116 Chapter 4 may help educators strengthen and maintain their learning-centred beliefs. Our findings demonstrate an alignment between educators’ personal mission and motivation to contribute to the student’s development, and their belief that learning activities should be aimed at facilitating the student’s learning process. This relates to another finding that only educators with an awareness of their educational mission show the most developed learning-centred belief orientation. This belief orientation is characterised by an awareness of the importance of fostering what a student brings to the learning session: their existing conceptions and their intrinsic motivations. We conclude that educators who believe that they should foster the student’s input are not only aware of their educational role but also of their educational mission. Thus the educators’ beliefs about the relevance of student input and the relevance of utilising this input align with the educators’ mission to focus on student learning. An explanation for these findings may be that educators who articulate an educational mission, in other words, why they teach, demonstrate that they have reflected on their deeper motivations as educators, and that this reflectiveness may help them consider whether their teaching beliefs align with this ‘mission’ and with their teaching role. Akin to the belief in our beliefs framework that student-learning is most enhanced if the intrinsic motivation of the individual student is fostered (see Addendum 4.2), we believe that the educator’s learning about teaching is most enhanced if they are encouraged to reflect on their personal motivation to teach. Two studies describe results consistent with our findings. Steinert and MacDonald21 reported that teachers who articulate their educational mission, also say that teaching enables them to learn from their students which is a learning-centred belief (see Addendum 4.2 and 4.3); Åkerlind29 concluded that teachers with learning-centred beliefs describe a focus on the student. Both findings are consistent with our conclusion that educators with learning-centred beliefs focus their educational mission on the student. Two other findings, related to the two areas of inquiry, deserve attention. The first concerns the hierarchical structure of the teacher profile model, which is confirmed by our findings: educators who were aware of their mission were also aware of their identity. In the discourse on the identity formation of an educator, the relevance of explicating one’s educational mission often remains implicit. Our finding reinforces the recommendation to pay explicit attention not only to who one wants to be as an educator but also to why one wants to be an educator, to what deeply drives and motivates.22 The second is the fact that a substantial proportion of the interviewed educators held teaching-centred beliefs. We expected teaching-centredness to be the exception due to the selection of the two
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