teachers’ beliefs greatly influence their performance in the classroom, their choice of instructional strategies, their way of controlling the class, their dealing with the students, and their general goals and objectives. one of these beliefs is teachers’ sense of efficacy which is viewed as an important construct and has shown to be positively correlated with students’ achievement (ross, 1992). teachers’ sense of efficacy has three subscales; class management, student engagement, and instructional strategies. in iran, teachers’ sense of efficacy has not been deeply studied yet and the few numbers of the related researches are concentrated on correlational studies. unlike these studies, the present study focuses on this construct in its own right and tries to explore it among iranian efl teachers. in order to carry out this study, fifty teachers from state schools and fifty from private institutes were chosen as the participants. all the teachers held b.a degrees, with a teaching experience of more than seven years. to measure their efficacy beliefs, they were given the teachers’ sense of efficacy questionnaire (tses), developed by t-schannen-moran and wolfolk-hoy (2001). the findings showed that the majority of the iranian efl teachers did not enjoy high degrees of efficacy beliefs. a similar status was found in the teacher sense of efficacy subscales. the argument put forward in this study is that the non-high degrees of efficacy beliefs among the iranian efl teachers might be rooted in the four main sources of efficacy beliefs propounded by bandura (1997); namely mastery experiences, vicarious learning experiences, social persuasion, and physiological arousal.