Teacher Thinking and Professional Action Over the past twenty years, the International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching (ISATT) has become world-renowned as an organisation dedicated to the discussion of current thinking in educational policy and practice. As such, the ideas aired at ISATT conferences are of the greatest significance to today’s educational practitioners. Teacher Thinking and Professional Action aims to satisfy the demand for a lasting record of ISATT’s illuminating discussions on the theme. It is based on a selec- tion of papers presented at their third biennial conference and has been updated by each contributor to include their current thoughts and opinions. The book contains nineteen articles, each an in-depth examination of its topic, and is divided into four sections, entitled: • Conceptual Frames for Teacher Thought and Action • Methods and Approaches to the Study of Teacher Thought and Action • Teacher Judgement and Evaluation of Students • Teacher Thinking and Teacher Education Broad in theme, international in scope and thorough in detail, this book is sure to be essential and enlightening reading for anyone with a serious interest in the ongoing development of educational thought. Pam M. Denicolo is a Professor and Director of the Graduate School for Social Sciences at the University of Reading, UK. Michael Kompf is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University, Canada. Teacher Thinking and Professional Action Pam M. Denicolo and Michael Kompf I~ ~~o~f !;n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2005 by Routledge Typeset in Times by Keyword Group Ltd. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 978-0-415-36223-8 (hbk) 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Published 2017 by Routledge Copyright © 2005 Pam M. Denicolo and Michael Kompf under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available Sigrun Gudmunsdottir was one of the contributors to the original version of Teacher Thinking and Professional Action . ISATT members were greatly saddened when notified of her death during the 2003 meeting in Leiden, The Netherlands. Sigrun’s contributions to ISATT, dedication to her students and unfailing good humour stand as inspirations to all of us. It is to her memory that this book is dedicated. Contents Contributors ix Acknowledgements xiii Preface xv Section A Conceptual Frames for Teacher Thought and Action 1 Chapter 1 The Place of Process-Product Research in Developing the Agenda for Research on Teacher Thinking 3 David C. Berliner Chapter 2 Perspectives on the Teaching Profession or Relative Appraisal 17 Pam M. Denicolo and Maureen Pope Chapter 3 The ‘Collective Student’ as the Cognitive Reference Point of Teachers’ Thinking about their Students in the Classroom 31 Rainer Bromme Chapter 4 A Contrast of Novice and Expert Competence in Maths Lessons 41 Gaea Leinhardt Section B Methods and Approaches to the Study of Teacher Thought and Action 59 Chapter 5 Strategies and Methods in Research on Teacher Thinking 61 Günter L. Huber Chapter 6 The Ground of Professional Practice 77 Antoinette Oberg Chapter 7 Case Study in Research on Teaching: A ground for reflective practice 91 John Olson Chapter 8 Teachers’ Personal and Professional Ideals about Practice 99 Michael Kompf and Alan F. Brown Chapter 9 Computer Simulation as a Tool in Studying Teachers’ Cognitive Activities during Error Diagnosis in Arithmetic 109 Erik De Corte, Lieven Verschaffel and Hilde Schrooten Section C Teacher Judgement and Evaluation of Students 119 Chapter 10 Goal-Dependent Perception in Relations between Teachers and Students 121 Manfred Hofer Chapter 11 Grading as a Quasi-rational Judgement Process 129 Annica Brehmer Chapter 12 Analysing Teachers’ Thoughts Prior to Student Assessment 139 Urban Lissmann Chapter 13 Teachers’ Causal Attributions in Problematic Situations Karin van Opdorp, Paul den Hertog, Theo Bergen and 153 Lucie Vreuls Chapter 14 Teachers’ Need for Pupil Information in Special Education 165 Sip J. Pijl and Steven F. Foster Section D Teacher Thinking and Teacher Education 175 Chapter 15 Asking the Right Questions about Teacher Preparation: Contributions of research on teacher thinking 177 Christopher M. Clark Chapter 16 Using Textbooks and Teachers’ Guides: What beginning elementary teachers learn and what they need to know 189 Deborah Loewenberg-Ball and Sharon Feiman-Nemser Chapter 17 Supervision Conferences and Student Teachers’ Thinking and Behaviour 201 Jan Broeckmans Chapter 18 Examining Complexity of Thought in Secondary Student Teachers 211 Greta Morine Dershimer and Bernard Oliver Chapter 19 Knowing, Thinking and Doing in Learning to Teach: A research framework and some initial results 223 Sharon Feiman-Nemser and Margret Buchmann About ISATT 235 References 237 Index 259 viii Contents Contributors Theo Bergen , The Netherlands Private address David C. Berliner College of Education, University of Arizona Tuscson, Arizona, USA Annica Brehmer Department of Psychology, Uppsala University Uppsala, Sweden Jan Broeckmans