I think the question needs some example to understand.

Please see the attached!

Kind regards

NP

Thank you for these papers. They are useful in terms of 'self belief ' and this is part of what I'm interested. However, I think I'm seeking to understand more about the teachers underlying belief about how learners learn best  and the way assessment influences the the way teachers teach - It seems that what is stated as their belief about how learns learn best is not matched by practice. It seems practice is heavily influenced by assessment even when there is 'freedom' to teacher in a different way. V

I see. Your research problem could be better stated as "Understanding the gap between pedagogical belief and instructional practice."

I think nobody is free of a gap between the ideal world and real world. I wonder if there is one teacher in the world who could pompously say that her/his pedagogical ideals are 100% reflected in practice.

I think, and I include myself, most of the teachers do their best to bridge the gap in different ways, being one of them coping strategies (a topic studied by educational psychologists).

Some related references

Fresch, M. J. (2003). A national survey of spelling instruction: Investigating teachers' beliefs and practice. Journal of Literacy Research, 35(3), 819-848.

Hwang, Y.-S., & Evans, D. (2011). Attitudes towards inclusion: gaps between belief and practice. International journal of special education, 26(1), 136-146.

Olson, J. R., & Singer, M. (1994). Examining teacher beliefs, reflective change, and the teaching of reading. Literacy Research and Instruction, 34(2), 97-110.

Schumm, J. S., Vaughn, S., Gordon, J., & Rothlein, L. (1994). General education teachers' beliefs, skills, and practices in planning for mainstreamed students with learning disabilities. Teacher Education and Special Education: The Journal of the Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children, 17(1), 22-37.

I agree with the idea that every teacher experiences (in a more or less reflective way) this gap between "ideal" teaching and "real" teaching. In this sense, I find Wood's concept of "hotspots" very useful: points or moments of discrepancy between beliefs about teaching and learning and teaching practice. You will find it here:

WOODS, D. (1996) Teacher Cognition in Language Teaching: Beliefs, decision-making and classroom practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

For a view of this discrepancy as a dimension that fosters development see also:

Kubanyiova, M. (2009). Possible selves in language teacher development. In Z. Dörnyei & E. Ushioda (Eds.), Motivation, language identity and the L2 Self (pp. 314-332).Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Other references are:

DIRKX, J.M. y SPURGIN, M.E. (1992) "Implicit theories of adult basic education teachers: how their beliefs about students shape classroom practice", Adult Basic Education, 2, pp. 20-41.

PAJARES, M.F. (1992) "Teachers' beliefs and educational research: cleaning up a messy construct", Review of Educational Research, 62 (3), pp. 307-332.

Dear Sally,

I am a narrative inquirer and understand identity to be a "story to live by".  When a teacher's stories to live by bump with the stories of others around them or with the dominant stories of institutions there is tension.  I have an article that inquires into the experiences of a beginning teacher named Anna. One of the stories she tells has to do with assessment practices. Personal practical knowledge -teacher's personal knowledge and how it is expressed in the classroom) is a concept that Jean Clandinin brought forward, and it has helped me understand the bumps and collisions that occur when beliefs and practice interact.  Attached is my article called Shaping Professional Identity with Saving Stories.

Thank you for beginning this conversation.  I look forward to reading your work!

Kind regards,

Lynne

Article Shaping Professional Identity With Saving Stories

Hello Sally,

This is a very interesting question for me as I am currently writing about assessment for a PGCEI, and as I teach and have a passion for technology my belief is that technology can be used as an effective tool in bringing an assessment for learning (AfL) practices to the classroom. This was more a personal belief for me rather than one built on teaching practices, however since researching this, it would seerm there could be a good argument for intergration ICT tools into the process of AfL or formative assessment. I would be very keen to read your finding as this will be helpful in my current paper on AfL and how ICT could meet John Gardner's ten principals of AfL in learning.

Kind regards,

Stephen Hesketh

For your literature review, start with this link:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22teachers%27+beliefs+and+practice%22

I was reading: "How teachers engage with assessment for learning: lessons from the classroom" by Bethan Marshall and Jane Drummond, 2006 and it has some interesting comments.

This is such an interesting perspective.  Often I find that people articulate -- rather well, in fact -- a belief in a methodology or framework for teaching and learning, yet their practice is actually a lack of praxis, if that makes sense.  That is to say their teaching style does not incorporate the theoretical perspective which informs how they understand the classroom.  Is it that the content or overarching policies to which they respond are not supportive of their inner conclusions, or that they have not operationalized conceptually how their beliefs would look in the light of day?  I lean towards the latter.  You actually made me think of a way to approach the observation and mentoring of new teachers -- it seems as a matter of course that we try to fit them in an acceptable stylistic, yet I don't know how many faculty mentors actually assess what these new teachers believe and understand about teaching. 

believe in child centre,practice in curriculum, teacher, time and marks/grade/job  centre. 

I wonder if we are making something as natural as learning, to complicated! 

A suggestion for research methods would be observing the teachers in their classrooms along with interviewing them about their beliefs and their choices for methods. One thing to consider is: What happens when teachers's beliefs about practice don't match what they are asked to do by administrators?  Do they continue to practice what they believe? Do they conform to administrator and school culture expectations? Or, do they move to a new school, or leave teaching altogether?

Belief and practice if there are differences and evidences also support that, it is definitely a gap between theory and practice. These gaps to be filled by researches and auditing practice regularly.Researches infact generate new knowledge base and give insight .

You could check teacher self-efficacy beliefs. This psychological construct seens to be predictor of teachers behaviour in classroom. It's is related to the beliefs that teacher make about theirselves about what they think about what they can do in classrooms.

Attached you can find some articles that could help understand more about teacher self-efficacy

Currently writing my Ed.D on this and it gets very complicated when you have been trained overseas. My hope is that institutions begin to realise the value of diversity and how they can incorporate it into the classroom rather than turning everyone into a standardized prototype.