Teacher Cognition and Language Education

Research and Practice

Simon Borg

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781472526953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The study of teacher cognition - what teachers think, know and believe - and of its relationship to teachers' classroom practices has become a key theme in the field of language teaching and teacher education. This new in paperback volume provides a timely discussion of the research which now exists on language teacher cognition. The first part of the book considers what is known about the cognitions of pre-service and practicing teachers, and focuses specifically on teachers' cognitions in teaching grammar, reader and writing. The second part of the book evaluates a range of research methods which have been used in the study of language teacher cognition and provides a framework for continuing research in this fascinating field. This comprehensive yet accessible account will be relevant to researchers, teacher educators and curriculum managers working in language education contexts.

1

The origins of teacher cognition research

Language teacher cognition research draws on a tradition of educational research which stretches back over 30 years. My aim in this chapter is to outline the origins and growth of this tradition. The rapid growth of teacher cognition research since the 1970s has been characterized by a number of perspectives from which teachers’ mental lives can be studied. I will highlight these here as they provide the conceptual basis for the research I discuss in Chapters 2–5. I will not attempt to provide a comprehensive review of research on teacher cognition in education generally (there are hundreds of individual studies in this domain, across a wide range of curricular areas), but to outline, chronologically, the emergence of this tradition of inquiry and the key perspectives, concepts and findings it has contributed to the study of teaching. In doing so I will draw on a number of reviews of teacher cognition research which have appeared over the years and which readers may want to turn to for more specific detail on particular research perspectives (a list of these reviews appears at the end of this chapter). I will also postpone a discussion of methodological developments in the study of teacher cognition until later in the book.

The 1970s: Changing perspectives in the study of teaching

Dunkin and Biddle (1974: 38) presented a model for the study of teaching which reflected the approach to research on classroom teaching predominant in the 1970s. This model posited relationships between what were called presage variables (e.g. teachers’ personal characteristics and teacher-training experiences), context variables (e.g. learners’ personal characteristics), process variables (defined through interactions between teachers and learners in the classroom) and product variables (e.g. learning outcomes). The approach to the study of teaching implied in this model is what is referred to (often disparagingly in contemporary educational debate) as a process-product approach. The aim was to study what happens in classrooms (i.e. processes, defined primarily in terms of observable teacher and learner behaviours) and to link these causatively with what learners achieve or can do. Although the model does acknowledge presage variables which influence teachers’ classroom behaviours, it made no reference to the role teachers’ cognitive processes might play in the act of teaching itself. This was the dominant conceptual model of teaching in the 1970s. Learning was seen to be a product of teaching, and teaching was conceived of as behaviours performed by teachers in class. The goal of research on teaching was to describe these behaviours, to identify those which were effective and to study links between these behaviours and learning outcomes.

Alternatives to this conception of teaching had already begun appearing in the late 1960s. Three factors are commonly cited to explain the emergence of these alternatives (see Calderhead, 1987, 1996; Carter, 1990). Firstly, developments in cognitive psychology had highlighted the influence of thinking on behaviour. This, therefore, suggested that understanding teachers required an understanding of teachers’ mental lives rather than an exclusive focus on observable behaviours. Secondly, there was an increasing recognition of the fact that teachers played a much more active and central role in shaping educational processes than previously acknowledged. Examining the kinds of decisions teachers made and the cognitive basis of these thus also started to emerge as a central area of research interest. Thirdly, there was growing recognition of the limitations of a concern for quantifying discrete teacher behaviours and the search for generalizable models of teacher effectiveness which had long characterized research on teaching. As an alternative, studies of teaching which examined individual teachers’ work and cognitions in a more holistic and qualitative manner began to appear.

Early work reflecting this emerging tradition consisted of rich descriptive and interpretive accounts of classrooms, which illustrated the complexities and the demands of teaching and the manner in which teachers coped with these challenges. Smith and Geoffrey (1968) and Kounin (1970) are representative of such work, though Jackson (1968) is perhaps most often cited as marking a change in the way teaching and teachers could be studied; it was, according to Clark and Peterson (1986: 255), ‘one of the first studies that attempted to describe and understand the mental constructs and processes that underlie teaching behaviour’.

In 1975 the National Institute of Education in the United States organized a conference, which had the aim of defining an agenda for research on teaching. Groups of experts in various areas of teaching worked to prepare a plan for research in those areas and one of these groups had as its focus ‘Teaching as Clinical Information Processing’. The report of this group argued that:

it is obvious that what teachers do is directed in no small measure by what they think . . . To the extent that observed or intended teaching behaviour is ‘thoughtless’, it makes no use of the human teacher’s most unique attributes. In so doing, it becomes mechanical and might well be done by a machine. If, however, teaching is done and, in all likelihood, will continue to be done by human teachers, the question of relationships between thought and action becomes crucial.

