Teachers' Minds And Actions

Research On Teachers' Thinking And Practice

Gunnar Handal, Sveinung Vaage, Ingrid Carlgren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135718282
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Based on the 10th International Study Association on Teacher Thinking and Practice Conference in Gothenburg, this text contains a collection of original research conducted by scholars from Europe, North America, Israel and Hong Kong, and provides an overview of the current status of international research on teacher thinking.; The contributors write from different perspectives - some analytical, some philosophical and some contextual - on the way teachers think and act. The intention of the book is not to characterise critically the established traditions or any of its researchers, but to study teacher-thinking research in context, analysing research objectives and enquiring into what lies behind the traditions. The result is a picture of an unpredictable but exciting and interesting future in developments in teacher-thinking research.

Part 1
General Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives

In this part the invited keynote addresses are presented. They represent different perspectives emerging from different theoretical and philosophical traditions. In spite of their differences, they all, directly or indirectly, challenge assumptions underlying what we could call present ‘mainstream’ teacher-thinking research.

Kenneth M.Zeichner in his paper on different views on reflective practice in teaching and teacher education, points to different reasons why we in present research on teachers, teaching and teacher education focus so much on reflection. He analyses how different researchers analytically try to sort out dimensions according to which the use of the term ‘reflection’ varies and their ways of classifying positions held in the research community about this concept. He also presents his own contribution in the form of five different traditions of reflective practice in teaching and teacher education in the USA, and discusses these. Zeichner stresses that identification of traditions like these cannot be made with claims to universality but has to take into account the societal and cultural context in which the activity takes place. Zeichner strongly advocates a more partisan approach on the part of researchers in collaboration with teachers and in relation to i.a. politicians.

Ference Marton’s approach is a phenomenological one. The key concept is intentionality and Marton refers to the principle of intentionality put forward by Franz Brentano over a century ago.

In his contribution, Marton questions the dualism between mind and world embedded in much of the research on teachers’ thinking. He argues that thinking is something taking place between individuals and the world, it is not something that takes place only within a person or something that belongs to persons. Marton’s suggestion is that research interest should instead be directed towards teachers’ awareness and intentionality as well as concentrated on the content of this intentionality. Drawing on some studies done within the phenomenographic tradition, a Swedish methodological approach, he concludes that teachers’ intentionality seldom includes the ‘content’ of schooling (see Alexanderssons contribution in Chapter 9).

Yrjö Engeström’s chapter is written within the framework of culturehistorical activity theory. He argues for a dialogic and discursive view of the mind, referring to authors like Vygotsky, Bakthin and Wittgenstein. He also points to today’s cognitive science, where a parallel movement is going on under the label of distributed or shared cognition. On the background of these insights, Engeström challenges what he calls the individualist and Cartesian bias in research on teacher thinking. His chapter is also analysing the process of collaborative thinking in an actual teacher team dealing with global education in California.

Hans Joas was invited because of his recent contribution within theory of action (Joas, 1992). Joas does not belong to the ISATT research community; the idea was to introduce some new perspectives into ISATT in order to challenge existing research and inspire future research. Joas combines traditions such as German critical theory and American pragmatism in his own approach. He argues that the topic of action has been crucial in many recent debates on social theory. He examines and discusses assumptions underlying what he calls the rationalist and the normativist approaches. Joas himself proposes a third position, which takes the creativity of human action seriously and tries to conceptualize creativity within a social theory of action.

Reference

Joas, H. (1992) Die Kreativität des Handelns, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag.

Chapter 1
Research on Teacher Thinking and Different Views of Reflective Practice in Teaching and Teacher Education

Kenneth M.Zeichner

Introduction

In the last decade, the slogans of ‘reflective teaching’, ‘action research’, ‘researchbased’ and ‘inquiry-oriented’ teacher education have been embraced by both teacher educators and educational researchers throughout the world.¹ On the one hand, teacher educators who represent a variety of conceptual and ideological orientations to schooling and teacher education, have, under the umbrella of reflective practice, tried to prepare teachers who are more thoughtful and analytic about their work in some fashion. On the other hand, educational researchers, including researchers identified with the research on teacher-thinking movement, have attempted to document and describe the processes of teacher reflection and associated actions, and the relationship between these processes and teacher development (e.g., La Boskey, 1990; Russell and Munby, 1991). Other researchers have focused on studying the social and individual conditions which influence the reflections of teachers (e.g., Ashcroft and Griffiths, 1989; Erickson and Mackinnon, 1991; Grimmett and Crehan, 1990; Wubbels and Korthagen, 1990; Richert, 1990).

