The teacher as a reflective decision maker: Facilitating active and engaged classroom practice
A seminar led by:
Dr. Dilys Schoorman
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, FL, USA
E-mail: dschoorm@fau.edu
Survey of attendees
Version #1
What would you want to be remembered for as a teacher? (Provide at least three ideas.)
Why is this important?
How would your students describe you?
(Think of the average students, the best students, the worst students. Would there be a difference in what they say?)
Describe your favorite teacher. Describe your worst teacher. In each case focus on how s/he taught, the impact on your learning and address why you rank the person as most/least favorite.
Think of the best lesson you have taught recently. Describe why you think it was good. What are the indicators of a good lesson in this case?
Think of the worst lesson you have taught recently. Describe why you think it was bad. What are the indicators of a bad lesson?
What institutional and social support do you receive in order to be a good instructor?
What institutional and social support do you lack that prevents you from being a better instructor?
Critical reflection on workshops
For many teachers the first response to encountering a problem of practice is to look for a manual, workshop or person that can solve it. Students refusing to learn? Buy a book on dealing with resistance to learning. Classes full of students with different backgrounds, expectations, ability levels and experiences? Enroll in that institute on dealing with diversity. Running discussions that are dominated by a handful of confident, articulate students? Go and see how that colleague across campus that everyone raves about runs her discussions.
All these resources for dealing with problems are useful and necessary. I do want to point out, however, that while reading books, attending workshops and watching colleagues can give you some useful insights and techniques that will help you in dealing with your problem, it is wrong to assume that at some point in these activities you will inevitably stumble on the exact answer to the problem you are experiencing.
To think this way is to risk spending a great deal of energy castigating ourselves for our inability to make externally prescribed solutions fit the problems we are facing. It never occurs to us that what needs questioning is the assumption that neat answers to our problems are always waiting to be discovered outside our experience.
A critically reflective teacher has researched his/ her teaching and his/ her students enough to know that methods and practices imported from outside rarely fit snugly into the contours of his/ her classrooms.
What does it mean to be a reflective decision maker as a teacher?
Schoorman:
In typical/ traditional practice teachers are preoccupied with “delivering” the content to students. Satisfaction comes from having “covered” the syllabus, and evaluation processes typically focus on student achievement, rather than that of the teacher. The “effort” in teaching is typically forward looking as teachers attempt to prepare for their next class, instead of looking back at their previous class. A reflective approach to teaching highlights the need to re-examine current and past practice and use the conclusions drawn to shape future practice.
Very little happens in the classroom that is not the decision of the teacher. What to teach that day, how it will be taught, the work / homework that students will do and how they will be evaluated is often decided by the teacher. This is true even within the context of working with a government regulated syllabus and examination, though such external pressures impinge upon some decision making.
Schon:
Reflective decision-making is a proactive approach to practice. The increasing complexity and pace of change in society presents a challenge to educators to devise new ways to respond to the needs of the education system. Educators must learn not only to reflect, but to reflect and respond creatively, actively and effectively to unfamiliar situations and demands, while ensuring that educational excellence continues to be the major focus of their work. [Schön, 1984].
Brookfield:
We teach to change the world. The hope that undergirds our efforts to help students learn is that doing this will help them act towards each other, and to their environment, with compassion, understanding and fairness. But our attempts to increase the amount of love and justice in the world are never simple, never ambiguous. What we think are democratic, respectful ways of treating people can be experienced by them as oppressive and constraining. One of the hardest things teachers learn is that the sincerity of their intentions does not guarantee the purity of their practice. The cultural, psychological and political complexities of learning, and the ways in which power complicates all human relationships (including those between students and teachers) means that teaching can never be innocent.
Teaching innocently means thinking that we're always understanding exactly what it is that we're doing and what effect we're having. Teaching innocently means assuming that the meanings and significance we place in our actions are the ones that students take from them. At best, teaching this way is naive. At worst, it induces pessimism, guilt and lethargy. Since we rarely have full awareness of what we're doing, and since we frequently misread how others perceive our actions, an uncritical stance towards our practice sets us up for a lifetime of frustration. Nothing seems to work out as it should. Our inability to control what looks like chaos becomes, to our eyes, evidence of our incompetence.
