Technical Series 89-1- The Teacher Education and Learning to Teach Study: An occasion for developing a conception of teacher knowledge.
Abstract
How does teachers' knowledge of teaching mathematics and writing to diverse learners change over time, particularly during and after formal teacher education programs? To address this question, researchers at the National Center for Research on Teacher Education (NCRTE) had, first, to develop and articulate a conception of teacher knowledge and, subsequently, devise ways of tapping such knowledge.
Recognizing that knowledge of what Schwab called the "commonplaces of teaching"--subject matter, learners, learning, and context--is a static formulation, the authors argue that the core activity of teaching and, hence, the proper object of study is pedagogical reasoning. In thinking about a specific activity or task, such as planning or responding to pupils' questions, teachers weave together their understandings of the various commonplaces in figuring out what is going on and what they should do. To track changes in teachers' knowledge involves examining changes in both how their understandings of the individual commonplaces change and how they bring these together in responding to instructional situations.
Using this framework for teachers' knowledge, NCRTE researchers developed three types of instruments: a self-administered questionnaire, a structured interview, and an observation guide. The instruments are distinctive because the teaching and learning of mathematics and writing are the context for most items. Using subject matter as context derives from the premise that teaching means teaching something to someone. The questionnaire, consisting principally of conventional Likert-scale and forced-choice items, is designed to tap teachers' beliefs about the commonplaces as well as their procedural and propositional knowledge of mathematics and writing. Scenarios built around tasks teachers commonly undertake in their mathematics and writing classes--such as responding to pupils' novel ideas, writing, and seatwork--constitute the interview. By examining how teachers respond to various scenarios across the entire interview as well as across time allows the researchers to discern patterns in teachers' reasoning and how these do or don't change over time. The observation, finally, is intended to collect information on aspects of teachers' knowledge to which the questionnaire and interview are not particularly sensitive: teachers' dispositions to act in particular situations such as ways of treating differences among learners and how they manage to "pull it all together" in the classroom.
The authors point out the shortcomings of their approach: the thinness of their data for the kinds of rich descriptive profiles of learners originally envisioned as a primary product; the struggle to develop credible ways of tapping participants' views of differences and the role of such differences in teaching and learning; the strictures imposed by the longitudinal design; and the difficulties of untangling the individual strands of teachers' understandings, given the intertwined, confounded nature of teacher reasoning. These shortcomings seem to point less to problems with their conceptual framework of teaching reasoning and more to flaws in the research design and instruments.
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