To the Best of Their Beliefs: An Exploration of How Beginning Teachers Develop Inclusive Practice Beliefs
Abstract
Teachers’ beliefs about teaching, learning, ability, and disability have been shown to inform their interactions with students with exceptionalities and their instructional practices in inclusive classrooms. Ensuring that teachers have beliefs that align with effective inclusive practices is essential to the success of inclusive education, however, little is known about how teachers develop these beliefs. This study aimed to explore beginning teachers’ inclusive practice beliefs and the experiences that influenced these beliefs over three years of teacher development. A cohort of sixty-four beginning teachers participated in three rounds of interviews starting during their pre-service education and continuing into their first two years of in-service teaching. A total of 106 interviews were collected. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyze the interview data. The Beliefs About Learning and Teaching Questionnaire (BLTQ) was used to guide the coding process and identify specific beliefs related to inclusive practices. Results highlight the specific experiences that contributed to the beliefs captured by the BLTQ at different stages of teacher development and patterns in belief development over time. Three overarching themes were identified: (1) faculty of education experiences become less salient after the first year of in-service teaching, (2) some classroom experiences with diverse learners impede the development of inclusive practice beliefs, and (3) a variety of experiences are needed to have a complete set of inclusive practice beliefs. Findings contribute novel information about how to promote the development of inclusive practice beliefs and have implications for those responsible for teacher education during the pre-service and early in-service years. Implications for future research are also discussed.