ABSTRACT
The quality of the instructional activities in a school is shaped, in part, by its context; and while school context is informed by a variety of attributes, in this chapter we focus on teachers’ collective beliefs as an integral element of the context that helps to create the normative environment of the school. The behavior of teachers is influenced by their beliefs about the children they serve and their own capability to teach them (Bandura, 1993; Goddard & Goddard, 2001; Goddard, Hoy, & Woolfolk Hoy, 2000; Tschannen-Moran, 2014), and as noted by several of the authors in this volume (e.g., Buehl & Beck, Chapter 5; Skott, Chapter 2), teachers do not develop or maintain these beliefs in isolation. Their beliefs are shaped by interactions with others in the environment in which they work and the collective beliefs that grow out of these interactions. While there are many diverse aspects to these collective beliefs, we explore two that have been found to be strongly related to schools’ success at fostering student achievement. These are teachers’ collective belief in their efficacy for fostering student learning (Goddard, Hoy, & Woolfolk Hoy, 2000) as well as the belief of teachers that their students and their families are trustworthy (Goddard, Tschannen-Moran, & Hoy, 2001). These two sets of beliefs are related to two strong norms that govern behavior in schools, including the level of academic press as perceived by teachers and students (Hoy, Tarter, & Hoy, 2006; Berebitsky, Goddard, Neumerski, & Salloum, 2012; Tschannen-Moran, Bankole, Mitchell, & Moore, 2013), and the degree of professionalism exercised by teachers, as perceived by their peers (Tschannen-Moran, Parish, & DiPaola, 2006). We conclude by exploring the implications of these findings for school leaders and policy makers.