Center for Teacher Education Leuven University Belgium Rainer Bromme Universität Münster, Psychologisches Institut III Münster, Germany Alan F. Brown (Retired) Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) Toronto, Canada Margret Buchmann The Institute for Research on Teaching College of Education, Michigan State University East Lansing, Michigan, USA Christopher M. Clark Faculty of Education, University of Delaware Newark, Delaware, USA Erik De Corte Centre for Instrumental Psychology, University of Leuven Leuven, Belgium Paul den Hertog Institute for Teacher Education University of Nijmegen The Netherlands Pam Denicolo Graduate School for Social Sciences, University of Reading Reading, UK Sharon Feiman-Nemser The Institute for Research on Teaching, College of Education, Michigan State University East Lansing, Michigan, USA Steven F. Foster Institute for Educational Research University of Groningen The Netherlands Manfred Hofer Universität Mannheim, Lehrstuhl Erziehungswissenschaft II Mannheim, Germany Günter L. Huber Universität Tübingen, Institut für Erziehungswissenschaft Tübingen, Germany Michael Kompf Faculty of Education, Brock University St Catherine’s, Ontario, Canada Gaea Leinhardt Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Urban Lissmann Zentrum für empirische Forschung Landau, Germany Deborah Loewenberg-Ball The Insitute for Research on Teaching, College of Education Michigan State University East Lansing, Michigan, USA Greta Morine Dershimer , USA Private address Antoinette Oberg Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria Victoria, BC, Canada Bernard Oliver Syracuse University Syracuse, USA John Olson Professor Emeritus, Queens University Kingston, Canada x Contributors Contributors xi Sip J. Pijl RION, Insitute for Educational Research, University of Groningen Groningen, The Netherlands Maureen Pope (Retired) University of Reading Reading, UK Hilde Schrooten Centre for Instructional Psychology University of Leuven Belgium Karin van Opdorp Institute for Teacher Education University of Nijmegen Netherlands Lieven Verschaffel Centre for Instructional Psychology University of Leuven Belgium Lucie Vreuls Institute for Teacher Education University of Nijmegen Netherlands Acknowledgements This volume would not have been possible without the goodwill, cooperation and patience of the contributors – we thank you. Acknowledgement and thanks are owed to Daniela Brewis for coordinating the flow of paper, Marie Harris for manuscript preparation, Ken Kehl for preparation of the index, Rahul Kumar for scanning in text and preparation of figures and tables, Tony DiPetta for the loan of his laptop and Andrew Short for assistance in proofreading. We wish to acknowledge the American Educational Research Association and Michael Degnan of the Educational Researcher for allowing us to include a paper by Christopher M. Clark. Thanks and appreciation are owed to Taylor & Francis who took over the project from Swets & Zeitlinger and helped ensure that this important work was pre- served to aid teachers and teaching in the future. We also acknowledge Brock University with thanks for partially funding the preparation of this manuscript through the Research and Development Fund. Our families near and far are acknowledged and thanked for their patience with our preoccupation. As with the other volumes of ISATT papers we have edited, student travel to ISATT meetings will be assisted through all proceeds of this volume – welcome. Pam M. Denicolo September 2004 Michael Kompf Preface ISATT (then known as the International Study Association on Teacher Thinking) began in Tilburg, the Netherlands in October 1983 and was initiated by Rob Halkes, John Olson, Alan F. Brown, Christopher M. Clark, Erik De Corte and William Reid. In 1985, ISATT met again, this time with representatives from 12 countries. Since that time ISATT has become the International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching; sponsor of the journal Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice ; producer of some 11 volumes of academic writing, research and theory; and mentor to several generations of scholars. The current volume follows on the successful reintroduction of early work produced by members of ISATT in Teacher thinking twenty years on: revisiting persisting problems and advances in education (Kompf & Denicolo, 2003). Chapters were drawn from Teacher thinking: a new perspective on persisting problems in edu- cation (Halkes & Olson, 1984) and Advances of research on teacher thinking (Ben- Peretz, Bromme & Halkes, 1986), which in turn were comprised of selections from association meetings held in Tilburg. Interest in the thoughts, research and writing of ISATT members has enjoyed a resurgence accompanied by further requests for mate- rials no longer available. To this end, the current volume Teacher thinking and profes- sional action re-presents selections from papers offered at the third biennial conference of ISATT held at the University of Leuven, Belgium in October 1986. The latter part of the