Breaking this vicious circle of innocence and blame is one reason why the habit of critical reflection is crucial for teachers' survival. [Brookfield, 1995]
Ferraro:
Reflective practice has also been defined in terms of action research. Action research, in turn, is defined as a tool of curriculum development consisting of continuous feedback that targets specific problems in a particular school setting (Hopkins & Antes, 1990). As such, it has become a standard concept in teacher education programs. The teacher educator as researcher and role model encourages students to put theories they've learned into practice in their classrooms. The students bring reports of their field experiences to class and analyze their teaching strategies with their mentors and colleagues. This collaborative model of reflective practice enriches students' personal reflections on their work and provides students with suggestions from peers on how to refine their teaching practices. …
Effective teacher professional development should involve more than occasional large-group sessions; it should include activities such as study teams and peer coaching in which teachers continuously examine their assumptions and practices. [Ferraro, 2000]
The nature of the educational process
From Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”
In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teachers existence -- but unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.
The raison d'etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.
This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:
* the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
* the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
* the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
* the teacher talks and the students listen -- meekly;
* the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
* the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
* the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;
* the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;
* the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;
* the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.
It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. [Freire, 1976]
Reflective decision making in curriculum implementation
Instruction:
Schon:
The best teacher will be who he has at his tongue’s end the explanation of what it is that is bothering the pupil. These explanations give the teacher the knowledge of the greatest possible number of methods, the ability of inventing new methods and, above all, not a blind adherence to ONE method but the conviction that all methods are one-sided, and that the best method would be the one that would answer best to all the possible difficulties incurred by a pupil. That is, not a method, but an art and a talent. And this is teaching in the form of reflection-in-action. It involves a surprise, a response to surprise by thought turning back on itself, thinking what we’re doing as we do it, setting the problem of the situation anew, conducting an action experiment on the spot by which we seek to solve the new problems we’ve set, an experiment in which we test both our new way of seeing the situation, and also try to change that situation for the better. [Schon, 1987].
Kohn:
The problem is that raising standards has come to mean little more than higher scores on poorly designed standardized tests. The more schools commit themselves to improving performance on these tests, the more meaningful opportunities to learn are sacrificed. Every hour spent drilling students to ace these exams is an hour not spent helping them become creative, critical, curious learners. Thus, the drive for high scores is tantamount to lowering standards--a paradox rarely appreciated by those who make, or report on, educational policy.
This transformation is taking place across the country. One example can stand for thousands: A widely respected middle-school teacher in Wisconsin, famous for helping students create their own innovative learning projects, stood up at a community meeting one evening and announced that he "used to be" a good teacher. These days, he explained, he just handed out textbooks and quizzed his students on what they had memorized. He had changed his teaching approach because he was increasingly being held accountable for test scores. The kind of wide-ranging and enthusiastic exploration of ideas that once characterized his classroom could not survive when the emphasis was on preparing students to take a standardized test.
Traditionalists typically believe we can make students learn by the sheer force of didactic instruction, by having the teacher stand at the front of the room, perhaps writing on the blackboard while disgorging information that everyone else in the room is supposed to lap up and copy down. The teacher tells; the students listen. And when they aren't listening, they're reading textbooks to absorb information. Then come the quizzes, compulsory recitations, and other ways of proving that they remember what they were told or what they read.
Here, education is conceived as transferring or transmitting facts, pouring knowledge into empty vessels. This transmission model is found both in first-grade classrooms devoted to the explicit teaching of phonics and in high school honors classes, where teachers slap transparencies on the overhead projector and lecture endlessly about Romantic poets or genetic codes. As a rule, the more that standardized tests are used (and their results emphasized), the more we would expect schools to adopt this approach to teaching students of all ages.
But cognitive scientists tell us that we're not passive receptacles, and that learning isn't just a matter of heaping new information on top of the knowledge we already have. It's a matter of coming across something unexpected, something that can't easily be explained by the informal theories we have already developed. To resolve that conflict, we have to reorganize our way of understanding so we can accommodate the new reality we've just encountered.
[Kohn, 2000].
Brooks & Brooks:
We must rethink the very foundations of schooling if we are to base our practice on our understandings of learners' needs.
One such foundational notion is that students will learn on demand. This bedrock belief is manifested in the traditional scope and sequence of a typical course of study and, more recently, in the new educational standards and assessments. This approach to schooling is grounded in the conviction that all students can and will learn the same material at the same time. For some students, this approach does indeed lead to the construction of knowledge. For others, however, it does not.
