Changing Teaching, Changing Teachers

21st Century Teaching and Learning Through Lesson and Learning Study

Keith Wood, Saratha Sithamparam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000210293
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

A unique feature of this book is its focus on engaging teachers themselves in changing teaching as a way to bring about teacher change through lesson study and learning study. The sequence – changing teaching, changing teachers – is significant. This approach to professional development is not about telling teachers what and how they should teach to bring about change in their students' learning outcomes. It is about empowering teachers to make their own decisions about what needs to change. Empowering teachers in this way has been identified as the 'soul' of Japanese lesson study (Cheng, 2019). It is the soul which can so easily be compromised when lesson study is adopted and – inevitably it seems – adapted in new contexts around the globe. Without teacher empowerment, top-down curriculum development is almost bound to fail. In presenting the cases of collaborative professional development included in this book, care has been taken to include the teachers' voices. They are intended to be the subjects and not the objects of our research into teachers' professional development.

1Changing teaching, changing teachers

Learning as changing as a person

In a phenomenographic study of learning, six qualitatively different conceptions of learning were identified from interviews with students completing a Social Science Foundation course at the Open University in the UK (Marton, Dall’Alba, & Beaty, 1993), with ‘changing as a person’ at the top of the hierarchy. The categories are learning as (1) increasing one’s knowledge; (2) memorizing and reproducing; (3) applying; (4) understanding; (5) seeing something in a different way; and (6) changing as a person. The sixth category may be explained as developing insights into the phenomena dealt with in the learning material to develop a new way of seeing those phenomena and in seeing the world differently, changing as a person. The study identified three ways in which this comes about: (1) seeing things differently changes you or it means you have changed (relational in nature); (2) continuity in a process engaged in by a person; and (3) acquisition of a skill or capability – learning as a way of seeing – that affects the perception of self by which learners come to see themselves as more capable people. What is learnt is not delimited from the person’s life-world or in time or from the person; the learner, the learning material and the meanings of the learning material, and the phenomena in the world and their meanings for the learner are all related components of what is learnt.

Changing teaching

In a phenomenographic study of learning to teach, three qualitatively different conceptions of teaching were identified from interviews with twenty-seven student teachers completing a one-year (October to June) Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) programme in the UK (Wood, 1996). The tutors sought to bring about change in the student teachers’ ways of experiencing teaching.

The programme was designed to focus student teachers’ attention on (1) variation in their students’ ways of experiencing learning, for example, learning as reproduction or understanding or changing as a person (Marton et al., 1993); and (2) variation in their students’ understanding of the content of learning (economics knowledge in this study). For example, in the following extract, a student teacher reviewed a lesson on the employment policy of a business. She referred to the variation in the students’ responses as evidence of what she had to work with in creating a learning experience for them:

… they thought profit ruled absolutely. And I think also they thought that was the answer they should give in their economics lesson … I think that the way that they changed their minds so they came to see there were certain implications to thinking that – that meant you couldn’t interfere with things that we might think were morally unacceptable, you know, racism, etc… I think they came to see all these implications of that.

She was able to help the students to learn by challenging them to think through the implications of their view of business motivation. She used the evidence from the lesson to develop her own view of learning in an economics class:

I think learning took place in seeing that there was more than one aspect to that and there were things that had to be weighed up and balanced against each other … I don’t know that there are really any economic truths there but I thought that was learning in an economics classroom … because it’s an economic issue – because they are talking about firms and the way they behave and that’s got clear implications for the allocation of resources …

Learning experiences were created by the tutors, by the tutors in collaboration with the student teachers and by the student teachers in collaboration with each other with the intention of giving the teacher education programme a particular relevance structure for the learners, that is, teaching as action research. For example, one student teacher began the programme with a view of teaching which he said involved two aspects:

… one of them is learning how to adapt to the knowledge that you have. In a sense, try and extract it through the students rather than giving it to them. It’s a subject based thing … working with economics in that respect. But on the other side is developing the social relationships between you and the students. Just how you should be pitching yourself in control terms.

