Part III. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TEACHER BELIEFS AND PRACTICES

In this report, we have presented information about how a national sample of teachers across every major subject and school level (in grades 4-12) responded to survey questions regarding their beliefs about good teaching and their instructional practices in one particular class. For the most part, we presented descriptive findings about individual survey items, broken down by subject and level, although in addition, items were aggregated into seven indices based on a series of exploratory factor analyses. [23] An argument was presented suggesting that these indices represent distinct, yet correlated, aspects of an underlying global dimension of pedagogy that ranges from a primary reliance on and belief in an information transmission and skills-practice model of pedagogy to a belief in and use of instructional practices more compatible with a constructivist theory of learning. We presented evidence that a strong relationship exists between the component of instructional practice labeled Cognitive Challenge and other aspects of a constructivist teaching practice—use of projects, group work, and (to a lesser extent) a relatively infrequent reliance on traditional transmission and skills-practice strategies. To complete our understanding of this aspect of teacher pedagogy, we need to understand the relationship between teachers' beliefs about good teaching and their actual use of various practices in the classroom.

How teachers organize classroom activities is a function of many influences—external pressures to cover curriculum or to prepare students for examinations, the expectations of a teacher's colleagues and immediate supervisors, the skills and confidence a teacher has that different instructional approaches can be managed in a diverse classroom with space, resource, and scheduling limitations, and many other factors.  However, teachers are also likely to feel accomplished when they can implement classroom practices that are consistent with what they regard as good and important teaching—when they can teach students about content that they themselves believe is important for students to know and when they can provide a collective learning experience that they think is likely to result in students growing and maturing in various ways, both intellectually and socially.

To what extent do teachers' actual classroom practices reflect their strongest beliefs about good teaching? Are teachers' practices constrained greatly by external pressures or by a "realistic" understanding about what kinds of instruction can successfully be employed in the particular classroom settings in which they teach?  By asking teachers to answer questions both about their teaching philosophy and about how they teach in the specific class "where you are most satisfied with your teaching—where you accomplish your teaching goals most often," we hoped to get a rough handle on the extent of this relationship.

There are two questions involved. One is the absolute level to which a teacher implements her philosophy in practice. The other is the extent to which philosophy and practice are correlated across teachers—that is, "How much more likely are teachers with a more constructivist philosophy to teach in a more constructivist way?"  Both of these questions are addressed here.

One approach to looking at these issues might be to compare individual survey questions about beliefs with "parallel" questions dealing with classroom practice. Although the belief and practice questions were not designed with parallelism in mind, there are some pairs of items that deal with similar issues.

One "beliefs" question, for example, asked teachers whether they agreed that  instruction should be built "around problems with clear, correct answers, and around ideas that most students can grasp quickly." The "practice" question related to this asked teachers how often their objective for asking questions of students was to find out if students knew the correct answer — a practice that a teacher agreeing with the belief statement would presumably employ.  (See Table 23.)

Table 23:  Frequency with which Teachers Ask
Students Questions  in Order to  See if They Know the Correct Answer Among Teachers With Varying Beliefs About Instruction

Though virtually all teachers, beliefs aside, report asking questions to see if students know the correct answer, those who tend to disagree with such an approach are less likely to do so.  In fact, only 36% of those who strongly disagree with the approach say they are testing students' knowledge "very often" or "always" compared to 74% of those who believe in such a basis for instruction (those who strongly agree with the traditional statement).  

We examined another "belief" question that asked teachers to position their own philosophy between two competing approaches to instruction; one that poses the teacher as a facilitator of student learning who provides opportunities and resources for students to discover or construct knowledge for themselves; and the other that describes the teacher's role as one who explains knowledge in a structured manner.  This belief item was matched to a practice item that asked teachers how much time they had spent in the last five hours leading a whole-class discussion where students listened and answered questions.  Presumably, those who believe in a regimented approach to teaching would allocate more class time to teacher-led discussion.  In fact, we found that  nearly one quarter of teachers whose philosophy is closer to that of an "explainer"  reported more than two hours of teacher-led whole-class discussion in the last five hours while only 6% of those favoring the role of "facilitator" reported that teacher-led discussion had occurred for such a long period of time.  (See Table 24.)

Table 24:  Amount of time spent on teacher-led whole-class discussion
among Teachers with varying beliefs about instruction

We examined yet another pair of items, this time addressing student involvement in planning classroom activities.  The "belief" item asked teachers whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement that "it is better when the teacher— not the students — decides what activities are to be done."   We paired this belief item with one that asked teachers to report how often their students actually suggested or helped to plan classroom activities.  As expected, teachers' beliefs manifest themselves in actual practice.

