Generally speaking, many theorists agree that teachers’ beliefs are formed, internalized and spontaneously constructed through a process of cultural transmission and social construction via peer interaction and social learning (Pajares, 1992; Liao, 2007). Van Fleet (1979) believes that this enculturation process involves the ‘incidental learning’
that teachers go through their lives, and covers their assimilation of “the cultural elements present in their personal world” through their “individual observation, participation, and imitation” (Pajares, 1992). As Stigler & Hiebert (1999) suggest, teaching, as a cultural activity, is “not invented full-blown but rather evolves over long periods of time in ways that are consistent with the stable web of beliefs and assumptions that are part of the culture” (cited in Correa et al., 2008).
Nespor (1987) has explained that teachers’ beliefs reside in the episodic memory from the early experiences and cultural sources of knowledge transmission, and “often derive their subjective power, authority, and legitimacy from particular episodes or events”,
especially the “crucial experience or some particularly influential teacher produces a richly-detailed episodic memory”, and “then continue to color or frame the comprehension of events later” and serve “as an inspiration and a template” for their own teaching practices (cited in Johnson, 1994).
Furthermore, Pajares (1992) notes that “the importance of critical episodes and images helps explain how teachers develop their educational belief structure as children”.
Lortie (1975) has found that “teachers may unintentionally acquire culturally shared beliefs about teaching and learning in childhood” (Correa et al., 2008), when they were students at school and participated in an ‘apprenticeship of observation’ that took place during so many years they spent in the school, and essentially those “thousands of hours teachers spend in the classroom as students far outweigh the effects of teacher education”
(Pajares, 1992).
A lot of research shows that prospective teachers have already developed well a set of personal beliefs in the form of narratives about school, classroom, students, teachers, learning and teaching prior to entering the teacher education, and those beliefs formed in the early study experience tend to be largely resistant to change (Holt-Reynolds, 1992; Pajares, 1992; Vartuli, 1999; Chen, 2006; Correa et al., 2008, etc.). Markman (1989) explains that “very young children are able of forming object categories that are so stable, available, habitual, and familiar that they achieve special status” and can resist change (cited in Raths, 2000).
In a general way, “early childhood experiences acclimate children, provide children with the rules of schooling, and serve as the foundation to education” (Vartuli, 1999), which are actually very “powerful in affecting behavior that becomes highly resistant to change in adult life” (Pajares, 1992). It is found by teacher educators that “students who are interested in a teaching career already hold strong conceptions of what good teaching should be like” (Correa et al., 2008). Knowles & Holt-Reynolds (1991) also confirm that prospective teachers “indeed come to their formal studies of teaching with powerful, personal history-based lay theories about good practice” of teaching (Holt-Reynolds, 1992).
It’s said that lay theories are those beliefs built on untutored interpretations of personal experiences and developed naturally from previous learning experiences, and usually
they represent the tacit knowledge that was not consciously gained at an announced and recognized moment, so, lay theories normally remain dormant and latent, but tend to influence the ways in which prospective teachers construct the knowledge during their education and training, and become a major force when they are in their own classrooms (Holt-Reynolds, 1992; Pajares, 1992; Johnson, 1994; Raths, 2000, etc.).
These lay beliefs “constitute what have been referred to as folk pedagogies, or personal history-based lay theories”, meaning that they have been constructed on the basis of volumes of personal and cultural experiences, some of which could be unaltered and long-standing regardless of situations (Joram & Gabriele, 1998).
While the beliefs that prospective teachers “bring with them are direct reflections of studenting experiences, they can act as powerful checks on the validity of the research-based principles”, when they are studying the professional knowledge (Holt-Reynolds, 1992). Again, Kennedy (1997) has also argued that prospective teachers have already had the beliefs about how to be a good teacher and how to deal with students according to the recollections of their former teachers’ teaching experiences, therefore, “they have very little to learn” during the teacher education of the university (Raths, 2000).
