are the contents of teacher candidates' beliefs as expressed in their written PPTs? What are the sources of teacher candidates' PPTs? What is the connection between the content of teacher candidates' PPTs and the sources of these beliefs?
RELATED RESEARCH
Cornett et al. (1990) and Marland (1988) studied individual teacher's PPTs and defined them as "empirically warranted claims-to-know about their own teaching practice." For the purposes of this study, we proceed from the premise that both teachers' personal theories (their beliefs) and their practical knowledge (derived from experiences) ultimately guide their actions in the classroom (Chant, 2002; Chant et al, 2004; Clandinin, 1986; Cornett et al., 1990). Although we do not follow our participants into their classrooms to evaluate this claim, earlier research cited above already makes this connection between teachers' beliefs and actions. Also, though we do not delve into more recent scholarship about teachers' professional identity development (e.g., Beijaard, 1995; Beijaard, Meijer, & Verloop, 2004; Beijaard, Verloop, & Vermunt, 2000), we believe that identity development is related, in part, to beliefs. Identity appears to be ever changing, influenced by social, cultural, political, and historical contexts, agentic, positional, and socially constructed, which is also true of some beliefs (Pajares, 1992). Although not the purpose of this study, reflection on and articulation of one's beliefs in the form of PPTs, plus identification of the sources of teachers' expressed beliefs, may be useful for those interested in future studies of teacher identity and the process of identity development.
To date, very few studies of teachers' beliefs have focused on the sources of teachers' beliefs. Most studies about teachers' PPTs, which we argue are also a proxy for teachers' beliefs, have been conducted by following only a few teachers into the classroom (Chant, 2002; Cornett, 1990a, 1990b). The individualized and context-based nature of teacher PPTs makes such analysis challenging to apply on a larger scale. Therefore, we posit that presenting a model that describes the salient features and interactions among knowledge, beliefs, and practices could be useful for helping teacher educators better understand their potential to influence teachers candidates" thoughts and actions at the preservice level.
In early studies about teacher beliefs, researchers concluded that beliefs cannot be changed by the "weak intervention" of a few years in a teacher preparation program (Richardson, 1996, 2003) and that what is learned during teacher education "washes out" once preservice teachers leave the university and become socialized in the field (e.g., Kagan, 1992; Lortie, 1975; Zeichner & Liston, 1987). We also know that teachers' beliefs influence their judgments and actions in the classroom during and after student teaching (Chant, 2002; Chant et al., 2004; Clandinin, 1986; Cornett, 1990a, 1990b; McCutcheon, 1992; Pajares, 1992, 1993; Pape, 1992; Ross, 1992; Ross, Cornett, & McCutcheon, 1992), which in turn influences the opportunities that their K-12 students have to learn. However, very little empirical research has emerged about the sources of teachers' beliefs, which may be a factor in whether or not teacher candidates' beliefs can be influenced during teacher education.
Several individual case studies have shown that teachers use their PPTs as their personal guiding theories in the pre-active (planning), interactive (teaching), and postactive (reflective) stages of their teaching (Chant, 2002; Clandinin, 1986; Cornett, 1990a, 1990b; Cornett et al., 1990; Pape, 1992). These researchers asked teachers what guided their thinking about pedagogy or interpreted their beliefs from what teachers stated, said they intended to do, or what they actually did during observations of their teaching (Chant, 2002; Chant et al., 2004; Cornett, 1990a, 1990b; Cornett et al., 1990; Lundeberg & Fawver, 1993; Pajares, 1992; Richardson, 1996, 2003; Tatto & Coupland, 2003). Other researchers have shown that the beliefs of both preservice and experienced teachers expressed as their PPTs during a process called "personal theorizing" drive pedagogical decisions about teaching and learning of both novice and experienced teachers (Chant, 2002; Chant et al., 2004; Cornett, 1990a, 1990b; Cornett et al., 1990; Ross et al., 1992). For example, Cornett and his colleagues (Cornett, 1990a, 1990b; Cornett et al., 1990) studied how individual teacher's PPTs describe how their beliefs and knowledge are grounded in their (personal) experiences outside the classroom and their (practical) experiences inside the classroom. The connection between teachers'...
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