The people working directly with students are the ones who must adapt and adjust lessons on the basis of evolving needs. Constructivist educational practice cannot be realized without the classroom teacher's autonomous, ongoing, professional judgment. State education departments could and should support good educational practice. But too often they do not.
The people working directly with students are the ones who must adapt and adjust lessons on the basis of evolving needs. Constructivist educational practice cannot be realized without the classroom teacher's autonomous, ongoing, professional judgment. …
Opportunities for constructing meaning
Recently, we visited a classroom in which a teacher asked 7th graders to reflect on a poem. The teacher began the lesson by asking the students to interpret the first two lines. One student volunteered that the lines evoked an image of a dream. "No," he was told, "that's not what the author meant." Another student said that the poem reminded her of a voyage at sea. The teacher reminded the student that she was supposed to be thinking about the first two lines of the poem, not the whole poem, and then told her that the poem was not about the sea. Looking out at the class, the teacher asked, "Anyone else?" No other student raised a hand.
In another classroom, a teacher asked 9th graders to ponder the effect of temperature on muscle movement. Students had ice, buckets of water, gauges for measuring finger-grip strength, and other items to help them consider the relationship. The teacher asked a few framing questions, stated rules for handling materials safely, and then gave the students time to design their experiments. He posed different questions to different groups of students, depending on their activities and the conclusions that they seemed to be drawing. He continually asked students to elaborate or posed contradictions to their responses, even when they were correct.
As the end of the period neared, the students shared initial findings about their investigations and offered working hypotheses about the relationship between muscle movement and temperature. Several students asked to return later that day to continue working on their experiments.
Let's consider these two lessons. In one case, the lesson was not conducive to students' constructing deeper meaning. In the other case, it was. The 7th grade teacher communicated to her students that there is one interpretation of the poem's meaning, that she knew it, and that only that interpretation was an acceptable response. The students' primary quest, then, was to figure out what the teacher thought of the poem.
The teacher spoke to her students in respectful tones, acknowledging each one by name and encouraging their responses. However, she politely and calmly rejected their ideas when they failed to conform to her views. She rejected one student's response as a misinterpretation. She dismissed another student's response because of a procedural error: The response focused on the whole poem, not on just the designated two lines.
After the teacher told these two students that they were wrong, none of the other students volunteered interpretations, even though the teacher encouraged more responses. The teacher then proceeded with the lesson by telling the students what the poet really meant. Because only two students offered comments during the lesson, the teacher told us that a separate test would inform her whether the other students understood the poem.
In the second lesson, the teacher withheld his thoughts intentionally to challenge students to develop their own hypotheses. Even when students' initial responses were correct, the teacher challenged their thinking, causing many students to question the correctness of their initial responses and to investigate the issue more deeply.
Very few students had awakened that morning thinking about the relationship between muscle movement and temperature. But, as the teacher helped students focus their emerging, somewhat disjointed musings into a structured investigation, their engagement grew. The teacher provoked the students to search for relevance in a relationship they hadn't yet considered by framing the investigation around one big concept, providing appropriate materials and general questions, and helping the students think through their own questions. Moreover, the teacher sought and valued his students' points of view and used their comments to assess their learning. No separate testing event was required.
Students must be permitted the freedom to think, to question, to reflect, and to interact with ideas, objects, and others--in other words, to construct meaning. In school, being wrong has always carried negative consequences for students. Sadly, in this climate of increasing accountability, being wrong carries even more severe consequences. But being wrong is often the first step on the path to greater understanding. [Brooks & Brooks, 1999]
Evaluation
Brooks & Brooks:
When tests constrict learning
Learning is a complex process through which learners constantly change their internally constructed understandings of how their worlds function. New information either transforms their current beliefs--or doesn't. The efficacy of the learning environment is a function of many complex factors, including curriculum, instructional methodology, student motivation, and student developmental readiness. Trying to capture this complexity on paper-and-pencil assessments severely limits knowledge and expression.
Inevitably, schools reduce the curriculum to only that which is covered on tests, and this constriction limits student learning. So, too, does the undeviating, one-size-fits-all approach to teaching and assessment in many states that have crowned accountability king. Requiring all students to take the same courses and pass the same tests may hold political capital for legislators and state-level educational policymakers, but it contravenes what years of painstaking research tells us about student learning.
