Have Five Years of Self-Study Changed Teacher Education?: Artifacts of our Personal Development as Teacher Educators Mary Lynn Hamilton, University of Kansas, USA Vicki Kubler LaBoskey, Mills College, USA John Loughran, Monash University, Australia Tom Russell, Queen's University, Canada Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices Second International Conference Herstmonceux Castle. East Sussex, UK. August 16-20th, 1998

Introduction

In this presentation we provide what we consider to be the evidence of our learning about our teaching through self-study. This paper is one artifact of that evidence but it is through our presentation and the conference that our emerging understanding, developed through ongoing interaction with our colleagues and students, might best be expressed. Learning through self-study is a process with no real end-point. For each of us the journey is different and, although our paths continue to cross in many ways, they are also divergent as issues and experiences influence our understanding of teaching and learning about teaching differently.

John

I see the process of self-study as closely linked to that of reflection. Although I have argued that these are not the same process (Loughran and Northfield, 1998), it is important to recognise that one underlying purpose of both processes is consistently to the fore: developing a better understanding of particular pedagogical situations .

I believe that one of the most important shifts in my teaching practice is bound up in the ability (and concurrent need) to articulate the principles of practice that underpin my teaching. Student-teachers do not learn about teaching by being told about it, nor do they learn about teaching simply by experiencing it. They learn about teaching by being involved in a range of activities and possibilities, through reflection on experience and by being able to question that which they experience and those with whom that experience is associated. In particular, there is a need to be able to make clear why a teaching experience is organised in a specific way, how that changes as the experience unfolds, and how a pedagogue adapts, reconsiders and mediates the teaching and learning environment. In terms of teaching about teaching, this development of a better understanding of one’s own purpose for teaching a particular topic in a particular way is perhaps an extension of, or a different approach to, Shulman’s (1986) notion of pedagogical content knowledge.

Therefore, the principles of practice that I am beginning to articulate and better understand in my own practice of teaching about teaching are evidence of my learning through self-study. These principles of pedagogy have been outlined in detail (Loughran, 1997) so I do not pursue them in detail here. I simply summarise them for consideration by others. However, an important development in these principles is how they are influenced by the learning of the student-teachers with whom I work.

Relationships

Teaching is about relationships, and knowing individuals and the ways they interact and develop within their group is important. Through teaching, relationships are important in allowing the teacher and students to extend their thinking and the relationships important in teaching continually evolve.

Trust

Trust is an important element of teaching about teaching. In the teaching-learning environment, I need to be able to trust that, regardless of the participants’ previous learning experiences, they might genuinely be able to be encouraged to approach learning as a collaborative venture. However, this requires an acceptance of shared responsibilities in learning and therefore necessitates a joint trust from both the teacher’s and learners’ perspectives.

Independence

A learner’s independence is important in shaping the extent to which they choose to take up the opportunities possible through their interactions; a lack of independence encourages convergence of learning rather than a breadth of understanding.

Purpose

Teaching needs to be purposeful and this is important from both the teacher’s and the learners’ perspectives.

Engagement/Challenge

An important element of pedagogical purpose is to encourage engagement and challenge in learning, to make possible an active and persistent commitment to understanding subject matter.

Modelling

Teaching student-teachers about teaching hinges on a need for teacher educators to "practice what they preach." If student-teachers are to understand a particular teaching strategy, they need to experience it as learners and as teachers, not just hear about it.

Self-study has been important in helping me come to recognize the value in knowing about, and articulating, my pedagogical knowledge. Knowing and understanding teaching is at the heart of teaching learners of teaching. It offers a touchstone to access reasoning and purpose in pedagogy.

 

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Mary Lynn

As a public school teacher and as a teacher in higher education, I have attempted to be the best teacher I can be. Critical reflection, note-taking, and discussions with colleagues about successful/unsuccessful experiences have always been my tools-of-trade. However, an experience with eavesdropping turned me more dramatically toward an even more careful examination of my teaching. Within the first few minutes of new career as an assistant professor at the University of Kansas, I overheard a young woman say quite passionately that her professors never enacted their beliefs. From her perspective, the university classroom was riddled with inconsistencies. That unknown student inadvertently triggered my deliberate inquiry into my own teaching -- in what ways do my actions in the classroom conflict with beliefs? How can I best convey my true "self" as I teach? How can I monitor the ways in which I do or do not do that?

