Mathematics teachers’ professional learning has frequently been treated as either predominantly participationist or acquisitionist – as social learning in becoming part of a community of practice or cognitive learning in the acquisition of knowledge and beliefs. Our experience within mathematics education suggests that professional learning is neither purely acquisitionist nor participatory and that a theoretically integrated treatment of both, together with affective processes of learning, helps shed more light on the complexities of professional learning. In this theoretical paper we firstly show how Social Cognitive Theory and its component theory of self-efficacy attend to this integration; and, secondly, illustrate this integration with an example from our research into preservice mathematics teachers’ training.

This research contributes new understanding of how teacher self-efficacy is acquired and developed by a preservice teacher during a one-year programme of initial teacher education (ITE). The findings are consistent with previous studies in confirming that self-efficacy is acquired through vicarious experience, verbal persuasion and mastery experience while being undermined by negative physiological and affective states. In this study, however, the authors consider three separate subdomains of teacher self-efficacy: efficacy in classroom management, efficacy in student engagement and efficacy in instructional strategies. Based on a qualitative analysis of a trainee's weekly reflections, this research shows that efficacy development is phased, initially dominated by developing efficacy in classroom management and efficacy in student engagement and, only at a significantly later stage, in instructional strategies. This is an important contribution to understanding how trainee teachers develop professional efficacy. Based on these findings, the authors tentatively offer a new self-efficacy development trajectory framework which can be used to inform the development of ITE programmes or continuing professional development programmes.

This paper reports on the role of self-efficacy sources in the development of teacher self- efficacy of four pre-service secondary mathematics teachers. The results revealed that all four self-efficacy sources were significant in the process, particularly for those individuals who were vulnerable. They also indicated that broadening of the current conceptualisation of physiological and affective states, and vicarious experiences as self-efficacy sources is necessary to uncover the nuances and aid understanding of the process of teacher self- efficacy development. Collectively, the results contribute to the field of teacher self-efficacy in new, previously unreported ways.

This article illustrates the role of teacher identity in teacher self-efficacy development during initial teacher education. It has been posited that teacher self-efficacy develops on the basis of information accessed through four self-efficacy sources: vicarious and enactive experiences, social persuasion, and physiological and affective states, and by interacting with a myriad of personal and external factors. The very process of teacher self-efficacy development, however, is not well understood. This phenomenological longitudinal qualitative case study contributes to addressing this issue by illustrating how a pre-service secondary mathematics teacher’s teacher self-efficacy is affected by the way she sees herself. More specifically, the study illustrates how aspects of a strong student teacher identity negatively affect the pre-service teacher’s teacher self-efficacy appraisal, and how her teacher identity, emerging through the processes of autonomous role enactment and social verification, supports teacher self-efficacy development. 

This study represents a theoretical investigation of teacher self-efficacy using abductive interpretative phenomenological analysis in the context of initial teacher education. We reveal the process through which a pre-service teacher’s self-schema adapts in response to their first classroom teaching experience. We also observe that narrative has a role in the adaptation of self-schema. Consequently, we show that teacher self-efficacy is an aspect of a more generalised narrative self-schema. This offers an alternative perspective on how teacher self-efficacy is developed. It contributes to a deeper understanding of pre-service teachers’ professional learning and a new understanding of the concept of self-efficacy more generally.