ISATT acronym represented ‘Teacher Thinking’ at that time and is visible through the undercurrents of thought and research in these papers. Two main resources provided the materials for the current volume. Conference host and ISATT founding member, Joost Lowyck, edited the proceedings – a blue-bound 717-page tome that participants received about 3 weeks before the meeting. From that volume, papers were further selected by editors Joost Lowyck and Christopher M. Clark (also a founding member of ISATT) and published by Leuven University Press in 1989 as Teacher thinking and professional action. This volume has not been readily available for many years. Because we were unable to locate some of the contributors to Teacher thinking and professional action , we revisited the proceedings and selected additional papers that represent the durability of ideas and the spirit of forward thinking that characterises the ISATT community. One of the features of Teacher thinking twenty years on , as the title indicates, was the inclusion of author comments considering, from the point of view of recent and current work, how well the content stood the test of time and what significance the issues raised still have. Where possible, we have included such comments in this volume and feel that much value has been added by the accumulation of wisdom and experience over the ensuing years. We include below excerpts from the preface to the original book to set the scene and to honour those who were instrumental in producing it. In particular, we would like to echo the original editors’ final acknowledgement to their original publishers who kindly gave us permission to use extracts from that book. We would also like to offer personal thanks to Joost and the other founding members of ISATT who welcomed us so unreservedly to the fold at the Leuven Conference as novice researchers in the field and thus fired our enthusiasm for the intellectual challenge and spirit of international collaboration that ISATT embodies. Pam M. Denicolo, Reading (UK) September 2004 Michael Kompf, Brock (Canada) Preface Extracts (1989) When ‘teacher thinking’ emerged during the seventies, emphasis was almost exclu- sively laid on teachers’ internal, mental processes. Teaching behaviours and skills were replaced by new concepts like intention, planning, reflection, concerns, constructs, personal theory, pedagogical knowledge, knots, subjective problems, etc. The teacher is no longer perceived as the observable performer of a set of effective but isolated teaching skills: he/she is a problem-solver, professional planner, hypothesis-tester, decision-maker, reflective practitioner. This initial conception of the study of teacher thinking is reflected in the first publication of the 1983 ISATT Symposium: ‘In short, what’s in the “mind” of teachers could explain classroom processes in one way or another’ (Halkes & Olson, 1984, p.1). Along with the increase of both empirical findings and conceptual refinements, the limitations of a narrowed teacher ‘thinking’ metaphor has been acknowledged. More action-oriented concepts appear like ‘teacher routines’, ‘interactive thoughts’, ‘teacher strategies’, etc. This evolution has been acknowledged in the 1984 ISATT Conference: ‘It is self-evident that research into teachers’ thinking runs the risk of excessive “cog- nitivism”. We are witnessing an extension of what is meant by “teachers’ thinking”. Almost all factors influencing teacher activity are subsumed under this notion. This has led to an over-emphasis on internal and mental control of activity’. (Ben-Peretz, Bromme & Halkes, 1986). In this 1986 ISATT Conference publication, a tentative attempt is made to avoid a further bifurcation of research on teaching. It seems at least intellectually honest to reflect on the possible integration of different research paradigms and not to accept ... the splitting force of dichotomous choices between description and prescription, teaching and learning, process and product, teacher thinking and profes- sional action ... however, this volume will not provide an answer to the complex rela- tionship between teacher thinking and professional action. On the contrary, it invites scholars in the field to reflect carefully upon the possible effects of centrifugal tenden- cies in research on teaching to look for more integration and cooperation. It would be impossible to end this preface without an explicit acknowledge- ment of gratitude to the Editorial Boards of the Studia Paedagogica Series and the Leuven University Press. Joost Lowyck, Leuven (Belgium) Christopher M. Clark, Michigan (USA) xvi Preface Section A Conceptual Frames for Teacher Thought and Action Berliner’s keynote presentation, entitled ‘The place of process-product research in developing the agenda for research on teacher thinking’, is included as the first chapter in this book. While he had been asked to provide a comparison of the estab- lished process-product paradigm with more contemporary paradigms pervading research on teacher thinking, he produced instead a convincing