The role of belief systems

Introduction

Here is a simple word —BREAKFAST— but if you click on the word, you can see that it evokes a host of responses from different individuals

If an apparently simple word like ‘breakfast’ evokes a huge range of responses, how much more will this be so when concepts to do with learning and teaching are presented. All of us have been ‘learners’ affected by ‘teachers’ for many years; these experiences have combined to give each of us a quite well elaborated set of ideas about good (and bad) teaching and good learning. We bring this with us, often quite unwittingly, when we become teachers ourselves.

Try the following activity to trace some of your own beliefs:

Activity: Tracing your individual beliefs

Recreating past experience

Jot down very quickly what comes into your mind when you think of each of the terms below. It could be a single word (‘boring!’, ’inspiring!’), a person (a memorable teacher or student), a learning event that was vivid, or even a training course that affected how you thought about learning. It could be what this term meant for you as a learner, or what it means for you as a teacher. The important thing is to capture your spontaneous reaction.

TEACHER
STUDENT
CLASSROOM
LECTURE
LECTURER
SEMINAR
TUTOR

Reflecting on these experiences

Now return to each term and pursue that first reaction: what was it that made the experience/person/situation what it was? (Why boring…? Why was this teacher influential...?)

Further reflection and analysis

Now set up some oppositional pairs:

if your experience of, say, the Lecture, was ‘boring’, and you have added ‘because the lecturer just talked at us for 50 minutes as if we were experts too, and I didn’t understand anything’, set beside that an alternative that would have made the experience better (e.g. ‘talking to us in language we could understand’).

Conversely if your reaction to ‘Lecture’ was ‘inspiring’, because, perhaps ‘the lecturer’s enthusiasm made me want to go and discover more about the subject’, then set out what would have failed to inspire you. Do this for each of the terms.

How past experience relates to present practice

Reflect back to a lecture, seminar or small group session that you taught recently.

How many of the teaching decisions you made - either in the planning or the carrying-out of that session – can you now relate to what you have written in the steps above?

How past experience bears on future practice

Now use as your example a seminar/lecture that you are planning to teach. At each step of your plan stop and ask yourself:

• Why am I doing this?
• What belief that I hold about teaching does it exemplify?
• What alternative ways are there and why am I rejecting them?

Articulating your beliefs

In any individual, beliefs and personal knowledge are inextricably linked (very much a chicken and egg situation). The series of activities above has tried to illuminate the picture a little by getting your instinctual responses to key concepts in learning and teaching, and then asking you to explore how your own experiences, extended over time, have resulted in your personal set of beliefs about teaching.

You may now therefore be able to express your present set of beliefs about teaching.

Taking each key term in turn, summarize the attributes that make it a positive contribution to teaching and learning.

• A good Teacher IS...as shown by actions LIKE ..
• A good Lecture can affect students in these ways ...by doing the following
• A good STUDENT has the following characteristics... As shown in the following ways

Expressing your ‘philosophy of teaching’

Taking your comments above, write a few paragraphs summarizing your views about teaching; what you would call your personal ‘philosophy of teaching’.

Carrying out this sequence of activities will have given you an insight into your own ‘teaching schemata’.

The next section asks you to experiment in a different way with the belief/knowledge/assumption/value mix.