Amid all of this activity by teacher educators and researchers, there has been a great deal of confusion about whether reflective practice is a distinct conceptual orientation or not (Feiman-Nemser, 1990; Valli, 1992) and about whether it is necessarily a good thing that should be promoted (e.g., Day, 1993; Zeichner, 1993b).

Although those who have embraced the slogan of reflective practice appear to share certain goals about the role of the teacher in school reform, that one cannot tell very much about an approach to teaching or teacher education from an expressed commitment to the idea of the teacher as a reflective practitioner alone. To say that we want to prepare teachers who are reflective, also does not translate directly into the content of a teacher education programme (Richardson, 1990). Underlying the apparent similarity among those who embrace the slogans of reflective practice are vast differences in perspectives about teaching, learning, schooling, and the social order. It has come to the point now where the whole range of beliefs about teaching, learning, schooling, and the social order have become incorporated into the discourse about reflective practice. Everyone, no matter what his or her ideological orientation, has jumped on the bandwagon at this point, and has committed his or her energies to furthering some version of reflective teaching practice.

I will do a few things in this chapter related to the idea of teachers as reflective practitioners. First, I’ll discuss in a broad way the current reflective practice movement in teaching and teacher education, describing some of the reasons why I think it has come about, some of the goals shared by those who embrace it, and some of the attempts to identify different conceptions of reflective practice which underly these surface similarities in perspective. I will also share a conceptual framework that I have used to describe different traditions of reflective practice in teaching and teacher education in my own country, and present my own ideas about the conceptions of reflective practice that we ought to embrace in our practice and support through our research. I will argue for more partisan efforts in research on teacher thinking. Finally, although the concept of reflective practice has been associated with movements around the world to enhance the status and influence of teachers in school reform, I will argue that in practice, the reflective practice movement in teaching and teacher education has served to undermine and limit the status of teachers and their role in the process of educational reform.

The Reflective Practice Movement

On the surface, this international movement that has developed in teaching and teacher education under the banner of reflection can be seen as a reaction against a view of teachers as technicians who merely carry out what others, removed from the classroom, want them to do, a rejection of top-down forms of educational reform that involve teachers merely as passive participants. It involves a recognition that teachers should play active roles in formulating the purposes and end of their work, a recognition that teaching and educational reform need to be put into the hands of teachers.

Reflection also signifies a recognition that the generation of knowledge about good teaching is not the exclusive property of colleges, universities, and research and development centres, a recognition that teachers have theories too, that can contribute to a codified knowledge base for teaching. Even today with all of the talk about teacher empowerment, we still see a general lack of respect for the craft knowledge of good teachers in the educational research establishment which has attempted to define a so called ‘knowledge base’ for teaching minus the voices of teachers (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1992).

In addition to the invisibility of teacher-generated knowledge in what counts as educational research, many staff development and school-improvement programmes still ignore the knowledge and expertise of teachers and rely primarily on top-down models of school reform which try to get teachers to comply with some externally generated and allegedly research-based solution to school problems (Little, 1993).

The concept of the teacher as a reflective practitioner recognizes the wealth of expertise that resides in the practices of good teachers, what Schön (1983) has called knowledge-in-action. From the perspective of the individual teacher, it means that the process of understanding and improving one’s own teaching must start from reflection upon ones’s own experience and that the sort of wisdom derived entirely from the experience of others (even other teachers) is impoverished (Winter, 1989).

