Generalist Teachers' Self-Efficacy Beliefs for Teaching Dance

How teachers think, behave and respond to teaching situations is predicated on their self-efficacy beliefs (Bandura, 1997). Because these beliefs can affect teachers’ motivation, emotions, and expectations for taking action, generalist teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs for teaching dance as a compulsory component of arts education have implications for the dance learning opportunities available to students and for supporting the professional capabilities of the student teachers they mentor. Therefore, this study investigated the question: What are generalist teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs for teaching dance in the arts curriculum and how might these be related to their subject knowledge confidence, classroom practice, and school context? A mixed methods methodology and 4 hypotheses guided the collection, analyses and discussion of quantitative and qualitative data. In Phase 1, 140 New Zealand generalist teachers completed a questionnaire that included the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES) developed by Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy (2001) and adapted for dance with permission. In Phase 2, 17 participants from the original sample were interviewed to explore and explain the quantitative results. The findings of the study shed light on the participants’ self-efficacy beliefs for teaching, engaging and managing students in dance and the participants identified more factors that supported rather than inhibited dance teaching. Self-efficacy beliefs were found to be correlated to subject knowledge confidence but not to the frequency of teaching dance, school context factors or years of teaching experience. The study gives recommendations for future teacher education and dance education research