Teachers' Beliefs in Successful Education in China and Germany

Abstract

Education acts as the powerful influence not only on a nation’s comprehensive strength, but also on the individual’s whole life, so the topic on successful education has important research value and significance for the reality. Within the process of education teachers undeniably play a main role, whose teaching minds and behaviors crucially affect the outcomes of education and decide the success/failure of educational reforms. Former research has found that teachers’ beliefs, as one of the most valuable psychological constructs, are strong guidance and predictors of their teaching behaviors, and some beliefs which are important for teachers are believed to remain stable and unchanged regardless of situations, where teachers try to hold on their beliefs and put into practice. Therefore, in the past years teachers’ beliefs have been a priority among the research topics in the educational area, and a large quantity of articles have focused on the discussion about teachers’ beliefs in different aspects. However, there has been no research connecting teachers’ beliefs to successful education in a cross-cultural comparative perspective between China and Germany. So this study could be expected to fill in this blank and open a fresh but practical angle to look into the education and school systems in both countries through the eyes of teachers, and hopefully it could provide an effective and helpful reference for teacher education and educational reforms in the future.