Reflection as a slogan for educational reform also signifies a recognition that the process of learning to teach continues throughout a teacher’s entire career, a recognition that no matter what we do in our teacher-education programmes, and no matter how well we do them, at best, we can only prepare teachers to begin teaching. With the concept of reflective teaching, there is a commitment by teacher educators to helping prospective teachers internalize during their initial training, the disposition and skill to study their teaching and to become better at teaching over time, a commitment to take responsibility for their own professional development (Korthagen, 1993a).

This explosion of interest in the idea of teachers as reflective practitioners has come about for a variety of reasons in addition to those I’ve just mentioned. These include the growing popularity of cognitive as opposed to behavioural psychologies, the birth of the research on teacher-thinking movement and the formation of organizations like ISATT, the growing acceptance of diverse research methodologies and views of educational research in the educational-research community which have given us greater access to teachers’ voices and perspectives on their work, and the growing democratization of the research process in which teachers have become less willing to submit to participation in research which seeks only to portray their behaviours. Most important of all, has been the growing recognition that top-down educational reform efforts that merely use teachers as passive implementors of ideas conceived elswehere, are doomed to failure.

Attempts to Clarify Different Conceptions of Reflective Practice

Not surprisingly, the growth of reflective practice as a slogan for educational reform has stimulated many calls for greater clarification of the similarities and differences among attempts by teacher educators to implement and/or study reflective teacher education (Bartlett, 1989; Kremer-Hayon, 1990) and criticism of the lack of attention to the conceptual underpinnings of particular projects. Consequently, a research literature has emerged which has sought to clarify the conceptual distinctions among proposals for reflective teacher education (e.g., Calderhead, 1989; Grimmett, et al., 1990; Tom, 1985; and Valli, 1990a).

Several important distinctions among different notions of reflection have been made in the teacher-education literature. In addition to those like Schön (1983, 1987), van Manen (1991) and Richert (1992) who have drawn attention to the distinction between reflecting before, during and after action, and those who have made the distinction between reflecting about teaching and reflecting about the social conditions which influence one’s teaching (van Manen, 1991; Zeichner and Liston, 1987), another important distinction that has been made is between those programmes of work that emphasize reflection as a private activity to be pursued in isolation by individual teachers, and those which seek to promote reflection as a social practice and public activity involving communities of teachers. Despite an emphasis by some on reflection as an activity to be carried out privately by individual teachers, there has clearly been attention to reflection as a social practice, even in North America where an ethos of individualism has reigned supreme (e.g., Clandinin et al., 1993; Lucas, 1988; Pugach and Johnson, 1990). Those who have stressed reflection as a social practice have argued that the lack of a social forum for the discussion of teachers’ ideas inhibits the development of the teacher’s personal beliefs because these only become real and clear to us when we can speak about them to others (e.g., Ross et al., 1992; Solomon, 1987).

Another important distinction that has been noted in the literature is between reflective teaching as a detached rational and logical process and reflection as a process imbued with an ethic of care and passion. Maxine Greene (1986) and Nell Noddings (1987) are among those who have challenged the detached rationality that has dominated the literature in teacher education for a long time. Their critiques go well beyond Schön’s (1983) criticisms of technical rationality, because the problems they identify, the lack of care, compassion, and passion in actions, can also be a problem in the epistemology of practice that Schön proposes as the new paradigm for conceptualizing reflective practice. Fred Korthagen’s (1993b) recent criticisms, from a cognitive information processing perspective, of the exclusive attention to reflection as a left-brain activity and his call for more attention to the non-rational (right brain) elements of teaching in reflective teachereducation programmes is similar in many respects to the critiques of Greene and Noddings. Another important distinction that has been made in the literature is among different levels of reflection by teachers. In North America and Australia, the most well-known of these typologies is the distinction based on the work of Habermas and his theory of cognitive interests that have been made by both Carr and Kemmis (1986) and by van Manen (1977) among technical, practical, and critical reflection.

In technical reflection, the concern is with the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Tables and Figures
• Introduction
• Part 1: General Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives
• Part 2: Research Issues
• Part 3: Teachers’ Thinking and Action
• Part 4: Development of Teachers’ Knowledge and Practice
• Appendix I: (Chapter 14) The Teacher-Innovator System
• Appendix II: (Chapter 14) The Stimulated Recall Analysis System (SRAS)