Teachers And Teaching

From Classroom To Reflection

Hugh Munby, Tom Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780750700207
• eBook ISBN: 9781135723323
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

The intention of this book is to develop an increased awareness of the place of professional practice in the realms of research in teaching. The chapters investigate, from an international perspective, the emerging reflective methods of collaboration between practitioners and researchers, appreciation of teachers and teaching, and greater understanding of what they aim to promote.

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Frames of Reflection: An Introduction

Hugh Munby and Tom Russell

The work collected in this book is intended to recognize the place of professional practice itself in the realm of research on teaching. Practice, we believe, precedes research just as practice is the realm in which we think efforts to improve research are most likely to be successful. As with other types of professional practice, teaching has not been accorded the status some believe it deserves, yet the status cannot be raised simply by assertion. The contributors to this book respect and take seriously the work of teachers and the challenges of teaching. The chapters in this volume speak clearly to the fact that teaching can be taken seriously, in schools and in programs of teacher education. To take teaching seriously is, at least in part, to seek new ways of bringing together the practice of teaching and research on teaching.

The Return of Research to Teaching Itself

The title of this collection, Teachers and Teaching: From Classroom to Reflection, signals our growing understanding of a shift in research on teaching, teachers, and teacher education. We joined the ranks of these researchers some twenty years ago when the process-product model had achieved prominence. For us, it has been important to understand that the process-product model for research on teaching embodied assumptions about two very different spheres of professional activity: research and teacher education. For research to be valid and publishable, it seemed that it had somehow to mirror the ‘scientific’ paradigm. The research assumption spilled into a conception of teacher education: the professional preparation of teachers implicitly became viewed as an enterprise in which beginning teachers were told authoritatively how they should teach. The occasional indication of problems with this research assumption (Russell, 1980) was unlikely to turn the tide.

Of course, the view that one can learn to teach by being told was not a novelty brought to teacher education by the process-product model. Yet the model appeared to endorse it. Neither would we argue that there is nothing valuable to be learned from the on-campus components of teacher preparation programs. But the endorsement of the view that we can prepare teachers by telling seems to have predisposed us not to ask which elements of the activities of teaching cannot be learned by telling.

Research on teaching published between 1980 and 1990 shows a marked shift in these assumptions. At one level the assumption about what yields valid research information is enlarged to admit ethnographic and qualitative approaches. At the same time, and possibly as a consequence of this, researchers have become increasingly interested in what teachers themselves think and know. Beneath this change we see researchers becoming more respectful of the experience of teaching itself, of the actors, and of their contexts. These movements in research approaches and foci have provoked and accompanied a change in the significance attached to the experience of learning to teach in practicum settings. The customary and lively attention to the curriculum for oncampus teacher preparation is being matched by attention to questions about how beginning and experienced teachers can and do profit from their professional experiences. When Schön (1983) described a ‘crisis of confidence’ in society’s attitudes to professionals, he went on to argue that the connections between research and practice had to be addressed directly within research. We are encouraged to see research on teaching and teacher education moving in that direction, and the contributors to this collection are among those who have recognized and accepted the challenge of understanding how teachers develop practical professional knowledge.

The contents of this book reveal our enthusiasm for these changes, and in part the contents signal the journey that the idea of a science of education has recently taken. There are ironies in these changes, for it appears that the apparatus of educational research has begun to align itself with Dewey’s view of the centrality of teaching experience. The science of education, in a sense, has come full circle so that it begins with practice, where Dewey argued that it should. The deeper irony is that a large portion of current research on learning to teach and improving teaching invokes the idea of reflection, and often with reference to Dewey.

The Faces of Reflection

Schön’s (1983) distinction between technical rationality and the knowledge of practice has drawn our attention to the significance of the knowledge that teachers acquire from their own experience. His work has reminded us of Polanyi’s statement that one’s knowledge is far more extensive than what can be put into words, just as it has forced us once again to acknowledge that there is far more to teaching than can ever be learned from the on-campus classes in teacher education programs. Our own research (Russell, Munby, Johnston and Spafford, 1988) has been prompted largely by this acknowledgement and by the realization that we seem to understand little of how teachers acquire this knowledge from their experience. Put another way, the slogan ‘teachers learn from experience’ masks questions that assume a special importance in the light of Schön’s work. Examples of these questions are:

1. What particular elements of experience prompt teachers to learn from them?
2. What are the differences between the teaching of those who have learned from experience and the teaching of those who have not?
3. Are some teachers more disposed to learn from their experiences than others, and is such a disposition relevant to those for whom learning to teach is a long, slow and confusing experience?
4. Is it possible to arrange programs of teacher education so that learning from experience is encouraged explicitly?