Complimenting this individual work, I have also focused on my self-study at the institutional level. In this broader work, I have examined myself as a teacher educator and my role as a member of the academy. My work with the Arizona Group, like my work in my classroom, has addressed my desire to remain true to myself -- to converge my theory with my practice, my word with my action. Inspired by the works of Friere and hooks, I have attempted to live my ideas and model my beliefs.

What are the artifacts of my personal development? I will offer four examples of my development as a teacher educator and speculate on the ways they have influenced teacher education in my world.

Example 1I began doing my self-study work with my attention on a very microscopic view of teaching. I asked myself "how can I teach about teaching if I have not studied what I do?" I also asked how I could best reach and teach my students. Early in my career as a teacher educator I recognized the importance of aligning beliefs and actions in the classroom. As I did that I saw that teaching evaluations and my own comfort level in the classroom improved. These teaching evaluation quantitatively demonstrated improvement. More importantly, I notice shifts in my language about teaching and in my students' language about teaching and learning. My clues included an elaboration of ideas and a development of concepts in ways not previously done (Hamilton, 1991).

Example 2As I developed as a teacher educator, I became aware of both the political nature of teaching and the political expectations placed on a teacher educator. At this point my interest in self-study took a broader focus to include both how my students and I worked together in the classroom and how my teaching and my view of teaching fit within the context of the university. Although my teaching continued to be a highlight for me as I redesigned courses to become more student-centered and more focused on issues we identified as important, my experience within the academic community faltered (Hamilton, 1994).

During this time I received veiled threats about my work in the schools because work in the schools was not considered scholarly. With a lack of support at my institution, I found support among my larger community. My work, like the work of others questions the status quo of teacher education. We expressed our dissatisfaction with the way things were and challenged the traditional teacher education scholars to think of teaching differently - specifically to focus teacher-generated knowledge and the self as teacher -- not the distanced other (Hamilton, 1995).

Example 3As I gained faith in the rigors of self-study and critical reflection, I began to think more globally. At this point my relationship with students, my tension within the university, and my desire to be a member of the multi-layered, multicultural world merged. I asked myself a variation of my original question "how can I address issues of race, class, and gender without confronting my own racism?" Was this or wasn't this an area where my beliefs aligned with my actions? My struggle to confront these issues have woven my classroom, university, and global knowledge together (Hamilton, Anderson, & Guidry, 1998).

Example 4My final artifact is my acceptance of the Directorship of Teacher Education at my institution. While I may not have dramatically influenced the current Teacher Education Program, self-study will play an important role in the future Teach Education Program. In this example, I illustrate how my thinking has developed in a global capacity (Hamilton, 1998).

 

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Tom

Self-study has transformed my own teaching, while also contributing to a major change in the B.Ed. program structure at Queen's University. When I became interested in the term "self-study" in 1992-93, I was a "somewhat successful" teacher of secondary science methods in a preservice teacher education program that could only be described as traditional. In hindsight, I realize that I had been struggling for years to overcome the "experience barrier" that separated me from those I wanted to help become science teachers. My class in 1992-93 seemed so lethargic that I postulated seven barriers to learning to teach--assumptions about how one learns to teach that many of those individuals seemed to display in one form or another.

As I look back to 1992-93, it is hard for me to believe that it has only been five years. I live in a very different world, thanks largely to self-study. As I work my way toward evidence of change, let's begin with a reference point: Teacher education is the most transparent of professions. Every moment of every class involves teaching about teaching. Living contradictions abound, and are immediately obvious to all. But all teachers love to believe that their good intentions will carry the day. At Queen's University we are discovering that they do not. Most of our teaching is now done in front of individuals who have 14 weeks of teaching experience. No longer can we be successful using chalk-and-talk to put down chalk-and-talk as a method of teaching. Those we teach now have pedagogical equivalent of X-ray vision, and they are expecting "Superteacher" at the front of every classroom.

Self-study has enabled me to understand my teaching and my students as never before. When the term "self-study" was gaining attention and interest, I had taken myself back to the secondary school physics classroom to better understand the work I was helping people learn. Now I had a better conceptual framework for viewing both my own development as a teacher and the development of those learning to teach. I also began teaching an M.Ed. course in action research, and through successes and failures, self-study became the key to better understanding.

