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Teacher Beliefs and Current Practices
The authors have found that teachers’ beliefs greatly influence their teaching practices. For
example, if a teacher believes that some students are simply unable to learn, he will not invest
a great deal of time in teaching these students. Similarly, if a teacher feels that the only way to
motivate students to learn is through grading, very little formative assessment will be found in
that teacher’s classroom. Such beliefs and practices bear directly on the ability of teachers to
implement new assessment and instructional strategies. If teachers wish to improve their
assessment and instructional practices, they often must first examine the underlying beliefs
that inspire these practices. To this end, we frequently begin our professional development
sessions with a reflection activity in which teachers are prompted to respond to survey
questions that help uncover their deep-seated assessment beliefs. One such survey can be
found in Table 9.1. Before continuing, the reader may wish to pause and respond to this survey.
Typically, in professional development sessions, several mismatches between “desirability” and
“implementation” are found. The statements showing the widest disparity are often statements
1, 2, 4, 8, and 9, which deal with assessment of learning