Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Pedagogical beliefs, or the assumptions made by teachers about their students and
student learning and their roles and responsibilities as a teacher, are composed of
cognitive, affective, and behavioral component. The latter two components are activated
when action or decision is required. Epistemological belief or the belief regarding the
nature of knowledge, the nature of knowledge acquisition, and the modes of knowing
the classroom.
Many of the previous studies used belief inventories, which may or may not
correspond to the teachers beliefs relevant to their unique professional reality. Gaete,
Gomez, and Benavidez (2017) confirm that there has been overuse of self-report in the
study of beliefs in education. This research aimed at capturing that unique professional
reality in the Philippine setting thats why open-ended interviews and observation were
conducted.
Literature on teacher beliefs about the nature of learners centers on the teachers
expectations of their students. Teachers provide different learning opportunities and level
infludence by beliefs about students intelligence, may be fixed or growth oriented. The
growth mind-set (Dweck, 2010) is more beneficial because teachers with that mind-set
take steps in developing student potential and commend student effort. Negative
stereotype is a fixed mind-set because it is a belief certain abilities are not present in a
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certain group. According to Brophy (as cited in Williams, 2012), teachers are inclined to
be attentive to what they expect and less likely to notice what they do not expect.
Because teachers beliefs about students have strong impact on how they treat
students and the instructional decision they make about teaching and learning (Dray and
Delgado, 2008), it is deemed important by this researcher to explore the teachers beliefs
about the students in the ultimate goal to contribute to educational success in the public
Ability grouping has been found by Muir (2007) to be a widespread practice and
that includes Philippine public schools, which rank students and put the highest ranking
to the top sections. An interesting underlying question of this research is how the teacher
beliefs about their students affect their pedagogical beliefs, which are usually represented
assessment techniques, such as multiple choice tests, fill-in the blanks, and matching
exercises, stress the accountability function for grading and sorting students based on
With not much study on the pedagogical beliefs of public school teachers in the
Philippine setting, it is important to find out how the teachers pedagogical beliefs and
Clark and Petersons (1986) cognitive model of teachers thought and action
served as the main framework used by this study in analyzing relationship between
teacher beliefs and practices. It postulates that the teachers thought processes and
practices influence each other. However, this study focused more on teachers planning,
theories and beliefs, teachers classroom behavior and interaction with students
practice.
Primarily, the study looked into points of consonance and dissonance between
beliefs and practice and the factors that facilitated or hindered translation of teachers
beliefs to practice. While many studies have supported interrelation between beliefs and
actions, some studies showed no consistent relationship between the two. Phipps and
Borg (as cited in Peercy, 2012) recommended that the underlying reasons of incongruent
relationship be explored in future researches and this was done by this study.
Dissonance between teachers beliefs and practices may give an insight on the limitations
that the teachers faced in implementing the recent reform in the educational system called
Not much research on the beliefs about educational reform was found. Hoffman
and Seidel (2015), who reviewed 345 studies on teacher beliefs, support that there is
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participants examine which among the principles in the reform they agreed and disagreed
to. It was hoped that the findings would provide DepEd with important information to
help determine curricula and program direction. It is unfortunate that most reform
processes have been designed without the input of teachers (Campos, 2005).
Van den Akker (in Elmas et al., 2014) state that in curriculum reform, three layers
must be penetrated: 1) the macro layer of the nation, society, and program; 2) the meso
layer of school; 3) and the micro layer of classrooms. (van den Akker in Elmas etal,
2014). According to Smith and Southerland (2007 in Elmas etal, 2014), teachers
perceptions of the curriculum may influence their reaction to it, thus the importance of
(LoucksHorsley, Hewson, Love, & Stiles in Elmas et al., 2014), characterized by in-
reflection, monitoring, assessment, and feedback (Campos, 2005) has been proposed for
schools. Campos (2005) emphasizes that the professional development systems should