“Teacher, Why Is There A Rainbow?”: Latent Categories Of Kindergarten Teachers' Teaching Beliefs Predict How They Respond To Children's Causal Question

Young children are prolific cause-and-effect agents.They put forward "why" to teachers,and teachers make some kind of response,which is a common teaching and learning phenomenon in kindergartens.How do teachers respond to young children? What beliefs guide them to respond one way rather than the other? Based on the perspective of dialogue philosophy of Martin Buber,a survey of 194 kindergarten teachers in China found that:(1)the common ways that teachers respond to children’s causal questions are explanatory response,inquiry response,questioning response,and consulting response.(2)Latent profile analysis of teaching beliefs identifies three types of teacher groups: leader,follower and polyphony.(3)Interpretive response is more likely to be used by the leader,exploratory and referential response are more likely to be adopted by followers,polyphonic people are impartial,use a combination of different response methods,and do not favor one response over another.Based on these findings,we further discuss the heterogeneous teaching beliefs of kindergarten teachers induced by the curriculum reform in China and the differences in their responses guided by the beliefs.These findings provide implications for us to pay attention to the internal and external landscape of teacher teaching.