An Analysis of Pedagogical Beliefs of Teachers at College Level and its Relationship to their Actual Classroom Practices

Abstract

Teaching beliefs are the essence of teacher’s academic activity. They contain a set of assumptions or suggestions about the teaching profession, teachers, students, and more the process of teaching and learning. They influence their planning, decision making, work ethic, student relationships, evaluation method, material and material selection and among other things, classroom practices. This investigation is aimed to analyze pedagogical beliefs and its relationship to actual classroom practices of teachers at college level. As this study also reveals the differences among pedagogical beliefs and classroom practices based on teachers’ gender and most importantly explores relationship among them at college level. The investigator adopted quantitative approach and conducted a survey study. Participants were randomly selected teachers and students from government degree colleges of Lahore who provided their responses about pedagogical beliefs and classroom practices through self-developed questionnaires. The outcomes shown that educators’ pedagogical beliefs as well as classroom acts at college level are not significantly correlated to each other.