Classroom practices designed to prepare students for tests clearly do not foster deep learning that students apply to new situations. Instead, these practices train students to mimic learning on tests.
Constructivist teachers assess student learning in the context of daily classroom investigations, not as separate events. Students demonstrate their knowledge every day in a variety of ways. Defining understanding as only that which is capable of being measured by paper-and-pencil assessments administered under strict security perpetuates false and counterproductive myths about academia, intelligence, creativity, accountability, and knowledge.
We counsel advocacy for children. And vision. And courage.
Focus on student learning. When we design instructional practices to help students construct knowledge, students learn. This is our calling as educators.
Keep the curriculum conceptual. Narrowing curriculum to match what is covered on state assessments results in an overemphasis on the rote memorization of discrete bits of information and pushes aside big ideas and intellectual curiosity. Keep essential principles and recurring concepts at the center.
Assess student learning within the context of daily instruction. Use students' daily work, points of view, suppositions, projects, and demonstrations to assess what they know and don't know, and use these assessments to guide teaching.
Initiate discussions among administrators, teachers, parents, school boards, and students about the relationship among the state's standards, the state's assessments, and your district's mission. Ask questions about what the assessments actually assess, the instructional practices advocated by your district, and the ways to teach a conceptual curriculum while preparing students for the assessments. These are discussions worth having. [Brooks & Brooks, 1999]
Jackson:
The difference between a diploma and doomsday cannot possibly come down to a Byzantine trivial pursuit. That is, unless you can make the implausible case that six or seven years from now, when these students are trembling job applicants, their bosses will look them dead in the eye and actually ask:
"Hmmm, your resume looks interesting, but to get this job you must tell me why King Henry issued the Edict of Nantes, the purpose of the Treaty of Tordesillas, and the function of the lord of the estate in medieval Europe."
Those are real - or surreal - requests of students from last month's Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) 10th-gradehistory and social sciences test. Some educators let me read the full test last week.
Many parents, educators, and business leaders are already concerned about the more subjective aspects of the MCAS. Some have called for any high-stakes testing for graduation in 2003 to be limited to basic literacy and math.
The 10th-grade history test should call into question the political intentions of the entire test. At best, it is silly. At worst, it is racist.
The test, which focuses on "world" history, has 57 items. There are 12 slightly different forms of the test. Of the 57 items, about 40 refer to Europe, from the Byzantine Empire to the Cold War. Five are questions about capitalism. Only 12 are about the rest of the world.
For Europe, students needed specifics on wars, innovations, cities, and individual writers, economists, and artists. They had to know, "In 1429, which military commander led a French army that defeated the English at Orleans? A. Joan of Arc; B. Catherine the Great;C. Napoleon Bonaparte; D. Charlemagne."
In fact, the MCAS really should be renamed the Mutual Charlemagne Admiration Society. The founder of the first empire in western Europe after the fall of Rome was also in this question: "Many separate groups attacked Charlemagne's empire. The fiercest of these groups came from the north and was known as the A. Magyars; B. Visigoths; C. Huns; D. Vikings."
Students were given detailed maps of Eurasia and asked if the dotted routes represent the Crusades or the spice trade. About all students got for Africa was a bare outline of the continent and asked to point out the desert - where there are no people to have a history. Asians are reduced to shoguns, samurais, and the split between China and Taiwan. Latin America is but a colonial appendage of Europe, and women, other than Joan of Arc and Catherine the Great, are almost invisible. [Jackson, 2000]
Bibliography
Brookfield, S. (1995). Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Brooks, M. G. & Brooks, J. G. (1999). The courage to be constructivist. Educational Leadership, 57, (3), 18-24.
Ferraro, Joan M. (2000). Reflective Practice and Professional Development. ERIC Clearinghouse on Teaching and Teacher Education Washington DC. ED449120
Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New revised 20th anniversary edition. New York: Continuum.
Kohn, A. (2000). Unlearning How We Learn. Principal (Reston, Va.) 79, (4), 26-29, 31-32.
Jackson, D. (2000). At best, silly, at worst, racist: The Massachusetts 10th-grade world history test is a Eurocentric exercise in travel pursuit. Boston Globe, June 9, 2000.
Schön, D. (1984). Leadership as reflection in action, in T. J. Sergiovanni and J. E. Corbally (Eds.), Leadership and organizational culture, 64-72. Urbana Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Schön, D. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. Presentation at Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC.
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