However, it is also said that the history-based lay beliefs might act as ‘helpful schemata’
that prospective teachers could further develop and expand during their studies at teacher education, but there are times when the lay beliefs “are not quite contextualizing, illuminating, and helpful so much as they are powerful, potentially misleading, and unproductive as resources” for learning the professional knowledge (Holt-Reynolds, 1992). That again highlights that teacher education may have influence on the development of prospective teachers’ beliefs, but not so much as it’s expected, as Nespor (1987) has asserted, “beliefs draw their power from previous episodes or events”
(Thomas et al., 2001), and “have strong affective and evaluative components”, which help the beliefs stay unchanged (Prime & Miranda, 2006).
Lortie (1975) believes that “most students who choose education as a career have had a positive identification with teaching, and this leads to continuity of conventional practice and reaffirmation, rather than challenge, of the past” (Pajares, 1992). Then after they become teachers, as their experiences in the classrooms grow, their teaching knowledge “grows richer and more coherent and thus forms a highly personalized pedagogy or belief system that actually controls the teacher’s perception, judgment, and
behavior” (Mansour, 2009). And “these personal beliefs of teachers give rise to the various teaching methods, despite similar teaching context, curriculum, and degree of subject knowledge” (Farrell & Lim, 2005). In that respect, Zeichner (1980) stated
“teachers’ teaching at schools had more power in influencing teachers’ beliefs and practices than their formal university experience had done” (Mansour, 2009).
So, it is very clear that teachers’ beliefs can be traced back to the early personal cognition on educational phenomena in the process of individual socialization and later personal understanding on education, and the beliefs “are constructed through their experiences as students first, and later they transmit their beliefs into their own teaching patterns” (Farrell & Lim, 2005). That is to say, teachers develop the strong sets of educational beliefs based on their personal socialization experiences, which is to explain that teachers’ beliefs are highly-personalized and self-constructed, and there’s no “universal, consistent, fixed teacher image has yet to emerge from the teaching literature” (Haritos, 2004).
Within the same culture, it is also true that, when teachers “learn about culturally shared values and beliefs through their experiences in and out of school, both when they were students and as teachers, they may be more likely to integrate new ideas and experiences in ways that are consistent with these common, culturally embedded ideas”, which is called by Bruner (1996) as ‘folk pedagogies’ which mean teachers from the same country or region might have some similar beliefs “shaped both by common experiences as students and by shared cultural assumptions about how children learn”
(Correa et al, 2008). It’s also widely known that some teachers could imitate the teaching ways of their former teachers, or “rely on models of teaching with which they were familiar from their own experiences as students” (Beswick, 2003).
Therefore, the cultural and personal experiences contributing to prospective teachers’
beliefs could also “present a problem for teacher educators preparing pre-service teachers for classroom experiences that differ from their own experiences” (Kyles &
Olafson, 2008). That could help to explain, while teachers start their jobs in the school, they might show that they are not well prepared for the teaching alone in the real classrooms, and many of them even get the reality shock and transition pains, which also means their gained teaching ideal images could be dashed to the ground in the uncontrollable reality and unexpected classroom life. Then in order to reduce the
pedagogic pains in the problems caused by complex teaching practices and value conflicts, new teachers have to commit themselves to personal ‘trial-and-error’ to adjust and change their beliefs in place of insisting on some beliefs from former experiences.
With more and more years of teaching, teachers mostly would rather to adapt themselves to their individual school’s teaching concepts, values and routines than to follow updated educational theories and knowledge, which witnesses the influence of school culture on teachers’ beliefs. For teachers, those teaching strategy or experiences with good effects or successful results in practices can be strengthened and constructed into their belief systems, and then guide their future teaching behaviors, besides, teachers also prefer to copy and follow the effective teaching styles and methods popular in their work fields.
