Part I. Teachers' Beliefs about Teaching and Learning

To understand teachers' pedagogy, it is important to understand their beliefs about what constitutes good instructional practice.  Presumably, their own instructional practices reflect, to a large extent, what they believe to be good teaching, and their beliefs about good teaching reflect their understandings about how students learn.  Of course, many other factors affect teachers' individual practices besides their philosophies of teaching—for example, class sizes that are larger or more heterogeneous than they expected, the content of the specific textbook provided to them, resources which they expected but which were not provided, explicit directives from administrators, influences of their peers, etc.  An important element in this project's investigation into teachers' use of computers is to inquire whether teachers who use computers frequently with students have become more constructivist in practice than their own teaching philosophy would suggest that they would be (and to study under what circumstances, those effects take place).  To do that, we must know to what extent teaching philosophy does predict instructional practice, and preparatory to doing that, we examine the character and distribution of specific beliefs that make up those teaching philosophies.

Descriptive Findings

Teachers' beliefs about good teaching, and more implicitly, their beliefs about the nature of learning, were measured mainly through three questions in the TLC survey: one question which presented a paragraph-length vignette describing how two hypothetical teachers—Ms. Hill and Mr. Jones—characteristically taught their class; a second question in which several pairs of contrasting statements of teaching philosophy were presented, asking respondents to choose on a 5-point scale which statement among the pair came closest to their own point of view; and a set of general statements about teaching and learning, presenting respondents with 6 alternatives from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree."  The full range of responses by teachers in the national probability sample to each of the items in these three questions, as well as to the questions measuring actual teacher classroom practices, is provided in Appendix C.

The "Ms. Hill vs. Mr. Jones" vignettes were used to gauge teachers' overall preference for, and beliefs about, contrasting direct instruction and constructivist instructional styles.  (See Figure 1 for the vignettes used.)  Although most teachers can see value and a reason to teach like either teacher, in different situations, a preference for Mr. Jones' pedagogy suggests a clearer belief in the value of constructivist instructional reforms.  Respondents were asked to evaluate the two alternative teaching styles with respect to four criteria: with which approach were they more comfortable, which approach did they think students preferred, from which approach did they think students gained more knowledge, and from which approach did they think students gained more useful skills.

Figure 1: Vignettes Describing Contrasting Instructional Styles

Overall, more teachers felt comfortable with (64%) and thought students preferred  (53%) the traditional style of Ms. Hill, with fewer selecting Mr. Jones.  (The middle or "undecided" position was chosen by many teachers as well; see Table 1.)   Moving quickly over content may pose fewer problems for teachers and students and therefore seem easier.  However, in terms of the consequences for students, teachers were more likely to believe that Mr. Jones' approach was better.  Concerning students gaining more knowledge  from Hill or Jones, teachers were evenly split — with more than 40% favoring each approach.   Concerning the acquisition of useful skills  many more teachers favored Mr. Jones' approach (57% favoring Jones, 29% favoring Hill).  This suggests that teachers think students will benefit from some use of inquiry-oriented teaching that places more responsibility on students. At the same time, they recognize that it is difficult to carry out many of those practices, particularly because not all students are eager to participate in classroom learning organized around those practices.

Table 1: Teachers' Beliefs About Contrasting Instructional Styles

In the paired comparison question, five pairs of philosophical positions were presented, four of which we discuss here.  One expressed the contrast in the role of the teacher between being a facilitator of student learning versus an explainer of material to students, very much encapsulating the difference in approach between Ms. Hill and Mr. Jones in the earlier question.  A second pair contrasted a teaching approach where multiple activities were going on in class at the same time, activities suggestive of complex project work and a fair amount of latitude for students, versus a classroom where everyone was working on the same assignment, one with "clear directions, and…that can be done in short intervals that match students' attention spans and the daily class schedule."  A third comparison was between the position that curriculum content coverage was more important than "encouraging sense making" among students versus the opposite position, and the fourth was whether promoting student interest or learning content skills was more important.  (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2: Paired Comparisons Measuring Contrasting Teacher Beliefs

Overall, teachers are substantially more constructivist than traditional in their responses to each of these items.  Twice as many teachers agreed that there should be multiple project-oriented activities going on as favored short-duration whole-class assignments instead.  Even more teachers believed that their instructional planning should focus on constructing meaning and on student interest than on coverage of curriculum and textbook content (by margins of 2.5 to 1 and 3 to 1 respectively; see Table 2). The facilitator-explainer contrast received a much more balanced reaction, reflecting the ambivalence teachers reported regarding these contrasting approaches in their responses about Ms. Hill and Mr. Jones from the prior question.

