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Exploring student teacher belief development: An alternative constructivist technique, snake interviews, exemplified and evaluated.

Cabaroglu, N., Denicolo, P. M.

Keywords:
constructivism; snake interviews; qualitative; beliefs; student teachers; modern languages; pre-service; teacher education

Abstract:
This paper reports the results of a naturalistic inquiry into student teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning with a particular focus on one constructivist technique used in data collection: Snake Interviews. Although a sequence of three in-depth interviews was conducted as a dominant data collection strategy in the main study, the Snake interviews proved to be very useful in answering some of the questions that arose at one particular stage of the study when other techniques apparently revealed contradictions. That main study addressed issues in the literature about the impact of pre-service teacher education programmes on teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning: that information in coursework and in the classroom is perceived, processed and acted upon through those beliefs (Clark & Peterson, 1986; Munby, 1982), that these beliefs are inflexible (Kagan, 1992), and that pre-service teacher education programmes are “not very powerful interventions” (Zeichner et al., 1987, p. 28).