rationale for recognis- ing the contribution that work in each can make to a functionalist, pragmatic approach that recognises that thought and action are inextricably linked. Having analysed what is required by education and those engaged in it in terms of approaches, methods and foci for research, he provides a set of recommendations to researchers for future practice. In his reflective commentary on his original paper, he notes that he still thinks (Recommendation 1) that more comparative research, for instance examining contrasting groups of teachers, would add to improved understanding of pragmatic problems. He remains unconvinced, as detailed in his paper (Recommendation 2: ‘Use more of the best teachers you can find’), that studying ‘ordinary’ teachers has much to contribute to resolving practical issues. His final recommendation is to focus first on those practical issues deemed important but little understood, and to devise research on how teachers think about them; in essence, reversing the ‘figure and ground’ in teacher thinking and action. In his reflective commentary, he regrets that much research in the field still fails to address issues of practical relevance. The second chapter, ‘Perspectives on the teaching profession or relative appraisal’ by Denicolo and Pope, provides a degree of response to the previous chapter in several respects. In the affirmative, the authors use a method, a Personal Construct Theory technique, which, though firmly embedded in an interpretivist paradigm and using a small sample, includes data amenable to quantitative manipulations to demon- strate pervasive constructs and characteristics within the teaching profession. It also includes a comparison between two groups of teachers – science and non-science teachers. However, these teachers certainly fit into the category ‘ordinary’ teachers. This was deliberate, for the purpose of the research was to elucidate their views on their professional roles and practices with a particular focus on how these might be both appraised and developed. Since the majority of teachers are ‘ordinary’, the results of this research alert us to the potential difficulties for government policy implementation in relation to appraisal and staff development. The reflective commen- tary indicates that these caveats proved to be well founded but also reinforces from sub- sequent practice the claim in the chapter that the research technique proved useful also as a means of engaging teachers in reflecting on their practice, thereby providing a challenge to improve it. Bromme, in the third chapter, ‘The “collective student” as the cognitive ref- erence point of teachers’ thinking about their students in the classroom’, addresses the way in which teachers attend to the problems and difficulties that their students have with the subject matter content of their teaching. In introducing an empirical study and a discussion of its results, the author notes that investigations of teachers’ perception and interpretation of understanding were quite rare at that time. His current reflection notes that this study preceded a wealth of studies both on teachers’ awareness about student difficulties and on students’ preconceptions and other factors that inhibit new learning. However, in a way echoing Berliner’s attention to solving practical problems in the classroom, he notes that his finding (that teachers, in the complexity of the normal classroom, are forced to work in relation to a notion of the ‘collective student’) remains currently relevant. The fourth chapter, Leinhardt’s ‘A contrast of novice and expert competence in maths lessons’, clearly meets Berliner’s first recommendation since novice and expert teachers are studied in relation to their competence in weaving together a series of lessons, structuring individual lessons and moving fluidly from one activity to another to reach a transparent goal so that confusion for students is reduced. In her conclusion, Leinhardt addresses the dilemma that arises from her research: that though a detailed mapping of expert procedures has been achieved, nevertheless further research is required to find ways to enable novice teachers to acquire these skills for themselves. However, some useful guidelines on strategies for improving practice for beginning teachers are provided from the results of this research. 