Early childhood education teachers: Do they practice what they preach?

Abstract The study explored relationships, for 60 preschool, kindergarten, and first grade teachers, among teachers' beliefs about how children learn, their views on the goals of early childhood education, their positions on policies related to school entry, testing, and retention, their satisfaction with current practices and pressures for change, and their actual practices. Results revealed, for preschool and kindergarten teachers, significant associations among beliefs, goals, practices, and to some degree policy positions, that map on to current debates among experts on child-centered versus more didactic, basic-skills approaches. Findings for the small sample of first grade teachers showed few of the predicted associations. Nearly all teachers who reported that they were not able to implement the program they believed was appropriate claimed that their program was too basicskills oriented; parents were the most often cited source of pressure.

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