Table 2: Teachers' Agreement With Contrasting Statements of Teaching Philosophy

These findings suggest that given a brief argument made between support for a philosophical position consistent with constructivist instructional reform and one reflecting a more traditional viewpoint, many more teachers will select agreement with reform than with traditional teaching practice.

Even when presented with statements solely supporting traditional teaching practice (without a paired argument favoring the opposite position), a majority of teachers typically will reject the practice.  This is seen by the teachers' responses to the third survey question probing their beliefs about good teaching practice.  Eight of ten "agree-disagree" questions posed statements consistent with traditional teaching philosophy (shown in Table 3).  Of the eight, a majority of teachers disagreed with five of them and almost a majority (48 to 49%) disagreed with two others.  A huge majority of teachers (85%) rejected the idea that because teachers know more than students, they "shouldn't let students muddle around when they can just explain the answers directly."  Even more teachers (91%) rejected the idea that student projects aren't useful because they "often result in students learning all sorts of wrong 'knowledge.'"  More than three-fifths of the teachers (62%) rejected the idea that "instruction should be built around problems with clear, correct answers, and around ideas that most students can grasp quickly"—a clear statement of rejection of the principles of direct instruction formulated two decades ago and around which most traditional instruction is based.  (See Table 3.)  In contrast, none of the statements reflecting traditional educational philosophy received anywhere near the level of endorsement as did one of the two statements in this survey question that reflected a constructivist philosophy: that "students should help establish criteria on which their work will be assessed."  More than two-thirds of responding teachers endorsed that principle (71%), but the maximum agreement for any of the eight "traditional" statements was only 58%—a statement about homework being a good setting for answering questions in the textbook.

Table 3: Percent of Agreement and Disagreement
With Opinion Statements About Pedagogy

Regardless of whether these statements of teaching philosophy carry over to teachers' actual teaching practice, their endorsement of ideas about good teaching consistent with constructivist instructional reform and their equally strong rejection of traditional ideas about teaching suggest one of two things: Either teachers believe that cultural norms are suddenly supporting reform practices (and that they felt they should endorse those norms) or these beliefs are actually ones that the teachers hold.  Although we do not discount the possibility that social desirability plays some role in the distribution of survey responses (and that includes the possibility that respondents perceived researcher opinion to favor constructivist statements which social desirability led them to endorse), still the consistent choices of teachers throughout these three survey questions favoring constructivist philosophies cannot be that easily dismissed.  Our conclusions: as a whole, U.S. 4^th through 12^th grade teachers believe in a much more constructivist basis for teaching than they are often given credit for.

Level and Subject-Matter Differences in Teaching Philosophy

There are certainly many reasons why some teachers hold philosophies of teaching more compatible with constructivist theories of learning than other teachers do.  Their differing personal and educational backgrounds, different prior experiences in teaching, and different current teaching responsibilities all play a role.  In this report, we will explore some of the clear differences in teaching philosophy between teachers teaching at different school levels and having different subject-matter responsibilities. 

Elementary Teachers, Particularly Those Who Teach Self-Contained Classes, Have More Constructivist Teaching Philosophies

When we compare upper elementary teachers (i.e., those who teach grades 4 to 6 in elementary schools) to teachers at the middle school and high school level, it is clear that elementary teachers are more often constructivist in their philosophies, and they agree with "traditional" views of good teaching less often than secondary teachers do.  For example, when asked whether students are ready for "meaningful" learning before they have acquired basic reading and math skills, most secondary teachers (51%) say "no"—they say essentially that reading and math skills must be mastered first.  However, nearly three-fourths of elementary teachers (71%) believe that meaningful learning can co-occur with the development of basic reading and math skills.  Elementary teachers are also more likely to be comfortable with Mr. Jones' turn-back-students'-questions approach to teaching than Ms. Hill's direct instruction approach.  They are also more likely to believe in having multiple project-oriented activities going on in class than teaching short-attention-span whole-class assignments.  However, on most of our teacher belief questions the differences between elementary and secondary teachers are under 10 percentage points. 

Why elementary teachers should be somewhat more constructivist in philosophy is probably partly due to their having a greater interest in child development per se and a lesser attachment to the knowledge base of particular subject matters.  That is, the average elementary teacher may be more attentive to the mechanisms that produce learning and less interested in the transmission of their own knowledge than the average secondary teacher.  Another reason may be related to structural differences in their work environment.  Most elementary teachers are responsible for one group of students for most of a school day.  In these self-contained classes they have a greater opportunity for flexibility in their teaching.  To help clarify this issue, we split elementary teachers into those who indicated they taught self-contained classes, versus those who identified their teaching responsibilities as subject-specialists or having responsibility for two or three subjects taught to different classes of students.