Table 25:  Frequency with which teachers have students suggest or help plan
classroom activity  by whether or not they agree with the practice

Table 25 shows that more than one third of those who believe that it is a good idea to consider student input (those who tend to disagree with the traditional statement) actually have students help plan classroom activities at least monthly.  This makes them twice as likely to involve students as those who don't believe in the practice (34% vs. 16%). Thus we can show that teachers holding certain constructivist philosophies carry that philosophy into their classroom teaching.

In our second analysis of this issue, a set of 10 different constructivist-related instructional practices were  compared with three teacher belief items that clearly contrast between a constructivist and a transmission pedagogy:

• Whether students learned more knowledge from the inquiry-oriented approach to handling class discussion attributed to "Mr. Jones" or from "Ms. Hill's" direct-instruction approach (see above, Figure 1).
   
• Whether the teacher believed more in being a facilitator for student discovery or in direct instruction ("my job is to explain, to show students how to do the work, and to assign specific practice"; see Figure 2).
   
• Whether the teacher believed it was better to "have all sorts of activities going on in the classroom" (at the same time) or whether classes were better organized around whole-class assignments with clear directions and accomplishable over short time intervals (also in Figure 2).

Teachers taking opposite positions on these issues were compared in terms of the proportion of them who reported having their selected class engage in each of 10 different activities on at least a monthly basis—activities such as engaging in week-long projects, keeping journals, suggesting or planning classroom activities, and designing their own problems to solve. Teachers favoring an inquiry approach, being a facilitator, and organizing class time around multiple simultaneous small-group activities were more likely to report doing week-long projects, student journals, designing assignments where students had to "represent the same idea in more than one way," hands-on activities, reflective student essays, and, in fact, nearly every one of the practice items shown in the table. Overall, those who selected the constructivist belief alternative on each survey question were about one-half a standard deviation higher on an index measuring the sum of the number of constructivist activities engaged in (monthly) than teachers who chose the traditional transmission belief statement (or who selected the middle response).  (See Table 26.)

Table 26:  Percent of Teachers Using Particular
Constructivist Strategies (Monthly+) Particular Constructivist strategies (monthly+) by specific beliefs about good instruction

Indeed, when we examine the full 13-item Belief Index (see above, page 13), teachers who reported using five or more of the practices in Table 26 were a full standard-deviation higher on the Belief Index (mean = +0.48) than teachers who reported using at most one of the practices (mean = –0.52).

The analysis of the relationship between teacher beliefs and practices has so far collapsed all teachers, regardless of subject or level.  However, we have already seen that subject and level play a large role in the relevance of certain instructional strategies to a teacher's practice (and, presumably, in the relevance of related beliefs). For our final foray into this subject, we examined the correlation coefficients between the Belief Index and the various components of constructivist practice, separately for 15 groups of teachers defined by subject and school level.

The correlational patterns show, for most of the 15 subject/level groups, a substantial relationship between teacher beliefs and practices at the level of generality of these indices.  As shown in Table 27, the Belief Index correlates at or above r=0.40 with Cognitive Challenge for English, social studies, math, and fine arts teachers at both middle and high school levels, for elementary teachers of self-contained classes, and for middle school science teachers.  (High school science teachers fall just below that criterion, at r=0.37.)  The correlations between contructivist beliefs and group work are slightly higher (a majority of correlations are at or above r=0.44). The project work correlations are lower than the other two (the median correlation is r=0.32); however, the projects index is correlated above 0.40 with Beliefs for math teachers, elementary teachers, and middle school social studies teachers.  Even correlations with "infrequent traditional practices" (i.e., the reverse-scored index of transmission- and skill-oriented practices) tend to be in the +0.30 to +0.50 range (with a median correlation of r=0.38 for the 15 teacher groups). Combining constructivist practice indices together produces slightly larger correlations. The median correlation between "Active Learning" (combining projects, group work, and absence of traditional practices) is 0.48, and when that is combined with Cognitive Challenge for a Combined Constructivist Pedagogy Index, the median rises to 0.49.

Table 27: Correlation of Constructivist Belief Index
With Components of Constructivst Practice

For some applied secondary school subjects, the Belief Index does not correlate well with some of the constructivist teaching practice indices. Among vocational education teachers, constructivist beliefs are not correlated with cognitive challenge and they tend to be correlated with frequent rather than infrequent use of transmission and skills-oriented practices. At the same time, constructivist beliefs correlate well with group work (r=0.53) and fairly well with projects (r=0.32).  For business education teachers, constructivist beliefs correlate with the overall Combined Constructivist Pedagogy Index very well (r=0.41); however, the two coefficients between beliefs and (a) group work and (b) traditional practices are both low.  Similarly, for fine arts teachers, constructivist beliefs correlate highly with the overall index (r=0.45), but they have weak correlations with both projects and group work.

