Chapter 1: Preservice Teachers’ Beliefs

The cognitive revolution has greatly altered our way of thinking about teaching, and the methods of conducting teacher education and professional development. No longer do we focus entirely on classroom behaviors, skills, and activities. Instead, teacher education has become highly cognitive in focus. Teachers in professional development programs and candidates in teacher education programs discuss the understandings they bring into their programs, and their beliefs are challenged through classroom readings, dialogue, and classroom experimentation. These changes in approach to teacher education and professional development accompany a very different vision of teaching in which the teacher, as facilitator, helps pupils create meaning around the topic of interest. Implementation of this vision relies on strong and complex thought processes on the part of teachers. Thus, the new ways of thinking about the teaching side of the teacher/learner relationship focus on what goes on in the minds of teachers and teacher education candidates as they engage in learning to teach, planning, classroom action, reflection, and assessment. The research related to this vision addresses descriptions of and methods for determining teacher cognitions, the relationship between cognitions and classroom actions, and ways of affecting changes in both. This chapter focuses on a particular form of cognition—beliefs—in preservice teacher education students (referred to in this chapter as teacher candidates).