stability and change in student teachers’ beliefs.pdf

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European Journal of Teacher Education Vol. 20 No. 3 1997 209

Guest Editorial

Stability and Change in Student Teachers Beliefs

H . H. T I L L E M A

ntrodu tion

The literature on learning to teach repeatedly points to the stability and even inertness

of student teachers' beliefs. The prese nt issue brings togeth er different studies tha t

elaborate on the problem of studen t teachers' seemingly un changed beliefs as the

outcome of intervention programmes in teacher education or in-service education,

many of which aim specifically at belief change. The studies in this issue show that

change does occur, although not always in a unidirectional or intended way, and not in

the same manner for each (student) teacher. Co mm on to all contributions is the

conviction that belief change is an important aim of teacher education p rogramm es, i.e.

that it is important to acknowledge student teachers' beliefs and to offer and discuss

alternative conceptions to which stud ent teachers can revert and in which they can findsupport in building their teaching identities and professional lives. Ho wever, as is

repeatedly found in several studies, student teachers come to experience diverse, often

incoherent, and som etimes even conflicting views on educa tional theories and teaching

methods during their participation in teacher training programmes. It is largely left to

the student teacher to build an integrated perspective on teaching and learning that will

help them cope with the demands of their working practice.

As they enter teacher education as their first learning environ me nt in the profession,

student teachers' beliefs are still quite 'stab le' or embedded in relatively fixed p atter n of

beliefs about teaching. It is the challenge of teacher education to make these concep-

tions and lay theories open to chan ge, which mea ns providing fruitful (instructional)conditions for building a personal as well as professional knowledge base for teaching.

The position put forward in this issue is that courses in teacher education should

recognize this tacit knowledge and exploit these beliefs to the full, rath er tha n simply

conveying new information to student teachers. This implies engaging stude nt teachers

in a deliberate exchange and debate on educational knowledge and beliefs or eliciting

implicit conceptions about teaching, thus involving them in a meaningful, constructive

learning process and reflective inquiry t hat will expan d their knowledge and action

potential. As a consequence, there is a real possibility that the knowledge and ideas

offered to student teachers will better prepare them for teaching, and will lead to or

stimulate their pedagogic reasoning as professionals. It is our belief that prior conc ep-tions and beliefs, as well as an active involvement in knowledge construction, ought to

have a considerable impact on program me design and course delivery in teacher

education. T here is now a growing body of research on the nature of orientations and

perspectives held by student teachers and their subjective or lay 'theories ' and beliefs

0261-9768/97/030209-04 © 1997 Association for Teacher Education in Europe

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210 H. H. Tillema

about teaching. What seems to be missing are validated ways of dealing with s tude nts'

existing beliefs, and althoug h we have come to learn m uch abo ut belief formation, belief

change as a process for intervention is less well understood. Belief change arises from

a need to change one's conceptions and knowledge, and it involves constructive as well

as confrontational processes which makes it of direct interest to teacher trainingprogrammes. Teacher education can be regarded as a vehicle for belief change while

orienting student teachers towards the profession. This issue, therefore, has a special

interest in the process of belief change in the context of teacher education. Restructur-

ing student teachers' pre-existing beliefs and ideas could be a more important to goal

in programmes of teacher education than the presentation of new information itself.

Given wh at is already known a bou t belief formation, it is at any rate im porta nt to clarify

how existing conceptions and knowledge can be effectively challenged and changed.

This thematic issue intends to form a collection of conceptual and empirical studies

that underscore relevant approaches to changing (student) teachers' beliefs while at the

same time providing information about the processes involved in belief change. Thestudies selected deal on the one hand with clarifying (the content and structure of)

student teacher beliefs as this is of interest to the construction of programmes, while on

the other hand including studies that try to directly influence belief change by using

intervention models. Together these studies portray an effective approach to belief

change that is founded on exchange and discourse while at the same time stimulating

the self-regulative learning and self-directed reasoning of young professionals.

Sugrue's contribution, entitled Stud ent teache rs' lay theories and teaching identi-

ties: their implications for professional development , can be regarded as a founda-

tional study in this issue dealing with the construction of (student) teacher beliefs. It

explores the origins and nature of student teachers' ways of thinking about their

professional lives and how this affects their actual learning and performance. He

discusses the formation of professional identities from a post-m odern ist perspe ctive, i.e.

stressing the nature of ambiguity and uncertainty as a companion process to learning

and development. This study opens the thematic issue to point out that beliefs have a

profound and long-lasting effect on professional development. Sugrue makes it evident

that belief formation is not confined to the period of teacher education or even that

teacher education programmes have a strong influence on the formation or change of

initial professional beliefs. Teacher education's main concern lies in being aware of not

reinforcing or implicitly reproducing 'false' images in relation to teacher identities, i.e.by promoting a kind of essentialism on teaching. Teacher education programmes do,

however, have strong opportunities to endorse the exchange of beliefs and their

continuous redefinition through discourse. This may be regarded as the theme which

permeates this issue and which is worked out in the respective papers.

In her contribution Why do we want to change teache rs' beliefs and how can we

support these changes? , Bernadette Hauglustaine-Charlier addresses the question of

stability and changes in student teachers' beliefs from the perspective of two research

objectives: to foster a process by which student teachers change their own beliefs and

to understand the process of this change. As a researcher, she employs a constructivist

standpoint by explicitly clarifying her objectives as a teachers' educator and theimplications of these objectives for the research design. Clarifying one's position is

found to be necessary to support the dialogue between teacher educators and re-

searchers, and to favour the use of the research results in teacher education.

