Teachers’ Beliefs about Good Teaching

Abstract

This article describes teachers’ beliefs about the pedagogical approaches of very good teachers. Our exploratory factor analysis and analysis of variance based on the data from an online survey of K-12 public school teachers (N = 179) revealed two main findings. First, the teachers distinguished between relationship-emphasized and content-emphasized pedagogical approaches, and they believed that a very good teacher – defined as a teacher from whom you learned a lot – was more likely to practice a relationship-emphasized pedagogical approach, which embraced predominantly caring and supportive pedagogical approaches and had strong subject matter knowledge. Second, regardless of their political orientation or other demographic characteristics, the teachers in our sample valued a relationship-emphasized pedagogical approach over a content-emphasized one. Further, we found that teachers’ political beliefs did not significantly influence their pedagogical approach to teaching, and teachers who held more conservative political beliefs valued a relationship-emphasized pedagogical over a content-emphasized pedagogical approach, similar to teachers with more progressive political beliefs.