Initial Development of an Instrument Measuring Teachers’ Mindsets in a Professional Development Context

Professional development (PD) is crucial for educators, offering continuous learning opportunities to enhance teaching effectiveness. Effective reading comprehension hinges on teachers’ ability to guide student learning, necessitating robust PD to enhance their knowledge of evidence-based reading comprehension strategies. Regrettably, many PD efforts fall short in transforming teaching practices, prompting an inquiry into the factors within PD that either facilitate or impede pedagogical change among educators. Variables such as teachers’ mindsets, self-perceptions of teaching abilities, attitudes toward PD, and readiness for change are pivotal. Although this article reports on the early phases of a multiphase survey development study, the results of this initial phase indicated that years of experience and education level did not significantly predict teacher mindset, but teachers’ beliefs and attitudes about implementing a newly learned reading comprehension strategy did significantly predict mindset. Understanding these factors can illuminate why some teachers struggle to implement evidence-based reading comprehension practices acquired from PD.