Teacher Expectations, Self-Efficacy, and Growth Mindset: the Experience of Colombian Rural Teachers from Fundacion Escuela Nueva

• In Event: The Teaching Profession in Latin America: Education, Reform, and Policy Actors in Chile, Colombia, and Peru

Proposal

Providing equitable access to quality education for rural students is still an urgent problem in Latin American countries. Given the variation in demographic density and cumulative underinvestments in crucial infrastructure and public goods, rural students face significant barriers to accessing quality education, navigating the formal education system, and experiencing social mobility. Because of the steep barriers students face, teachers might adapt their behavior by lowering their expectations and casting doubt on their self-efficacy as educators, which would further deteriorate rural education quality, reinforcing the shortcomings in place. In the Colombian context, the NGO Fundación Escuela Nueva has been at the forefront of providing quality education for several decades based on a model tailored to multigrade classrooms where teachers serve as learning facilitators.

Based on the Colombian context, this paper aims to establish a) rural teachers’ expectations of a typical rural student trajectory in the formal education system and b) how teachers’ characteristics correlate to expectations and implicit theories of intelligence. To do so, this study examines a teacher training program conducted by Fundación Escuela Nueva in March 2022, following an initial run in 2021, which provided free pedagogical materials and digital resources to teachers to strengthen rural teachers’ technological capabilities during COVID-19. A survey administered ex-ante comprises responses from rural teachers (N=319) to questions centered around expectations, growth mindset, self-efficacy, and a wide array of critical organizational variables such as trust in leadership and cooperative behavior among teachers. Survey data is analyzed using hierarchical clustering, uncentered correlation, and average linkage algorithms to identify teacher responses and characteristic patterns.

Author

• Jonathan Beltran, Teachers College at Columbia University