Snider and Roehl (2007) state that the majority of teachers “acquired important teaching skills from on-the-job experience rather than from teacher training or ongoing professional development, …the practical knowledge teachers traditionally acquire through trial-and-error learning on the job may be insufficient to meet today’s teaching challenges”. Usually it can be seen that some teachers also have subjective initiative to apply some learned principles of the theories about psychology or pedagogy from in-service training into their daily teaching and reinforce the effects by more practices, which is proved by this research and reveals that teachers’ in-service training have some possibility on improving their beliefs and teaching behaviors.
This research does prove that teachers could take their former teachers as good examples or role models to construct the similar beliefs, and the study experience in courses of teacher education more or less assist in the development of teachers’
educational beliefs. Some research also finds that teaching internship can individualize teaching cognition and attitude, and then shape teaching beliefs and impact future teaching life. In some cases, teaching internship could even be a turning point for intern teachers and a forceful influencing source in teachers’ initial socialization. What’s more, it has been widely discussed that personal experience in the family/school life and social/cultural context cannot be neglected in the study of teachers’ beliefs.
For instance, Kyles and Olafson (2008) declare that teachers’ beliefs are “shaped by particular socio-cultural and historical contexts in which they grew up and can be
closely related to their efficacy in teaching diverse learners,…(their) cultural understanding and responsiveness in teaching are best developed within the context of daily life in classrooms”. Richardson (1996) has also mentioned that “ethnic and socioeconomic background, gender, geographic location, religious upbringing, and life decisions may all affect an individual’s beliefs that, in turn, affect learning to teach and teaching” (cited in Kyles & Olafson, 2008).
In a conclusion, as research has indicated, teachers’ beliefs during the evolution are inevitably exposed to the ideas and values of their parents, peers, teachers, neighbors, various significant people and also the literatures, the media, popular folklores, cultural norms and social values, and teachers’ beliefs are derived from their personal histories and prior experiences, informal observation of classrooms as learners, individual personality and characters, experiences with families and institutions, previous training courses in colleges, teaching experiences, contexts of the classrooms and students, teaching/learning incidents at schools, professional knowledge, personal judgments and perceptions, school culture, educational policy, and so on (Lasley, 1980; Thomas et al., 2001; Farrell & Lim, 2005; Liao, 2007; Nergis, 2011, Al-Amoush et al., 2014, etc.).
Based on what teachers talked about in the interview, the factors that teachers think affect their beliefs can be put in the following table:
coding GG GR GH CH CC CR
Study experience 4 2 2 2 2 2
Teaching experience 2 1 3 2 2 2
Former teachers 2 2 2 0 1 3
Life experience 1 1 1 2 2 0
Special people/events 2 0 2 0 2 0
Family/friends 2 0 1 0 0 1
Teacher training 0 1 0 1 1 0
There are several teachers in both countries, who reported that their beliefs were influenced by more than one factor of the table above, that’s why the number in all is larger than 18.
1) Study experience
From the table above, it is quite obvious that among all factors teachers’ study experiences as students do have the biggest effect on their beliefs, most of them, like GGF7F, GGS5F, CCD5F, CHL10F, etc., had a very good time at school so that they chose to be teachers and their own study experiences became the big part in their beliefs. But the teachers, like GRR1F, GHG30F, CRB22F, etc., had not very pleasant school time, which, however, is also a reason to make them decide to be teachers so that they could do things in another way. No matter what reason, it is also proved by this research that the beliefs formed during teachers’ early study experiences are very deeply rooted and firmly resistant to change in spite of the difficult situations they have to face, and they really want to fulfill their beliefs as long as it’s possible.
2) Teaching experience
Only the second next to the study experience, teachers’ teaching experiences are reported to also play a main role in the development or changing of teachers’ beliefs.
In this research, many of the teachers, like GGM10F, GRB33F, GHK5F, CHH6F, CRB4F, etc., either went through the reality shock in the beginning when they got to know the students in their classes or the school environment they were in, and very soon they found the practices of their beliefs brought them into big failures, or experienced and learned something new and positive in their teaching, which made them realize more important for students or more beneficial to their teaching performance. In order to make themselves fit the reality that they cannot change, they decided to modify their beliefs or just keep the beliefs in mind.
