What Expert Teachers Do

Enhancing Professional Knowledge for Classroom Practice

John Loughran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136969676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How do expert teachers do it? How do they enhance student learning? How do they manage the dilemmas and tensions inherent in working with 25 different students in every lesson?

Internationally respected teacher educator John Loughran argues that teachers' knowledge of what they do is largely tacit and often misunderstood. In this book, he distils the essence of professional practice for classroom teachers.

Drawing on the best research on pedagogy, he outlines the crucial principles of teaching and learning, and shows how they are translated into practice using real classroom examples. He emphasises that teaching procedures need to be part of an integrated approach, so that they are genuinely meaningful and result in learning. Throughout, he shows how teachers can engage their students in ways that create a real 'need to know', and a desire to become active learners.

What Expert Teachers Do is for teachers who want to become really accomplished practitioners.

Part 1

Understanding Teaching and Learning

Part 1 of this book introduces ideas about teaching and learning that are designed to illustrate the importance of seeing both as complex and interwoven. Although it is important to be technically competent, as teachers we need to be able to move beyond this form of competence alone. There is a clear need for us to continue our development in ways that encourage us to see more deeply into the complex nature of teaching and learning. In seeing into teaching and learning from different perspectives, the importance of the relationship between teaching and learning stands out, and it is in this relationship that real understanding of pedagogy emerges—that is where our expertise resides. Expert pedagogues understand the relationship between teaching and learning in ways that inform their practice and enhance not only their students’ learning but also the growth of their own professional knowledge of practice.

1

Thinking about teaching

There are many skills in teaching that, when combined, form an important base from which initial teaching competence may be derived. Most of these skills require refinement and development over time because, in many instances, they are not a part of our normal patterns of behaviour. Therefore, as teachers, we need to make a conscious effort to pay attention to these skills to ensure that what we think we do in our practice is in accord with what we actually do, and that is not a simple task.

Some of these skills appear to be quite obvious, but there is a noticeable difference between being aware of certain behaviours and purposefully enacting them in our practice. That becomes even more difficult when the skills run counter to our normal behaviours. Therefore, as a starting point in thinking about our teaching, it is important to become a keen observer of our own behaviours, as well as the behaviours of others, in order to consciously develop strategies and approaches to teaching that will be conducive to high quality learning.

At the simplest level, such things as rhetorical questions, talking over others, put-downs (inadvertent or otherwise), ignoring and many other behaviours that we all display from time to time can become serious barriers to students’ open and honest engagement in classroom learning. Paying attention to such things in our own patterns of behaviour is important because the ability to moderate or change such behaviours requires ongoing effort and attention. In addition, recognising and responding to students’ behaviours is also essential because these behaviours are equally important in shaping the nature of the teaching and learning environment.

The following section briefly considers some of the technical skills of teaching that form a base for practice and also highlights how moving beyond skills alone matters in developing expertise in teaching.

Questioning

Questioning is a most important teaching skill that comprises many different components such as:

• question frequency;

• question distribution;

• how responses to questions are dealt with (by teachers and students);

• individual/group directed questions;

• teacher/student generated questions;

• question types (for example, open/closed; factual/thinking; convergent/divergent; evaluative; higher-order); and

• questioning techniques (for example, Socratic).

Clearly, the list of aspects of questioning is extensive and varies depending on how the list is categorised. However, as demonstrated by those components briefly noted above, that which may at first glance appear simple and obvious is much more complicated and demanding when considered more deeply, and from varying perspectives.

Each of the points above impact teaching and learning differently depending on who is doing the asking (the teacher, an individual student, a group of students) and the level of importance perceived to be attached to the question and answer. The level of confidence, knowledge and ability of the questioner and answerer also need to be considered. For example, how you respond to a thoughtful question from a normally quiet student may be very different from your standard response to a commonly inquisitive or talkative student. You may be taken by surprise by the question from a quiet student and therefore respond in a more conscious and knowing way than the automatic response evoked by a much more talkative student. Being aware of what we are doing is important in order to seriously monitor and adjust our own teaching behaviours. There is a major difference between knowing and doing and, in our daily work as teachers, we are continually making decisions about how to act, when and why, in our interactions with our students. Such decisions are often subconscious and over time become routinised. However, the nature of our decisions matters because so much of what we do directly influences our students’ learning.

For each of the categories of questioning noted above there are a range of skills that, when refined, make an enormous difference to the nature of our classroom interactions: teacher to student(s); student(s) to teacher; student(s) to student(s). Consider, for example, the frequency of questions. On the one hand, we can ask questions with such rapidity that answers are barely required, much less seriously valued. In such a situation our students soon learn how to respond and how much effort to put into their thinking. On the other hand, less frequent but more incisive questioning can demand very different behaviour from the same students. Of course the context also influences the underlying purpose of our actions and so what happens and why is not always for the same reason. However, as alluded to earlier, if our normal behaviour revolves around asking lots of questions then it can be very difficult to change that behaviour—it happens subconsciously or automatically. Therefore, despite knowing about questioning, thoughtfully applying that knowledge may not naturally follow in the doing of questioning. That is one reason why technical competence, or accumulating the base skills of teaching, in itself is not sufficient. Expertise is derived from purposely moving beyond knowing and into learning about consciously doing and doing with reason.