2 Section A: Overview Chapter 1 The Place of Process-Product Research in Developing the Agenda for Research on Teacher Thinking David C. Berliner Introduction I was asked if I would discuss the place of, and lessons learned from, an older style of research on teaching, often called process-product research, in developing the research agenda for studying teacher thinking, a contemporary programme of research on teaching. The older research programme has often been linked with the behaviours tradition in psychology; the newer research programme is associated with cognitive psychology in particular, and the exciting new field of cognitive science in general. To carry out my charge, however, means sharing with you my own idiosyncratic view of the two apparently disparate research traditions or programmes. What I offer, then, is a very personal view of these issues in the hope that this will contribute to the dialogue about the future course of research on teacher thinking. Background My personal history of involvement in research on teaching began with studies of presumably effective teaching skills, using task analysis as our method, a procedure borrowed from industrial and human factors psychology. Armed with a list of teaching skills we began training teachers to act in ways we thought effective, using microteaching settings and videotape feedback (Berliner, 1969). Then, a few years later I worked on trying to understand teaching by building and empirically confirm- ing models of effective classroom teaching. We believed that our version of the Carroll (1963) model of school learning was so informative that we again worked on ways to train teachers so that they could acquire behaviours that were central to the model (Denham and Lieberman, 1980; Fisher and Berliner, 1985). We wanted teachers to think and act sensibly with regard to variables found to be important predictors of student achievement and attitude. Both of these kinds of research programmes are usually conceived of as squarely in the process-product tradition. They are often criticised as mechanistic in conception, leading to over-prescription for training, reflecting the kind of simple notion of how research gets into practice that is typical of behav- iourists. Now I study a group of special teachers – experts – and wonder what they see and remember about classrooms, how they attribute meaning to what they see and do, what kinds of experience they bring to bear on educational issues, how they reason about the future course of events in classrooms, and what explanations they offer for their actions (Berliner, 1986). This work is considered typical of the cognitive research tradition. Supposedly, I have reformed, overcoming my silly behaviourist ideas, which some of my friends saw as my central character defect. I recite my personal history only to provide a background for what I say next, that I personally have not shifted the goal of my research at all, and I believe I work in the same research tradition in which I have always worked. This apparent anomaly is the reason I stated above, that I had an idiosyncratic view. Let me explain. A Functionalist Psychology My work and the work of many others that was called process-product is not automat- ically in the tradition of Skinnerian behaviourism, nor does the new work that is being done necessarily fit clearly within the programme of cognitive psychology. Much of the old and new work is, I believe, in the finest tradition of a much older research pro- gramme in psychology called functionalism. The psychological research tradition called functionalism has its roots in Darwin, in the philosophy of pragmatism, and is generally conceded to have been started by John Dewey (and others), around the turn of the century. The Chicago school of psychology, as functionalism was sometimes called, was a loose confederation of people and ideas. The functionalists, therefore, were eclectic. Boring (1957) once labelled functional psychology as ‘what a psychol- ogist does when free of systematic compulsions’ (p. 559). They borrowed ideas and methods from all their contemporaries: Pavlov, Watson, Thorndike, and the Gestaltists. As applied scientists they were ‘pragmatists; they take what works and accept those systems which provide convenient terminology for new general principles’ (Boring, 1957, p. 570). Thus, the contemporary research programmes of behaviourism and cognitivism can supply the functionalists with concepts and methods for thinking about how to do the particular kind of work that they want to do. That work is always the establishment of relations between important characteristics of the environment and what human beings do and think about. What should be noted, however, is that one can borrow concepts and methods without taking on the ideology of the pro- gramme of research that is doing the lending. Functionalism was given its most articulate formulation by James Rowland Angell in his presidential speech to the American Psychological Association in the early years of the last century (Angell, 1907). It pre-dated, by six years, Watson’s famous paper that announced behaviourism and rejected the study of mental life (Watson, 1913). Watson, by the way, was Angell’s student, and a functionalist in outlook. His contribution to the evolution of scientific psychology, however, was to jettison mind as a necessary concept in the determination of functional relationships between an organism and its environment. Watson narrowed the new functionalism that Angell had announced, and by so doing, led psychology down a much narrower path than it needed to go. One consequence of the ascendance of the Watsonian view of psychology was that it paved the way for Skinner and the radical behaviourism associated with 4 D. C. Berliner