Teacher Education Students' Preconceptions of Teaching

Weinstein examines teacher education students' expectations about future teaching performance, their explanations for their predictions, and their descriptions of good teaching. Students tend to engage in "unrealistic optimism" and to demonstrate self-serving biases, perceiving as important for teaching those attributes that they themselves possess. When describing "a really good teacher," students emphasize interpersonal/affec tive variables and downplay academic dimensions ofteaching. These descriptions are compared with those of inservice teach ers. Results indicate that inservice teachers also tend to em phasize interpersonal/affective variables.