Chapter 3: Essential Beliefs

Belief 1: Teaching is intellectually complex, difficult, and demanding work. The knowledge and skills required to teach successfully are on a par with that required for proficient practice in architecture, engineering, or law.

Belief 2. The nature of professional knowledge is defined by areas of performance, repertoires, and matching, not effective behaviors.

Belief 3. The knowledge bases of a professional teacher are many, diverse, and complex; skillful teaching requires systematic and continual study of these knowledge bases.

Belief 4. The development of skillful teaching requires deep collaboration and nondefensive self-examination of practice in relation to students’ results.

Belief 5. The total environment of a school has a powerful effect on students’ learning.

Belief 6. Learning is constructed as learners assimilate new experience with prior knowledge.

Belief 7. Learning varies with the degree to which a learner’s needs for inclusion, influence, competence, and confidence are met.

Belief 8. Children’s learning is primarily determined by their effective effort and their use of appropriate strategies. “Intelligence,” or the ability to learn, is not a fixed, inborn trait. All children possess the raw material to learn rigorous academic material at high standards.

Belief 9. We can get underperforming, low-confidence students to believe in themselves. We really can change their attributions so that they outperform their own internalized stereotypes.

Belief 10. Racism in our society and a dearth of cultural proficiency in our classrooms exert a downward force on the achievement of students of color that must be met with active countermeasures. To achieve our espoused goal of educating all children to a high level, we need to become culturally proficient and antiracist.