Assessing Teachers’ Beliefs to Facilitate the Transition to a New Chemistry Curriculum: What Do the Teachers Want?

Abstract

In this article, we describe the results of a study of chemistry high school teachers’ beliefs (N = 7) of the chemistry curriculum and their roles, their beliefs on the teacher as developer of materials, and their beliefs about professional development. Teachers’ beliefs influence the implementation of a curriculum. We view the use of a new curriculum as a learning process, which should start at teachers’ prior knowledge and beliefs. The results reveal that it is possible to develop a new curriculum in which teachers’ beliefs are taken as a starting point. Promising approaches to prepare teachers for a new curriculum is to let them (co)develop and use curriculum materials: It creates ownership, and strengthens and develops teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK).

Keywords:

• Curriculum change and transition to a new curriculum
• Teacher preparation
• Teacher beliefs

Open Access

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

Notes

1 Two teachers from different schools wanted to be interviewed together because they had cooperated closely as a team during the development of innovative classroom materials. This interview, in which the same issues were addressed as in the other interviews, resulted in one transcript. It is presented under teacher G.