Teachers' Beliefs About Good Teaching: Professional Insights in a Digital Society.

• In Event: Teaching in a Digital Society: Challenges and Innovations

Proposal

This paper describes teachers’ beliefs about the pedagogical approaches of very good teachers (defined as teachers from whom students learn a lot) in the context of a digital society. Two research questions guide this study:
1. What are the beliefs of U.S. K-12 teachers about the pedagogical approaches that define a very good teacher (VGT)?
2. Do teachers' beliefs about these pedagogical approaches vary by their political orientation and teacher’s personal characteristics?

We created survey items to explore beliefs about pedagogical approaches to teaching. Research on effective teaching generally can be divided into two strands: pedagogical approaches and teaching strategies. Pedagogical approaches are the fundamental frames that guide how one understands and approaches learning, teaching, and schools (Authors, 2014). Teaching strategies are specific actions, usually at the classroom level, through which teachers implement or operationalize their pedagogical approach (see, e.g., Lemov, 2021). As described in the seminal work by Hattie (2012), strategies that teachers decide to implement or that are promoted or required to be implemented by the educational policy will partially depend on the underlying pedagogical approaches.

Using factor analysis, we identified common factors among these items and combined them into an index to represent a construct of very good teacher practices. Next, we statistically compared the average values of the construct in relation to teachers’ characteristics (ideological views, demographics, etc.) using ANOVA and t-tests.

Survey Instrument
We administered a survey previously piloted with a general population (authors, 2023), to understand what practices -relationship or content-emphasized- teachers prioritize in the context of a digital society (Authors, 2023). Our respondents were teachers who taught in the US K-12 schools in the previous five years. The survey consisted of two parts - pedagogical practices of very good teaching and policy vignettes which are not the focus of the current study. We defined a “very good teacher” as “a teacher where you learned a lot” and asked participants to rate their level of agreement with 10 statements (Table 1) about teaching practices of a very good teacher representing five domains of pedagogy framed either through the relationship-emphasized or content-emphasized pedagogical approach drawn from the literature on effective teaching.

Results and Findings
Overall, in our sample of 179 teachers (see Table 2), an average teacher worked in a traditional public school (84%) in an urban or suburban area (88%), and had experience teaching English Language Learners, special education, and gifted students. Consistent with the teaching workforce in the US (NCES, 2023), an average teacher in our sample was 46 years old, more likely to be White (78%) and female (80%). Almost all teachers were certified (97%), most of them had a master's degree (72.5%), and at least two-thirds of them had more than 10 years of teaching experience (70%). More than half of teachers lean towards progressive views on social issues (63%).

Through factor analysis we identified two distinct factors (see Table 3) with one item not being strongly associated with either of the factors. The first factor consisted of all five items framed as relationship-emphasized approach. The second factor included four content-emphasized teaching practices. The values of Cronbach’s alpha indicated a relatively good fit of the items for the relationship construct (0.63) and lower consistency between items for the content construct (0.48). This suggests that teachers have a good practical understanding of the two approaches and can professionally distinguish between practices that belong to either of them.

With the scale for items ranging from 1 to 7 where “1” meant “very definitely true”, the average value across all five items in the relationship construct was 1.6 out of 7, and the average value of the content construct across four items was 4.19. This implies that teachers, on average, favored teaching practices framed as relationship-emphasized approach compared to content-emphasized approach. Table 4 further presents the differences between how teachers perceived five teaching strategies framed from either relationship or content perspective. We used paired sample t-tests to compare how each teacher ranked these statements. For all items, except content knowledge, we found significant differences in the ranking of the same practice framed in a different way, with teachers giving preference to a relationship-emphasized approach. For content knowledge, participants agreed that very good teachers needed to be strong in both pedagogical and subject matter knowledge.

To answer our second research question, we used analysis of variance to test whether teachers’ beliefs about teaching strategies varied with teacher characteristics and ideological orientation. We did not find significant differences in average values for either relationship or content constructs apart from gender: compared to male teachers, female teachers expressed less agreement with content-emphasized teaching practices as practices of a very good teacher.

Significance
Our findings indicate that teachers can clearly distinguish between two pedagogical approaches: relationship-emphasized and content-emphasized. On average, teachers in our sample believed that a very good teacher helps students learn a lot when they know and care about their students, create engaging learning activities relevant to their students’ lives, and know the subject matter. The factors associated with very good teaching identified by the participants in this study -- prioritizing relationships, affective connections, and mastery of content -- coincide with those identified in the relevant research literature (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018) and are aligned with the recently published recommendations of the UN High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession (UN, 2024).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, teachers' beliefs about the pedagogical approach of very good teachers are consistent with that of education scholars, cited above, as well as that of the general public as described in our previous research (Authors, 2023). This consistency suggests that including teachers’ beliefs in research development and discussion can also promote strong coalitions of scholars and teachers, and likely also parents, to remedy and repair teaching and learning through the implementation of effective pedagogy (Debs et al., 2022; Haas, 2009; Shipps, 2006).

Authors

• Gustavo E Fischman, Arizona State University

• Margarita Pivovarova, Arizona State University

• Eric Haas, Cal State East Bay