We found that self-contained elementary teachers do give more constructivist-compatible responses to questions about their teaching beliefs than other elementary teachers do.  For example, more self-contained elementary teachers favored Mr. Jones' inquiry-based approach (59%) than did other elementary teachers (47%). This pattern was also evident when we asked about the utility of different forms of assessment in judging how well students are learning. (See below.)  Among elementary teachers of self-contained classes, 73% saw open-ended problems as being a very useful assessment tool while only 54% of other elementary teachers did.  Teachers of self-contained classes were also somewhat less likely than other elementary teachers to believe that "a quiet classroom is generally needed for effective learning" (39% vs. 48%).  Finally, when confronted with having to choose between covering standard curriculum content or instruction that encourages critical thinking and "sense-making," elementary subject-specialists chose curriculum content nearly twice as often as elementary teachers of self-contained classes (24% vs. 13%).

Differences Among Secondary Teachers by Subject Taught

Among secondary school teachers, there are a wide variety of beliefs about good teaching.  Even within subjects, opinions vary.  However, subject matter is among the most important predictors of teachers' opinions.

To illustrate these differences, we will show the pattern for two specific survey items: whether the teacher believes that students learn more knowledge from Mr. Jones' inquiry approach or Ms. Hill's direct instruction approach; and whether they see their role more as a facilitator for student discovery or more as the explainer ("Students really won't learn the subject unless you go over the material in a structured way.")  These two survey prompts deal with the same basic difference in approach between a teacher helping students to discover knowledge for themselves and a teacher who transmits that knowledge directly to students. When one explains something, to some extent it means that all the meaningful questions have been answered—and that transmission of these answers should be the goal of instruction. However, if one believes that one cannot deeply understand something through simply receiving an explanation, one is more likely to value a teaching style that is more inquiry-oriented and constructivist.

Table 4 shows how secondary teachers of different subjects answered those two survey items.  Regarding the question about the Mr. Jones' inquiry approach and Ms. Hill's direct instruction style, four groups of teachers were more likely to say that learning would be greater if students were given responsibility for investigating their own questions: English teachers, fine arts teachers, science teachers and teachers of computer classes (e.g., "Computer Applications" or "Introduction to Computers").  Teachers of the other five subjects were more likely to believe that rapid-fire delivery of questions with single correct answers is a better approach to helping students learn their subject: mathematics, social studies, foreign language, business education, and vocational education teachers.  These subject differences were not small.  In seven of the nine subjects, one or another of these views was clearly dominant (i.e., led the other by more than 10 percentage points). 

On the more general survey item about the same issue—do the teachers see themselves as a facilitator of student work or person who explains what students need to know—the pattern was fairly similar except that vocational education teachers switched to the "constructivist side" and two other groups (social studies teachers and business education teachers) were evenly split. (One difference between the questions is that in the vignettes, Jones' class involved specifically intellectual discourse whereas in this second item the facilitation was merely of "students discovering…for themselves.")  Still, even for this second item, teachers of two subjects, mathematics and foreign language were much more likely to see their teaching in terms of explaining things to students than in terms of facilitating student work.

Table 4: Secondary Teachers' Responses to Two Survey Items About
Constructivist Versus Transmission  Models for
Approaching Teaching, by Subject Most Often Taught

Belief Index Scores

Exploratory factor analysis suggested that, like the two survey prompts just discussed, most of the items in the three survey questions about teaching philosophy could be interpreted as indicators of a common underlying construct that contrasts constructivist versus transmission and skills-practice orientations.  Reliability analysis of 13 of these items produced an index with an alpha of 0.83.  The following are these 13 survey items, which are expressed in constructivist terms when both poles were presented to respondents, and marked as "reversed" when the prompt asked the respondent to "agree or disagree" with a transmission-oriented statement.

• Jones' inquiry approach produces more student knowledge than Hill's direct instruction
• Jones' inquiry approach produces more student skills than Hill's direct instruction
• Believes in being a facilitator rather than explainer
• Student interest and effort is more important than textbook content
• Sense-making and thinking are more important than the specific curriculum content
• Different students engaged in  different project-type activities is better than the whole class working at the same time on a series of short-duration assignments
• Students will take more initiative if they are free to move around the room
• Students should help establish the criteria on which their work is assessed
• Instruction should be built problems with clear, correct answers (reversed)
• Teachers know more than students and shouldn't let students muddle around (reversed)
• Student learning depends on background knowledge — that's why teaching facts is so necessary (reversed)
• It is better for the teacher, not students, to decide what activities are to be done (reversed)
• A quiet classroom is generally needed for effective learning (reversed)
  
  

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