Teacher Beliefs: "the Gost" In The Schooling

Teachers and schools play the important roles in the education reform. To know the factorswhich influence the school reculturing and teacher change is of great significance, for anyreform on any level it is the school and teachers who carry it out at last. Related studies showthat Teacher Belief is the profound instruction in the school culture. It influences the schooleducational practice and is influenced by the school culture at the same time. Therefore, tounderstand, control and reconstruct Teacher Belief becomes the key pointt of the qualityschool construction. The past researches have paid more attention on teachers' beliefs aboutinstruction but neglected the beliefs about other aspects in the schools. Teachers' activities arenot confined in the classrooms only. Teachers' beliefs permeate in most school activities andinfluence them, thus we should concern about teachers' beliefs on every aspect of theeducation.Teachers' educational beliefs should include the following aspects: beliefs on school vision;beliefs on school educational activities (curriculum, instruction, moral education, scientificresearch, evaluation, management, etc.);beliefs on the social and family roles;beliefs onschool development etc.. In order to know the successful conditions and difficulties of theimplementation of the New Curriculum Reform, school reforms and teacher change, we startthe study from the perspective of teachers' "whole-education beliefs" and select a secondaryschool N as the case. We construct the teacher belief system in N by interviewing, classobservation, students' free writing, file analysis, questionnaires and situational diagnosis.After that we make a comparison between those beliefs and the ideas of the New CurriculumReform in nowadays educational reforms. And via this we have achieved the purpose of thisdissertation.Research shows that the belief"Marks of the examination are the most important factor inthe education" is the "ghost" in most of schools. There exists two contrary cultures in N: thestagnate culture and the progressive culture. These two cultures form a paradox, conflictingwith each other. In fact it is the result of the conflicts among those teachers' beliefs. The maincontents of teachers' beliefs are: the contradiction between the two perspectives as"Management and control come first, teaching follows" and "Scientific research rejuvenatingthe school, activating self-development";"Students' marks and control are the central aims ofschool education" or "Self-development is the main goal";Teachers fix their self-images as"authorities and controllers" or "friends";Individual differences are "problems" or "varieties".Thus the contradictory beliefs lead to the conflicting school visions and contrary schoolcultures. The purposes of school education are narrowed down to "marks and disciplines"which neglect individuals and individuals' needs.According to the result of the research, we suggest that teacher beliefs should be the baseof school reculturing and teacher change. Besides, schools need to help teachers to reflect ontheir original experience and educational beliefs and adjust to the basic concepts of the NewCurriculum Reform. At the same time, teachers should restructure their educational beliefsduring the implementation of the New Curriculum and the school reculturing.In order tofacilitate the implementation of the New Curriculum, the school culture and TeacherProfessionalization should be improved, thus to form a kind of autonomous teacherprofessional culture. Based on the above analysis, we provide the following suggestions: toreconstruct Teacher Belief from meta-affect and the teacher culture;to construct a schoolvision of "integrating scientific research, moral education and instruction";to reconstruct aschool curriculum vision of "caring for individuals";to reconstruct the belief on teacher rolesand form the leadership community, let every teacher be part of the leadership;to popularizescientific research throughout the whole school;to build the theory of "Fieldwork—Study"and form "School—University" Parternerships. In a word, the school culture and teacherbeliefs interact with each other and change each other mutually.