A case study is presented in which she analyzes changes in the teaching beliefs of


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European Journal of Teacher Education 2 1 1

experienced teachers as they relate to the training conditions in which they have taken

part. These changes are discussed with respect to the stability of teachers' beliefs and

interpreted within the central questions of the study, i.e. Why are we interested in the

question of stability and changes in teachers' beliefs? What are the underlying assump-

tions supporting this interest? And how can teachers' educators support thesechanges?

These questions closely correspond to the issues addressed in the contribution by

Douwe Beijaard & Yvonne de Vries. Having studied different beliefs on 'good' teach-

ing, they report on the core beliefs of nine experienced secondary school teachers as

constituents of their practical knowledge. In addition to the study of these conceptions

of teaching, they explored how teachers had developed their core beliefs on student

learning and to what extent they had changed these beliefs. It was found that to some

extent change of beliefs can be predicted by the different ways in which teachers

developed their actual beliefs, e.g. through (enhanced) reflection, through progressive

problem-solving (taking on new challenges), through the reduction of problems (con-centration of knowledge and experience), and through a stimulating working environ-

ment. In this contribution, particular attention is placed upon the extent to which the

teachers' development of their beliefs has been reflective, the ways teachers deal with

conflicting theories and self regulation, and their sources of learning. These are

supposed to be relevant indicators that promote change in teachers' beliefs.

The studies by Hauglustaine-Charlier and Beijaard & De Vries both deal with the

beliefs of experienced teachers who can resort to substantial practical knowledge.

Taking this as a point of reference, it becomes interesting to explore and locate the

beliefs of student teachers entering teacher training programmes to see whether these

beliefs differ from the ba ckgrou nds of experienced teachers a nd discover if they grow orare changed in the direction of the conceptions of practitioners through interventions

in teacher education program mes. T his is carried o ut in the study by Mo ira von Wright.

She discusses teaching beliefs of the teacher role, and the teaching practice of student

teachers. H er contribution, entitled Stud ent teacher beliefs and a changing teacher

role , is based on two empirical studies of Swedish compulsory school student teachers.

The results show that when entering their teacher education, student teachers seldom

have coherent beliefs and expectations. Student teachers express implicit beliefs and

underlying conceptions of hum an development which in many cases are contradictory.

During teacher education, their pedagogical beliefs might become replaced by 'correct'

ones, but implicit beliefs, such as affinity with certain pedagogical discourses, are notchanged or brought to awareness unless they are seriously challenged and problemized.

Yet it is found that these beliefs do direct students' attention. Changing demands on

the teacher role bring about a shift in thinking about teaching and learning and are

therefore connected to beliefs about the pupils' socialization process and the teacher's

influence. Teacher education and educators play a role mainly as fortifying beliefs and

the traditional teacher role.

The descriptive studies in this issue all seem to align with the position outlined,

namely that beliefs grow and change over time, depending upon external input and

influences that can alter them, and are certainly not fixed or stable. However, this does

not mean to say that these beliefs are easy to change, rather that teachers hold on tocertain beliefs as being central to their thinking, reasoning and action. It is through

dialogue and discourse, or even by discussing beliefs in the context of a research study

(e.g. Hauglustaine-Charlier; Von Wright; see also Lauriala) that these beliefs can be

opened to scrutiny. This may shed some new light upon the role of beliefs in teacher


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212 H. H. Tillema

training programmes. Beliefs need to be addressed and can be made amenable to

debate and learning.

The other contributions in this issue deal more directly with this interventional side

of belief change, by offering some solutions for the design of teacher training pro-

grammes.Anneli Lauriala's article discusses two case studies carried out at the Oulu Univer-

sity in Finland. The studies involved both development and research, that is, designing

'new' types of student teacher programmes as well as researching into their delivery.

Programm es w ere constructed on the basis of collaboration betw een a teacher educator/

researcher (the author of the article), supervising teachers from the teaching practice

school (closely attached to university), and student teachers. The main starting points

for the development of new kind of programme are to be found in the design principles

to overcome the theory/practice gap, use of strategies likely to overcome the status quo

or the subordinate role of student teachers, and an awareness of the progressive/

traditional shift. Teaching in so-called 'practicums' took place in innovative classroomenvironments where the participants had an opportunity to observe, act and discuss

teaching, while being mentored by classroom teachers who had experimented with

innovative pedagogies for years. An interpretivist research approach was used to study

the belief changes focused on m eanings ascribed to events by actors in a social situation,

trying to understand how teachers view themselves and how they experience and

interpret events, interactions and situations within their practicum contexts. The results

demonstrated that the programme, i.e. the practicum context, made student teachers

more critically examine their (frequently) tacit beliefs, as well as restructure and reflect

on their professional beliefs. This article discusses belief change processes from the

point of view of teacher socialisation, and on more elemental level from the point ofview of (professional) learning, applying the principles of situated cognition and action

theory to teacher learning.

In his study Reflective discourse in teams ; a vehicle to suppo rt belief change in

student teachers , Harm H. Tillema discusses the results of an intervention approach

that deals with belief change in teacher education programmes from the perspective of

self-regulation and metacognitive awareness. Evaluations were collected regarding

teaching and learning in so-called 'study teams' of student teachers; these student

teachers worked in a self-regulated manner on problems they themselves selected for

learning. It showed that when actively involved in inquiry-oriented and reflective

learning, and when provided with full opportunities for discourse and exchange,student teachers become increasingly engaged in processes of belief change, opening up

their teaching identities for debate. It is therefore advocated that self-regulated learning

in teacher training programmes can be an important vehicle for professional learning

and development, since it promo tes ind epende nt thinking and metacognitive as well as

meta-affective awareness of one's learning, which in itself provides the condition for

focusing on one's beliefs and fostering change or growth of beliefs.

Correspondence: H. H. Tillema, Centre for the Study of Education and Instruction, P.O.

Box 9555 , 2300 RB Leiden, Th e Netherlands (Fax: + 31-71-527 361 9).


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