Personality Characteristics and Teacher Beliefs among Pre-Service Teachers.

Abstract

Teacher education is at a cross-road. Public interest in school reform has increased and teacher education has been rediscovered as a problem in policy circles (Cochran-Smith, 2005). With this heightened visibility there exists a press, on the national level, for evidence and answers concerning the effects of teacher preparation on future teacher quality. Bransford, Darling-Hammond, and Lepage (2005) offer a framework for conducting research on teacher preparation that points out a critical need for research on how teachers learn to engage in that successfully support student development and learning (p. 23). Our investigation is consistent with this goal. In order to understand what pre-service teachers need to learn, it is critically important to understand what they already believe and what personal attributes (e.g., personality) they have that may relate to their beliefs and learning. The present paper asks three questions about pre-service teachers. First, what are the prevalent beliefs about teaching among pre-service teachers? Second, what are the personality characteristics of pre-service teachers? Third, in what ways do personality traits and other demographic attributes predict beliefs about teaching? Findings have implications for the consideration of such attributes in teacher education programs. Pre-service Teacher Beliefs Many studies have acknowledged the importance of teacher beliefs (Fang, 1996; McCarty, Abbott-Shim, & Lambert, 2001; Nespor, 1987). Teaching involves multiple, simultaneous decisions related to content pedagogy, student relationships, praise and discipline, materials of instruction, and interactions with colleagues (Griffin, 1999). Teachers do not possess templates to guide their work. Rather, teachers draw upon past experiences and their own ways of approaching problems. They develop their own solutions based on their personal understanding of the circumstances (Smylie, 1994), an understanding that is rooted in their belief systems. Two factors motivate our interest in the beliefs of pre-service teachers. First, existing work indicates that students come into teacher education programs with a set of beliefs about teaching, classrooms, and children stemming from their own K-12 educational experiences (Kagan, 1992; Lortie, 1975; Pajares, 1992). This is in contrast to college students planning to work in other professions who have less direct experience upon which to base beliefs about future work. This situation creates a challenge to teacher educators striving to improve the of future educators. This challenge occurs because, in human learning, it is clear that it is more difficult to unlearn existing beliefs than it is to learn new beliefs (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). Therefore, pre-service teachers may teach the way they remember being taught rather than using pedagogical knowledge learned in teacher education (Ginsburg & Newman, 1985; Lortie, 1975). As Pajares (1992) describes, unexplored entering beliefs may be responsible for the perpetuation of antiquated and ineffectual teaching practices (p. 328). Teachers' beliefs are more malleable during the years of teacher preparation, rather than once an individual is in a classroom. So and Watkins (2005) found that pre-service teachers' thinking changed to a more constructivist approach by their first year of teaching. A mixed-methods study conducted by Brownlee, Purdie, and Boulton-Lewis (2001) found growth in the epistemological beliefs of pre-service teachers due to a year-long reflective teaching program. Such work provides evidence to suggest that changing teacher beliefs should and can occur during the training years. Second, the majority of work on teacher beliefs is based on in-service, not pre-service teachers which pose a problem. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education recommends that teacher educators increase their awareness of beliefs of their pre-service teachers (NCATE, 2002) and Raths (2001) even goes so far as to say that beliefs should be used as one criterion for entrance into teacher education programs. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 116 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.