Self-study and a research project with a colleague led us to begin speaking of the "authority of experience" (Munby & Russell, 1994) as a way of including personal experience (along with theory, research, and the experience of others) in accounts of learning to teach. Soon after, our faculty was swept up in a new dean's leadership of the construction of a new preservice program structure, one that held the potential for a better sense of partnership with schools as well as better use of faculty time in a period of major financial constraints. Early extended experience would be the cornerstone. At the same time, my work with John Loughran led me to speak of my own work with teachers in phrases such as "how I teach IS the message" (Russell, 1997).

I can now credit self-study with enabling me to develop the following pedagogical principles that were present in my teaching in 1997-98 but very absent in 1992-93.

• Build on and trust in their extensive early teaching experiences

• Build a community in my classroom (networks and relationships are everything)

• Every class includes a significant experience, with implications for how we teach

• Gather backtalk often and distribute it freely

• Find a critical friend in your class, and share personal notes for comments

• Identify a few central themes, post visual cues to each, and link to them as often as possible

• Replace lectures with notes on a website; use classroom time for ¨experiences and discussions

• Encourage and reward self-directed learning

• At the end of the course, ask students what they think you learned from them

 

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Vicki

I attended the first meeting of the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices Special Interest Group because I assumed it would be a natural for me. After all, my primary research study, my dissertation, which I was then in the process of transforming into a book (LaBoskey, 1994), had been my own exploration of the nature and stability of reflection in the student teachers enrolled in the teacher education program I was administering. What I did not realize at the time, but came to understand very quickly, was that that work was not as much in the realm of self-study as it might have been because I did not examine my own role in the process.

Virtually all of the research I have done since then has been designed to help me learn about my own teaching. The driving force behind my work has been an effort to improve the ways in which I teach about teaching to prospective and inservice teachers. In this presentation, I would like to share four examples that I believe represent this diversity of both aspect of practice and means of discovery.

The first is a radical change in the structure of a course assignment for the elementary credential candidates in our program that came about because I was becoming more and more dissatisfied with the outcome. I engaged in a self-study of the process (LaBoskey, 1998c) and discovered that there was a mismatch between my goals and my strategies as evidenced by the differences in students' papers and in the nature of the conversations in which they engaged.

The second example is a more gradual transformation of an aspect of my pedagogy. For the last several years I have used a heuristic in my elementary curriculum and instruction course that is designed to help the student teachers carry out the process of lesson and unit planning. A visual comparison of the heuristic as it appears in my yearly lesson plans provides evidence of change (LaBoskey, 1998b).

The third instance is on a larger scale; it involves a change in program philosophy that resulted from self-studies my colleagues and I did of our individual and combined efforts with regard to our guiding principles. During the 1996-97 academic year, our teacher credential program had been structured around five fundamental principles. Throughout that year we engaged our student teachers in a number of evaluative activities in order to help us determine how well we were doing with regard to these goals. We learned that, despite our emphasis on constructivist learning theory, our student teachers were not as strong as we wanted them to be in the teaching of powerful subject matter knowledge to their students. As a result, we added a sixth guiding principle this year which had a direct impact on both what we taught and how we taught it. Our practices as a result of what we learn (Galguera, 1998; Kroll, 1998; LaBoskey, 1998b; Richert, 1998)

The fourth and final example is one of non-change, involving a core assessment instrument. For several years now I and one of my colleagues have used an open-ended portfolio project as the culminating reflective experience of the program. Through numerous self-studies (LaBoskey, 1995; LaBoskey, 1997; LaBoskey, 1998a) I have found that the portfolios are very beneficial to the student teachers in a variety of ways. As a result, I have continued to use them in the same way each year; now one of my other colleagues is moving toward using the same kind of portfolio assignment with her group.

Self-study has allowed me to learn much from my practice that I could not have learned otherwise. It has provided a substance and detail to my daily reflections that permits me to understand more fully the nature of my students' learning. It has encouraged me to articulate, examine, and on occasion, re-define the fundamental principles that guide my teaching. It has convinced me that self-study is the most powerful instrument available to us in our efforts to transform teacher education.

 

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Conclusion

In this paper, each of us set out our learning about teaching through self-study. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that there are real outcomes from self-study, outcomes that are important in our teaching about teaching to prospective teachers.

References

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