Title: Shaping teacher beliefs that build equity and promote improvement
Description: Teachers' collective efficacy beliefs -- defined as a teacher's perception that her school faculty is capable of achieving their shared goals -- are a critical factor in efforts towards educational improvement and race- and class-based equity. When a teacher has strong collective efficacy beliefs, she is more likely to be motivated in her work and more willing to innovate her teaching. The central problem that motivates the two studies in this dissertation is the tendency for teachers of low-income and racial-minority students, and teachers of academically low-performing students to have lower levels of collective efficacy beliefs. What can school leaders do to improve these teachers' collective efficacy beliefs? Theories of communities of practice point to teachers' shared engagement with their problems of practice as sites of the negotiation of collective efficacy beliefs. In the first study, I asked if levels of teachers' collective efficacy beliefs were higher when they were more involved in evidence-based decision-making practices with their colleagues, using multi-level modeling to analyze data from teacher surveys conducted by the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR). I found that levels of teachers' collective efficacy beliefs were higher, on average, when they were more engaged with such practices, and that this effect did not differ by levels of prior student achievement, suggesting that teachers' collegial practices support their collective efficacy beliefs even in schools where student academic performance is lower. In the second study, I took advantage of the implementation of the Chicago Data Initiative, a teachers' evidence-based decision-making program, to examine the impact of such work on levels of teachers' collective efficacy beliefs. I analyzed data from the CCSR surveys spanning seven years, using a regression-discontinuity strategy coupled with a difference-indifferences estimation.

I concluded that teachers' evidence-based decision-making work can enhance the levels of teachers' collective efficacy beliefs, but that this positive effect depends on schools having a high level of instructional program coherence. Both of my empirical studies point to the possibility that school leaders could structure school processes as a way of enhancing teachers' collective efficacy beliefs in schools that serve predominantly low-income and racial-minority student populations.
Subjects: Teachers, Attitudes, Psychology, Teacher effectiveness, Minorities, Education, Low-income students
Places: United States