Interviewing students about their understanding before and after lessons was a learning opportunity for him because he had seen that what students say to the teacher may not have meaning for them. It could be a kind of lip service, giving the teacher what the student perceives he wants.

I find interviewing students before and after lessons a little confusing because seeing through what they were saying and interpreting that as something that was intrinsically theirs and something that had been fed to them was confusing to me.

This was a chance to learn because, clearly, he could not work in the way that he described at the outset of the programme if he created situations where students simply repeated after the teacher. That observation alone could put emphasis on the importance of the nature of the tasks set by the teacher and what they require of the students if meaningful learning is to occur.

The different conceptions are summarized here as three levels of understanding of teaching arranged in a hierarchy, with some brief examples of student teachers’ descriptions of teaching.

Focuses on the agent of teaching

The emphasis is on the teacher as the agent of learning, not the learner. Teaching is seen as imparting knowledge to students. The outcome, described as learning, is an increase in students’ knowledge, but the meaning of knowledge is not attended to. Rather attention is drawn to the communication process by which knowledge is understood to be imparted. Successful teaching is associated with personal qualities of the teacher such as firmness, charisma, being respected and having power. This puts distance between teacher and students.

… the hardest thing, just to walk into a classroom and take control … to get respect from students you’re working with when you’ve got to transmit information in a clear and logical way …

… I think some of them learned from the lesson … They seemed to get down the information and were answering questions …

Focuses on the act of teaching

Teaching is understood as preparing students to use knowledge. The focus is on the communication process, but it is understood as a two-way process between teacher and students, not simply from teacher to students. Teachers’ questions are emphasized. Through a type of Socratic dialogue with the teacher, the learner is encouraged to respond to an issue or problem and, through interaction with the teacher, modify that response in the course of teaching. The dialogue demonstrates the weaknesses in students’ thinking when applied to problems or issues or an explanation of a phenomenon.

… They have to go through a process of trying to assimilate information and manipulate it in ways they think appropriate … the teacher has to facilitate that because most of the theories are fairly logical … you shouldn’t have to do too much to get them there …

… Managing the learning process so that it goes in the direction you want without veering off in directions you don’t want …

Focuses on the object of learning

Students’ understanding of the object of learning is the focus of the teacher’s attention. Teaching is understood as preparing students to be aware of their own thinking and learning. Teaching understood in this way involves a willingness on the part of the teacher to discover the critical aspects of the object of learning, that is, to find out from the students what they need to learn to achieve the intended outcome of the lesson(s). The teacher is also a learner.

… looking at how the students responded was important but, before you can make sense of that data, you have to have an understanding of how you yourself learn and how you view the process of your own learning. Without that being made explicit to you, looking at other things is of limited value to you.

… we found that it [the role play] served to reinforce their view about what business and property developers were all about – basically money … And then we had a problem getting them to challenge these views and giving them things to get them to consider wider aims such as environmental issues and responsibilities for workers’ safety … All issues we did raise with the role play but they tried to avoid … We thought raising the issue would be enough and it wasn’t … it’s what they make of it … we then have to look at what they are making of it, and look for something that will challenge what they’re doing with it rather than what we see that they should be doing with it … and there were opportunities ….

The ‘how’ and ‘what’ of the conceptions of teaching at levels A to C have dialectically intertwined structural aspects (how the phenomenon and its component parts are delineated and related to each other) and referential aspects (the meaning of the phenomenon). For example, the approach to teaching economics (the ‘how’) has (at level A) a structural aspect of passing on received knowledge or (at level C) student’s knowledge as the object of their thinking. Similarly, the outcome of teaching (the ‘what’) has a structural aspect of control for communication (level A) or working pedagogically with pupils’ thinking (l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Changing teaching, changing teachers
• 2 The many faces of lesson study
• 3 Learning study
• 4 Twenty-first-century teaching and learning design
• 5 Learning and variation
• 6 Critical aspects of the object of learning
• 7 Roles of teacher, researcher, facilitator, coach
• 8 Necessary conditions of teacher learning
• References
• Index