The Changing Process of Chinese Teachers’ Beliefs When Using Thinking Tools

Abstract

With the shifting focus from knowledge acquisition, to nurturing higher-order thinking skills, teachers need to learn new teaching strategies and utilize new teaching beliefs in their lessons. Using a case study, this paper attempts to clarify how the beliefs of Chinese primary school teachers changed their practice of using thinking tools (TTs) to improve children’s thinking skills. The Three Layers Model of Genesis (TLMG), an approach of Cultural Psychology, was used to analyze the process of change in the representative teachers. The authors interviewed eight Chinese teachers and focused on their beliefs when they used TTs. The authors found that there were three types of beliefs in Chinese teachers who used TTs. Type 1 teachers kept their traditional belief but changed their value system, Type 2 teachers changed their belief from knowledge acquisition to thinking skills training, and Type 3 teachers kept the balance between knowledge acquisition and thinking skills training. The promoter sign of “the importance of thinking skills” played a great role to trigger Type 2 and 3 teachers to change their existing beliefs. The environmental factors in the concrete context strengthened or weakened the power of promoter signs that affect whether their new beliefs could form or not. In addition, all teachers experienced the conflict of whether “improving thinking skills of students is important” or “improving the knowledge acquisition of students is important” (Conflict 1). The Type 3 teacher, Teacher A, experienced cognitive conflict of “continuing to use TTs” or “giving up using TTs” (Conflict 2) after she experienced Conflict 1. Consequently, the type of beliefs in Chinese teachers influenced their usage of TTs in the classroom.