Shaping Teacher Efficacy By Design: How Novice Efficacy Beliefs Develop in Embedded Teacher Preparation Programs

Teacher efficacy, broadly defined, relates to teachers' beliefs about their abilities to promote students' learning (Woolfolk-Hoy & Spero, 2005). With roots in Bandura's (1977, 1997) concept of self-efficacy, defined as "the beliefs in one's capabilities to organize and execute the course of action required to produce given attainments (Bandura, 1997, p. 3) researchers note that teacher efficacy beliefs have the power to influence the thought patterns and emotions that enable classroom actions (Pendergast, Garvis, & Keogh, 2011).;A multitude of existing studies demonstrate the importance of strong efficacy beliefs on teachers' work, and the impact of early professional learning experiences on the nature of teachers' efficacy beliefs. These studies correlate teacher efficacy to a host of important and impactful teaching practices and behaviors, and a variety of positive outcomes necessary for student success (see, e.g., Ashton, 1984; Dembo & Gibson, 1985; Goddard & Goddard, 2001; Grant, 2006; Ross, 1994; Shidler, 2009; Tschannen-Moran & McMaster, 2009). Many note that efficacy beliefs can be most malleable during the early years of learning (Bandura, 1997), and highlight the central role that early learning contexts -- both that of the teacher preparation program and of the schools in which novices learn and first teach -- can play in the development of teachers' sense of efficacy throughout their careers (Atay, 2007; Oh, 2011; Poulou, 2007; Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk-Hoy, 2007). They do not, however, offer a framework for understanding precisely how these contexts impact efficacy development as candidates experience them, nor examine the particular ways in which alternative preparation program contexts, which have grown into an increasingly popular pathway to teaching since the early 1980s (Feistritzer, 2008), shape a sense of efficacy in novice teachers. This thesis attempts to fill these gaps.;Using qualitative, interpretive methods (Erickson, 1986) in the multi-site case study tradition (Yin, 2009), this study examines how teacher education and work contexts play a role in the development of the efficacy beliefs of novice teachers learning in two embedded preparation programs, alternative routes to preparation that situate the majority of learning in and through schools managed by the same program. In doing so, this research offers a framework for not only understanding that program and school contexts matter but why and how they matter for the development of novice teacher efficacy.;Drawing upon extant teacher efficacy literature and using theoretical conceptions of teacher and occupational socialization (Lacey, 1977; Lawson, 1992; Lawson & Stroot, 1993; Lortie, 1975; Zeichner & Gore, 1990; Zeichner & Grant, 1981), the multi-site case study examined in these pages reveals how embedded candidates' efficacy beliefs were shaped by organizational expectations for effective practice and the various support systems in place to help them meet these expectations. While inherently embedded, the support systems themselves and the nature of the efficacy beliefs they helped shape varied pending program, and characterized candidates' efficacy beliefs, in effect, as deeply contextual. This developing sense of "contextual" or "context-based" teacher efficacy, defined in this thesis as one's belief in their ability to teach in service to organizational expectations of effective practice, was revealed most saliently by when and how candidates spoke of feeling successful or unsuccessful in their teaching, and why.