(National Institute of Education, 1975: 1)

This report marked the start of a tradition of research into teacher cognition. It argued that, in order to understand teachers, researchers needed to study the psychological processes through which teachers make sense of their work. This emphasis on cognitive processes marked a major departure from the views of teaching and teachers dominant at the time; teaching was no longer being viewed solely in terms of behaviours but rather as thoughtful behaviour; and teachers were not being viewed as mechanical implementers of external prescriptions, but as active, thinking decision-makers, who processed and made sense of a diverse array of information in the course of their work. As a result of this report, significant research funding for the study of teacher cognition became available to researchers in the USA. Consequently, early thinking in this domain of activity was powerfully shaped by work in North America.

Two key individuals involved in the report just referred to, and whose views at the time on the nature of teaching were influential in promoting a focus on the cognitive dimension of teaching, were Shulman and Elstein. In an early paper (Shulman and Elstein, 1975) they examined psychological studies of problem-solving, judgement and decision-making and considered their relevance to the study of teaching. Both authors had a background in psychology and early work in teacher cognition was in fact primarily psychological in nature, rather than educational (we can contrast this with developments in late 1980s and 1990s, for example, where the study of teacher cognition was aligned more with the field of teacher education rather than with psychology). Reflecting the shift in perspective from teaching behaviours to teacher thinking I have already noted, they commented at the start of their paper that ‘research typically slights the problem of how teachers think about their pupils and instructional problems; it concentrates instead on how teachers act or perform in the classroom‘(p. 3). The aim of their paper was to consider ways in which greater research attention might be focused on teacher thinking; of particular interest was their discussion of teaching as clinical information processing, a metaphor for teaching which dominated early research into teacher thinking (see Kagan, 1988 for an analysis of this analogy). In their words:

The teacher role can be conceptualized like a physician’s role – as an active clinical information processor involved in planning, anticipating, judging, diagnosing, prescribing, problem solving. The teacher is expected to function in a task environment containing quantities of different kinds of information that far exceed the capabilities or capacities of any human information processor. Many of the research strategies [we have] discussed above can be used to understand how teachers cope with that overload while somehow responding, diagnosing, judging, making decisions, and taking actions.

(Shulman and Elstein, 1975: 35)

Research on teaching adopting this perspective was rare at the time, but the position outlined here set the tone for much subsequent work. Teachers’ planning, judgements and decision-making were in fact key foci in the emergence of what came to be known as research on teacher thinking. An early review of such work is Clark and Yinger (1977).

The introduction to this review reflected the scope of teacher thinking research and the promise it was felt to hold for extending our understandings of teaching:

A relatively new approach to the study of teaching assumes that what teachers do is affected by what they think. This cognitive information processing approach is concerned with teacher judgment, decision making, and planning. The study of the thinking processes of teachers – how teachers gather, organize, interpret, and evaluate information – is expected to lead to understandings of the uniquely human processes that guide and determine teacher behaviour.

(Clark and Yinger, 1977: 1)

Four topics were identified here which had been studied from the perspective of teacher thinking: teacher planning, teacher judgement, teacher interactive decision-making (i.e. decisions made during teaching), and teachers’ implicit theories or perspectives. The study of planning in teaching was at the time dominated by a prescriptive model in which objectives were the basic initial unit in the planning process followed by the selection of learning activities, decisions about their organization and about their evaluation. Early studies of planning from a teacher thinking point of view, however, suggested that teachers did not follow this rational model and that learning activities and a concern for the content to be taught were the starting points in planning. This kind of finding immediately highlighted the capacity of teacher cognition research to develop theories of teaching grounded in an understanding of teachers’ actual thinking and practices. This kind of work also began to reveal the complexity of teaching, indicating that linear, rational models of teachers’ work were inadequate. Early teacher thinking research on planning also highlighted teachers’ use of instructional routines, developed as a result of experience, and defined as ‘methods used to reduce the complexity and increase the predictability of classroom activities, thus increasing flexibility and effectiveness’ (Clark and Yinger, 1977: 284). In contrast to this work on planning, the research on teachers’ judgements, interactive decision-making and implicit theories available at the time did not suggest many clear conclusions. In each case, the number of studies was small, diverse and conducted in very specific contexts. One interesting point which did emerge from the study of teachers’ implicit theories, though, was that teachers’ thinking and behaviours are guided by a set of organized beliefs and that these often operate unconsciously. This is a point we take for granted in contemporary research on teaching, but 30 years ago the study of teachers’ beliefs and their impact on what teachers do was just emerging. In fact, in all four areas of teaching reviewed by Clark and Yinger, more questions than answers were generated, another reflection of th...