Questions such as these are addressed in the chapters of this book, which have been arranged so that they instantiate facets of reflection as a central approach to the acquisition of professional knowledge. In this way, the book testifies to the progress made in what we prefer to think of as the science of teaching, where ‘science’ is understood in Dewey’s sense of inquiry—the point at which Schön’s work with ‘knowing-in-action’ begins.

Schön’s epistemology of action, knowing-in-action, begins with the view that the knowledge resides in performance and so is non-propositional, representing more than can be put into words. Something of this type of knowledge is revealed in the chapter by Oberg and Artz, whose conversation can be read as an attempt to explain in text what they ‘know-in-action’ as teachers. Schön’s epistemology continues with two different accounts of how the knowledge of action is acquired: reflection-on-action and reflectionin-action. Reflection-onaction refers to the systematic and deliberate thinking back over one’s actions that characterizes much of what we do when we pause after an action and attend to what we believe has occurred. This form of reflection is parallel to what seems to be intended in a considerable amount of the literature on reflective teaching and reflective teacher education. As Richert puts it, the goal of the enterprise is to develop a cadre of teachers who are thoughtful about their work.

Reflection-in-action is Schön’s term for those interactions with experience that result in the often sudden and unanticipated ways in which we come to see experience differently. The heart of this, for Schön, is reframing, a term that we have explained in the following way:

Reflection-in-action is a process with nonlogical features, a process that is prompted by experience and over which we have limited control. Teachers at every level of education are familiar with the circumstance of being unable to get a point across to a whole class. Success may come suddenly and unexpectedly, through the teacher’s somehow hearing what the students say in a quite different way. For us, the essence of reflection-inaction is this ‘hearing’ differently or ‘seeing differently’, a process that Schön calls ‘reframing’. Importantly, the form of reflection that involves reframing is very different from the more familiar form, which Schön terms ‘reflection-on-action’. This refers to the ordered, deliberate, and systematic application of logic to a problem in order to resolve it; the process is very much within our control. The sort of thinking characterized by reflection-on-action involves careful consideration of familiar data. In contrast, reflection-in-action presents the data quite differently, so that they appear in a novel frame. What control we can exercise comes through reflection on reflection-in-action, when we think systematically about the freshly framed data. (Russell and Munby, 1991, pp. 164–165)

Frames, for Schön, function importantly in the epistemology of knowing-inaction. If problem solving is the essence of technological rationality, then framing or problem setting is the essence of knowing-in-action. How we come to frame experience establishes how the puzzles of experience are set and is thus the crucial first step in problem solving. This brings us directly to describing the contents of this book, for we can now speak to the chapters in terms of the puzzles of experience addressed in each and the particular frames that the authors have adopted for seeing these puzzles and then addressing them. The twelve chapters in this collection are organized into five sections.

Setting the Stage

The chapter by Douglas Barnes is unique in several respects: It is the longest chapter in the collection, it takes a broad perspective on teachers’ work, and it takes advantage of long-term views across a range of curriculum development activities. Accordingly, this chapter leads off, introducing the topic of teachers’ frames for reflecting on their work. Barnes draws on his own experiences with the London Association for the Teaching of English, with the introduction of ‘oracy’ into the secondary English curriculum, and with the Language Across the Curriculum movement to illustrate his broad points about the significance of teachers’ frames for interpreting the settings in which they work. He emphasizes that personal commitments and professional experience exist in interaction with each other. Barnes concludes that teaching can change only when teachers’ frames change, and these are in turn dependent on ‘subtle and sensitive’ changes in schools that will not easily be achieved.

Reflection in Teaching

John Baird, author of Chapter 3, describes two unique projects in Australia in which reflection and enquiry into classroom events are carried out by teachers (and others) in collaboration with one another with a view to improving teaching. Three ‘guiding principles’ are developed: to converge processes and outcomes, to support change adequately, and to base improvement on reflection. Four illustrations are provided from one of the projects, and each is described in terms of procedures and resulting issues. Baird concludes by using the concept of ‘challenge’ to summarize this research into ways to improve teaching and learning.

