Understanding Teacher Beliefs

Introduction

Understanding teacher beliefs is crucial for improving teaching practices, student learning, and the achievement of educational aims. This document aims to provide a comprehensive framework for categorizing teacher beliefs across various aspects of teaching and learning in the context of government schools in India.

The broader approach/framework draws upon multiple well-established theoretical models and research findings to design a comprehensive, robust and credible approach to analyzing teacher beliefs in the context of work done by IT for Change. It tries to cover a wide range of areas, including epistemological beliefs, subject-specific beliefs, pedagogical beliefs, beliefs about student learning, beliefs about technology integration, and beliefs influenced by cultural and contextual factors.

By systematically categorizing teacher beliefs, the idea is to develop a broader framework that can serve as a valuable tool for (our team) educators, researchers, and policymakers to gain insights into the underlying beliefs that shape teaching practices, inform professional development initiatives, and guide educational reforms. Understanding teacher’s beliefs, reflecting on them, and researching Teacher Professional Development (TPD) programs that seek to help teachers examine and revise these beliefs, is an important part of the [[1]] program of IT for Change.