Teachers' Beliefs About Good Teaching: Professional Insights for Remedying Schooling

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Abstract

This paper describes teachers’ beliefs about the pedagogical approaches of very good teachers, defined as teachers from whom you learn a lot. Exploratory factor analysis and analysis of variance based on data from an online survey of K-12 public school teachers (N = 179) revealed two main findings. First, the teachers in our sample believed that very good teachers preferred relationship-emphasized over content-emphasized pedagogical approaches, which embraced predominantly caring and supportive approaches, plus strong subject matter knowledge. Second, regardless of their political orientation (conservative to progressive) or other demographic characteristics, the teachers valued a relationship-emphasized pedagogical approach over a content-emphasized one. This consensus suggests that teachers’ experience-informed views of pedagogical quality could bolster research development and policy formation.

Authors

• Eric Haas, California State University - East Bay

• Margarita Pivovarova, Arizona State University

• Gustavo E. Fischman, Arizona State University