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Teachers' beliefs are directly connected to their practices and have an impact on students' educational experiences and results. The aim of this study was to describe and examine the relationship between beliefs and practices linked to teaching students to write in the first four years of primary school. A total of 255 Portuguese primary school teachers participated in the study. A 52-item questionnaire was used to evaluate their beliefs, preferred activities and classroom organisation procedures in relation to writing instruction. Beliefs and classroom organisation procedures were subjected to factor analysis, whereas activities were considered individually. The analysis of teachers' beliefs revealed two different factors: (1) code-based beliefs and (2) meaning-based beliefs. The analysis of teachers' classroom organisation revealed three different factors: (1) pairs or small groups; (2) individual; and (3) whole classroom. Most of the participating teachers emphasised both explicit teaching and informal learning methods. There were significant associations between beliefs and activities and beliefs and classroom organisation procedures supported by code vs. meaning beliefs. However, the different associations revealed in the study showed that teachers combine multidimensional aspects in their writing instruction theory and practice.Keywords: beliefs; practices; teaching; written language; primary school Introduction According to several authors (Clark and Peterson 1986;Pajares 1992;Poulson et al. 2001;Van Driel and Verloop 2002;Pederson and Liu 2003;Woolley, Benjamin, and Woolley 2004;Shin and Koh 2007), teachers' beliefs influence teaching practices and have an impact on students' educational experiences and results. However, the relation between beliefs and practices is referred by Fang (1996) and Vaughn, Moody, and Shumm (1998) as a relation governed by consistency and inconsistency patterns as there often exists contextual constraints as school/national policies or external evaluations that inhibit teachers' actions (Valencia and Wixson 2000;Lam and Kember 2006).One set of beliefs that appear to have important implications for the teaching of written language is the assumptions and beliefs that teachers make and hold about teaching and learning (Bruner 1996;Gipps, Mccallum, and Brown 1999). More specifically, Fitzgerald (1999) and Cunningham and Fitzgerald (1996) argue that teachers' decisions are shaped by their beliefs about literacy and literacy instruction.

Os modelos orientadores da intervenção do psicólogo educacional sugerem uma multiplicidade de oportunidades/opções que cada profissional terá que fazer. A investigação tem sugerido que a aprendizagem cooperativa conduz todos os alunos a uma melhor eficácia na aprendizagem. Apesar de muitos psicólogos ainda adoptarem uma perspectiva de intervenção individual, o objectivo deste ensaio é discutir as diferentes abordagens através dos quais a intervenção do psicólogo educacional cria e sustenta modelos de educação inclusiva. Este ensaio tem por base a convicção de Vigotsky de que todas as crianças, independentemente das suas necessidades, devem ter direito a frequentar a escola de ensino regular. Iniciando com a análise de três eixos essenciais: inclusão, necessidades educativas especiais e psicologia; termina com algumas sugestões que ajudam a definir o modo como a psicologia educacional pode contribuir para o sucesso de todos os alunos no ensino regular.

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Education systems around the world, faces the major challenge of including all children in schools. Differentiated instruction (DI) is proposed as a pedagogical approach that support social, emotional and academic success for all students in the context of heterogeneous classrooms. Although, recent research draws the attention to the inconsistent definitions and practices of DI. In this context, this qualitative study aimed at exploring the Portuguese teachers self-reported typical DI practices in mixedability classrooms. The participants were thirty-six teachers from kindergarten to middle school and came from a public-school cluster of five schools. The qualitative analysis carried out indicate a variety of practices under the concept of DI, ranging from practices aimed only at a group of students, based on low ability or special education needs, to practices aimed at building communities of learners. The majority of the self-reported practices described DI as simply giving one assignment to most pupils and fewer or easier activities to students who are struggling with their learning. Implications for initial teacher training and professional development programmes are discussed.

This article examines the effect of literacy teaching practices on the reading ability of first grade pupils in Portuguese, a semi-transparent orthography. First grade teachers (N=267) self-reported their literacy teaching practices through a questionnaire. Hierarchical cluster analysis revealed three groups with different practices -Language Experience, Phonic, and Balanced. Eight teachers from each group were randomly selected for classroom observation (N=24) to gain more in-depth information about their practices, namely by analysing classroom management procedures and materials used. Their pupils' reading abilities were assessed at the beginning and end of the first grade (N=465) through two tasks: word reading and comprehension. Multivariate analysis of covariance, controlling for mother's educational levels, showed that pupils of balanced teachers had better results than pupils in the other two groups. These results are in line with those described in the English literature, pointing out that the key term for describing successful literacy teaching practices is balance: balance in classroom management procedures, from more teacher-centred to more pupil-centred; balance in different types of reading materials, from more authentic materials to materials designed to work on specific skills; and balance between explicit instruction in grapheme-phoneme correspondences and reading and writing authentic texts.