ABSTRACT
This chapter explains some of the parameters for teachers' beliefs, and discusses what is known about key aspects of the nature of teachers' beliefs, motivations and practices to the psychological environments for teaching. It examines how teachers' beliefs about what they can do to achieve specific educational outcomes are influenced by their psychological and organisational contexts. Teachers gain their efficacy beliefs mainly from experiences of success observed experience, and within environments that foster professional reflection and transformational learning that generate changes in the learner beyond expectation. Teachers with positive beliefs in their efficacy, believing they know what is necessary to achieve specific desired outcomes, are more likely to achieve these outcomes for the children in their classrooms. Teachers' efficacy beliefs have been shown to be positively related to superior outcomes in specific subject areas as well as teachers' survival in the profession.
