Chapter 1: Teachers’ Personal Epistemologies: Theoretical and Practical Considerations

We provide a rationale for this volume and summarize three main goals within the context of a teacher’s epistemological beliefs and their relationship to classroom practice. A summary of each chapter is provided and linked to these goals. We also discuss five emergent themes within the volume that describe ways in which teacher’s beliefs change and develop. Although these themes are discussed in the chapters included in the volume, we sought to make them explicit so that readers of this volume may consider them in their own instructional practice and ongoing research. The five emergent themes also had strong ties to previous research on teachers’ beliefs and practice. We conclude with a summary of three ways to improve theory through research. These include developing and testing integrated models that examine the interrelationships between different dimensions of teachers’ personal epistemologies and classroom practice, testing multi-stage empirical models that examine how teachers’ beliefs are related to classroom and student variables, which in turn, are related to important outcomes such as student learning, higher-level thinking, and belief change; and refining developmental models of teachers’ personal epistemologies.