In Chapter 4, Hilda Borko, Mary Louise Bellamy and Linda Sanders report their study of teachers’ plans for and reflections on their teaching, with specific reference to science teaching, and guided by a contrast between ‘expert’ and ‘novice’ teachers. They view teaching as a complex cognitive skill, and their vignettes of four teachers are rich with quotations from the teachers’ reflections on their planning and teaching. The contrast between beginning and experienced teachers is particularly effective in illustrating the value of a cognitive skill perspective, as the experienced teachers revealed more appropriate and more developed schemata for interpreting and thus responding to the events of teaching. These schemata help to explain the experts’ greater ability to interpret and respond to students’ signals about how well they were understanding their lessons.

Reflection in Cases of Teaching

Brent Kilbourn specializes in detailed analysis of teaching and in Chapter 5 uses an instance of history teaching, by a teacher attempting to change, to illustrate that ‘elegant practice in teaching requires the integration of philosophical, subject matter and classroom understandings’. After introducing each of the three types of understanding, one history lesson at the Grade 7 level is examined closely. The analysis provides valuable illustration of the nature of each of the three types of understanding while also achieving valuable insights into the challenges that are inevitable when one seeks to change one’s teaching. Kilbourn’s skillful presentation and interpretation of ‘Bill Lander’ at work in the classroom reveals the complexities that emerge when reflection rooted in one aspect of a teacher’s understanding is returned to the action of the classroom where it inevitably encounters other aspects of professional understanding.

In our personal contribution to this collection, Chapter 6, we shift from our editorial roles to a recent case in our accumulating collection of cases about metaphor and reflection in the development of teachers’ professional knowledge. We present the case of ‘Debra’, a beginning teacher of chemistry with a graduate degree and extensive experience as a research technician in chemistry. When Debra agreed to be observed and interviewed at intervals, she was experiencing difficulty with classroom interactions while achieving considerable success in laboratory activities. This chapter describes a number of patterns in Debra’s teaching and in her thought about her work. Among the suggestions that emerge is the possibility that developing the necessary pedagogical knowledge of her subject of chemistry is complicated and constrained by her highly integrated view of her subject acquired in years of laboratory research.

In Chapter 7, Kathy Carter addresses an important recent development in teacher education: the possibility of developing the knowledge of teachers with case studies of teachers’ work. Case studies for educational purposes pose the issue of whether teaching can be captured in written form in ways that will nurture the reflections of both beginning and experienced teachers. Carter’s argument begins by considering the emerging understanding that teachers’ knowledge is practical and contextualized, personal, task-specific and eventstructured and rooted in recurring experiences of the classroom. The substance, the shape and the size of cases prepared for teacher education purposes are considered from this perspective of new understandings of teachers’ knowledge. Carter’s discussion concludes with important points about the nature of learning to teach and its significance for using cases for teaching purposes.

Narrative in Reflection

Jean Clandinin introduces in Chapter 8 the perspective of narrative and story in teacher education, building on the use of narrative inquiry in research that she has conducted with Michael Connelly. Teachers’ ‘personal practical knowledge’ is taken to be narratively constructed, and an account is given of a specific narrative inquiry into teacher education. The illustrative case emphasizes the collaboration between teacher and researcher, as the stories of both are played out in interaction. Thus this chapter considers research methodology as well as the content of individuals’ stories. Clandinin stresses the power of narrative and story in fostering reflection on teaching but readily acknowledges that the ‘storying process’ can be a hazardous as well as a constructive medium. Broad issues for teacher education are raised, and illustrated by the story of ‘Julie’ learning to teach.

Antoinette Oberg and Sibylle Artz pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Frames of Reflection: An Introduction
• 2. The Significance of Teachers’ Frames for Teaching
• 3. Collaborative Reflection, Systematic Enquiry, Better Teaching
• 4. A Cognitive Analysis of Patterns In Science Instruction By Expert and Novice Teachers
• 5. Philosophical, Subject Matter and Classroom Understandings: A Case of History Teaching
• 6. Transforming Chemistry Research Into Chemistry Teaching: The Complexities of Adopting New Frames for Experience
• 7. Creating Cases for the Development of Teacher Knowledge
• 8. Narrative and Story In Teacher Education
• 9. Teaching for Reflection: Being Reflective
• 10. Practitioner Research and Programs of Initial Teacher Education
• 11. The Content of Student Teachers’ Reflections Within Different Structures for Facilitating the Reflective Process
• 12. The Roles of Reflective Practice and Foundational Disciplines In Teacher Education
• Notes On Contributors