Prior Beliefs and Cognitive Change in Learning to Teach

This is a report of the first year of a longitudinal study to investigate changes in preservice teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about reading instruction before, during, and after a fifth-year teacher education program. In particular, changes in global preprogram beliefs about education, teaching, and learning were traced as preservice teachers acquired specific knowledge of how to manage, assess, and instructionally facilitate students’ learning through text. Researchers interviewed and observed 14 elementary and secondary preservice teachers as they entered the teacher education program, attended reading classes at the university, then taught reading in school classrooms. These qualitative data were analyzed to determine (a) the patterns of intellectual change from novice preservice teacher to beginning classroom teacher; (b) the personal, program, and contextual influences or constraints on that change; (c) the role of the cooperating teacher and university supervisor in supporting intellectual change; and (d) the nature of prior beliefs on identity maintenance while learning. Findings include the importance of understanding preservice teachers’ prior beliefs to inform supervision and university course design, the value of cognitive dissonance in practice teaching contexts, the need to routinize classroom management knowledge before attending to subject-specific pedagogy, and the importance of the academic task as part of the teaching knowledge base.