However, among teachers in every academic subject, the patterns are very consistent: Teachers in that subject who hold more constructivist beliefs than others of the same subject and school level report substantially higher levels of use of all types of constructivist teaching strategies—from cognitively challenging ones to projects and group work and they also report less frequent uses of traditional instructional practices. For academic subject teachers, the correlations between the Belief Index and the Combined Constructivist Pedagogy Index range as high as 0.65 for middle school social studies teachers and go no lower than 0.31 (for foreign language teachers).

These data show that teacher beliefs do a reasonably good job of predicting patterns of practice.  Although it would be a mistake to assume that teachers who do not employ a give practice fail to employ it because they lack a belief in its value, the relationships shown do suggest that teachers are more likely to engage in constructivist practices if they state a belief in their validity. In other words, beliefs do help determine practice, and therefore to increase the frequency of constructivist practice, one might need to directly address teachers' philosophies. On the other hand, if one can encourage and guide teachers to carry out a specific practice (even in the absence of supporting belief), this  may change their beliefs about what is desirable and what is feasible in their teaching practice, thus helping to make other constructivist practices more likely. A future report will address changes teachers reported having made over the last three years in their teaching practices and the circumstances under which increased constructivist practice is more likely to occur.

Other Analyses of Teacher Pedagogy Using the TLC Data

The largely descriptive findings presented in this report is one element in our use of the TLC survey data to analyze teacher pedagogy and its relationship to other aspects of teaching. Analyses are being conducted in two directions: (1) examination of possible determinants of differences in teachers' pedagogy; and (2) examination of possible outcomes of a constructivist teacher pedagogy.

Determinants of Teacher Pedagogy 

In terms of possible determinants, we are looking at three types of variables that may influence pedagogy:

• teacher background and role orientation (private practice versus collaborative professional practice),
• student ability and socio-economic background, and
• school professional culture, including aspects of staff development, cohesion, and school-level leadership. 

Teacher Background and Role Orientation

Pedagogical differences by teacher gender, years of teaching experience, and educational background have important implications for educational policy. The differences in pedagogy are particularly strong by gender and by educational background, and these will be examined in a future report.  The relationship between having a "private-practice" orientation towards teaching and a transmission-oriented pedagogy (or between having a "professional" orientation and a constructivist pedagogy) has been explored in two TLC Special Reports (Becker and Riel, 1999; Riel and Becker, 2000). In particular, a private-practice orientation is likely to make a teacher less responsive to influences of and changes within the larger teaching culture, which despite external pressures towards accountability, is strongly oriented towards a constructivist practice. Teacher leaders who are involved with their peers at school and throughout the profession are among the most constructivist teachers in the country.

Student Background

It seems reasonable to believe that teachers feel that students of apparent higher ability or greater prior knowledge respond more favorably to one type of teaching approach as opposed to another, or that teaching in low socio-economic-status communities brings greater pressures for teachers to adopt transmission-oriented practices. A future report will examine equity issues in technology use and pedagogy.

School Culture

Teacher pedagogy may be affected by the cultural environment in which they work—for example, staff development opportunities, cohesion and goal uniformity among the teaching staff and between administrators and teachers, the extent of external pressure to teach at variance with one's beliefs, the attitudes of school administrative leaders, and the pedagogy of teachers with whom they work.  The relationship of many of these variables to teacher pedagogy have already been examined in the Becker and Riel (1999) paper. Future work will incorporate more of these in greater depth.

Outcomes of Teacher Pedagogy

The principal focus of the Teaching, Learning, and Computing study is on the determinants of teachers' use of information and communications technologies. In Report 1 of this series (Becker, 1999) we already showed that teacher pedagogy is a principal variable for identifying which teachers use the Internet, both professionally and in directing students in its use. It is not surprising, then, that we are finding the same is true of the relationship of pedagogy to computer use as a whole: Constructivist-oriented teachers use computers professionally in more varied ways, have greater technical expertise in the use of computers, use computers frequently with students, and use them in apparently more powerful ways.  These findings have been explored in several papers to date (Ravitz, Wong, and Becker, 1999; Riel and Becker, 2000; and Becker, 2000a).  Further examination of the relationship between teacher pedagogy and computer use will be the topic of a future report.

Finally, although we have already identified teacher role-orientation as a likely determinant of teacher pedagogy, it seems plausible to believe that a teacher's approach to her practice in turn also affects her role-orientation. Thus, while having a "private-practice" role orientation is likely to engender a transmission-oriented practice, teachers who engage in a constructivist pedagogy may actually be more likely as a result to seek out other teachers and become more professionally involved. As with other relationships between variables in our dataset, the direction of causality between pedagogy and role orientation is difficult to disentangle with a cross-sectional survey. A future report will examine the whole set of relationships uncovered and clarify what can be concluded from our data and what remains for new research to discover.

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