Teacher beliefs and education reform in Abu Dhabi: 21st Century Skills?

Abstract

Education reform, in particular, curriculum reform, of the magnitude being implemented in Abu Dhabi and involving such different cultural contexts and expected paradigm shifts, poses a number of questions with respect to implementation, ongoing challenges, and future impact for teachers, students and the community. This paper focuses on the relationship between the results of the Teacher Belief's Survey and the teachers' classroom practice. The research reported in this paper took place in Abu Dhabi where the Arab teachers had been entrenched in mostly traditional approaches to teaching. The large-scale education reform, being carried out at the time of writing this paper, required the teachers to shift to a constructivist approach. The study involved a mixed methods approach in which quantitative and qualitative data were collected sequentially. As a first step, the newly-developed Teacher Belief Survey was administered to 198 teachers across the emirate. The second step involved a case-study approach, involving 15 teachers, that was used to further examine teacher beliefs and observed practice. Lesson observations were conducted with each of the case study teachers that were preceded by a semi-structured interview with each teacher and a post lesson observation interview. The results indicated that the teachers were willing to comply with the reform initiatives; however, they continued to hold more traditional beliefs about their role in the classroom and their philosophy of teaching and learning acquisition. Observations corroborated these findings, indicating that the teachers choice of delivery, use of student collaboration and the physical environment, were not what they believed it to be. Interviews and observations showed that culture, fear, a lack of knowledge and understanding by teachers and incongruent interpretations of terminology were strong mitigating factors that were impeding the Arab teachers' implementation of curriculum reform initiatives.