The Relationship Between Teacher Beliefs and Practices,and Head Start Classroom Quality

Within early childhood research considerable emphasis has been placed on examining teachers' beliefs about developmentally appropriate practices in the classroom. The purpose of this study was to describe Head Start teacher beliefs and self-reported practices as they relate to classroom quality and examine the potential differences in the beliefs of those teaching in high, average, and low quality classrooms. Scores on two subscales, appropriate and inappropriate, for both self-reported beliefs and practices were used as the dependent variables. Analysis of variance was used to examine differences between the self-reported beliefs and practices of teachers in classrooms of differing quality. The results for both the appropriate beliefs and appropriate activities subscales were statistically nonsignificant. However, the results for the two inappropriate subscales were statistically significant. These results would seem to indicate that teachers in the low quality group tended to respond more favorably to statements about inappropriate beliefs and practices than did those teachers in either the high or average quality classrooms. These findings provide important information about offering professional development opportunities for Head Start teachers that focus on providing theoretical perspectives on children's development and instructional practices aimed at changing beliefs about teaching practices.