3) Former teachers
6 German teachers and 4 Chinese teachers think that they were affected greatly by their former teachers. For most of them, their former teachers were big reasons for them to become teachers later, and till now they still take their former teachers as their role models for their teaching beliefs and behaviors, like GGF7F, GGD15M, CCD5F, CRB25M, CRB3F, etc., who share the same or similar beliefs as their former teachers. But there are also teachers, like GRR1F, GRK4M, whose former
teachers didn’t influence them in a positive way, and who didn’t like or agree with what their teachers did in class, therefore, since they became teachers, they always want and try to do something different.
4) Life experience
Some teachers, like GHU32F, GRE35M, CHH18F, CCD14F, CCD23F, CHL17F, etc., learn a lot from their personal life experience which has helped to shape, enrich and change their teaching beliefs. Based on their own life experience, teachers, like GRE35M, CHH18F, CCD14F, etc., believe that successful education should cultivate children into social people who have the ability to live a good life and be good members of the society, which actually more other teachers from the interview also agree on, for they don’t see education is only in the school, but more for the lifelong benefit.
5) Special people/events
Some teachers’ beliefs have some relationship with special or significant people such as famous educationists like GHW2F, GHU32F, etc., who are very convinced by the theories or ideas of educationists, or some colleagues like GGD15M, CCD23F, etc., who are very impressed by what their colleagues do, for it’s what they really want to do, or accidental events like CCD14F, CHH6F, etc., who are very shocked by the cases of school violence which leads them to more deeply rethink about the education and students.
6) Family/friends
There are several teachers, GGH7M, GGD15M, GHH38M, CRB21F, etc., who believe their parents or friends or even their children have had more or less influence on their beliefs about education, especially the influence from parents, no matter they wanted or not, they always get effects from their parents since their childhood. Even though they cannot tell what exactly their parents have influenced them, they believe their parents must be the important persons who have impacted on them.
7) Teacher training
The finding of this research also confirms that teacher training really doesn’t make a big contribution on teachers’ beliefs, which includes pre-service training and on-service training. In both countries only one German teacher GRD21F mentioned that per-service training had an effect on her belief, and two Chinese teachers CCD6M and CHH18F were positively affected by in-service training. Most of the teachers from the interview confessed that teacher training was not helpful for them, which was more theory-oriented or a little bit ideal, and not practical or pragmatic for their teaching. Some teachers, like GGS5F, GRE35M, CRB25M, etc., believe that teachers should be given more chances to do teacher training in their professional knowledge and skills.
8) Teacher education
Even though teachers in both countries have to pass through the formal teacher education and school internship to become teachers, when they started their jobs, teachers may find themselves not well or enough prepared for their classes, like GGS5F, GRK4M, CCD23F, CHH10M, etc., they didn’t think they learned during the teacher education useful knowledge and pragmatic skills to help them handle different kinds of students and the complex real teaching life in the school. From the cases of teachers in this research, it shows teacher education is not an obvious factor influencing teachers’ beliefs, at least not from what teachers have told. Maybe teachers are over-equipped with subject knowledge in teacher education, but they are far not enough ready or qualified to be teachers in the schools of secondary education after graduation.
9) Culture
Culture is not an influencing factor reported by teachers in the interview, for it’s something that teachers cannot be clearly aware of when they have been all the time immersed in it, but through the cross-cultural comparison the issue of culture can be seen in a clear way. For almost all Chinese teachers, they never have to be encountered with the cultural things, except one teacher CHL10F who has an experience of teaching in the USA and did get a cultural shock there, which made her realize that China has a good cultural tradition on respecting teachers. But for German teachers who usually have students from many different countries, so
cultural gap or difference is a normal topic in their classes, their beliefs are also affected in some way by the cultural issues, like GRE35M, GRD21F, GGH7M, etc., they believe it’s important for students to learn respect, tolerance and to be able to get along with very different people.