It seems obvious that if we ask a question and then respond positively only to those answers that are correct, then any of our students who are unsure or have different answers or want to ask a question in return will be less likely to engage in the process. We have all experienced at some time in our student career that embarrassing feeling of answering a question the wrong way and feeling foolish. Yet the skilled teacher knows how to avoid this situation by actively working to ensure that students honestly speak up and say what they think. The way an expert teacher reacts in such a situation may not be immediately noticeable to the casual observer because of the subtle aspects that make a difference and that do not necessarily stand out as being so dramatically different as to draw attention. When we respond to students by saying, ‘Yes, that’s right’ or ‘No, you’re wrong’, the language shapes our students’ expectations of how to act. Because those responses may be part of our normal language, then, without realising it or meaning it, our normal behaviour can limit our students’ willingness to contribute. It can also be very hard to see this in our own teaching but be immediately obvious in someone else’s.

Compare the situation above to when we are conscious and careful about how to respond to our students. When we work to withhold judgement our students are encouraged to contribute in ways that are not possible when they think that only the right answer is acceptable. We can do this in lots of different ways, for example by using phrases such as ‘Thanks for that, anyone else?’ or ‘Yes, that’s an interesting point’ or ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way myself, good thinking’ or ‘Does anyone have a different idea?’ and so on. Through being conscious of how to respond to students, our normal behaviours can be modified so that there are fewer impediments to students’ involvement in classroom discussion. The value of adjusting behaviours in this way can be further enhanced by allowing more students to respond before offering any comments or attempting to bring closure to the situation. Again, these simple changes in patterns of dialogue can have a dramatic influence on our classroom interactions, but they can be surprisingly difficult to implement because they are not the normal way we act.

It has been said many times that teaching is the only job where people ask questions about things to which they already know the answer. It is in this familiar pattern that the game of ‘guess what’s in the teacher’s head’ becomes ritualised. Unfortunately, despite experiencing that game as students ourselves, it is amazing how frequently teachers end up playing the same game in their own classrooms. As the discussion above highlights, being conscious of our own actions and how they are interpreted by others (students) is crucial to knowing and doing being more tightly aligned in practice.

Last century, Dan Lortie (1975) coined the phrase the apprenticeship of observation to describe how, through their years of schooling, students become accomplished observers of teaching. Yet, as Lortie noted, although students have seen lots of teachers teaching, they have actually only viewed teaching as a one-way process. They did not usually have access to the thinking and planning that underpinned their teachers’ practice; what they saw was largely interpreted as teachers telling or imparting information. Therefore, it is easy for us to inadvertently and subconsciously apply an approach to teaching that has been shaped by being an observer of teaching from one side of the desk. As students we did not necessarily pay serious attention to what underpinned what was happening and why, so in moving to the other side of the desk we can sometimes act from these superficial understandings of practice shaped by our apprenticeship of observation.

If we do not pay enough attention to how to develop and enhance our skills, knowledge and ability as teachers, our apprenticeship of observation, our default behaviours and the subtleties of practice can conspire to confuse understanding the technicalities of teaching and gaining the knowledge that underpins genuine expertise. For example, as a knowledge of questioning is developed, a false sense of confidence can emerge that undermines a recognition of the value and purpose in moving beyond these skills alone. This is partly because knowing and doing are not always recognised as different in our own actions (despite often easily seeing the difference in others) and partly because understanding the difference really requires us to look more deeply into our actions and to question what we take for granted. It is much easier to rationalise our behaviour and justify particular actions than it is to genuinely reflect on what is happening, how and why (Loughran, 2002). It can also be very difficult to see the things that are closest to us; we need some distance to be able to see more clearly, to be adept at creating different vantage points from which to see ourselves in action. This notion of seeing from different perspectives is what Schön (1983) described as reframing. Reframing is crucial to questioning what we take for granted in our practice and encouraging us to reach out beyond the technical to develop genuine expertise.

Moving beyond the technical: Wait time

There is a well-known body of research conducted in the mid 1970s and early 1980s into aspects of wait time (Fagan, Hassler & Szabo, 1981; Rowe, 1974a, 1974b; Tobin & Capie, 1980). Wait time is that period of teacher silence that follows the posing of a question (wait time I) as well as the corresponding period of time following an initial student response (wait time II). In an initial study Mary Budd Rowe (1974a) analysed over 300 tape recordings of classroom teachers and discovered a mean wait time I of one second and a mean wait time II of 0.9 seconds.

Her findings were interesting for many reasons but perhaps the most pertinent is that she had empirical evidence to support the assertion that when teachers ask a question, their wait time is so short that students do not really have sufficient thinking time to formulate a well-reasoned response. For most teachers this result is easy to explain because, despite the demonstrated short wait time in the study, our experience tells us that an answer is already forming in our students’ minds before we have finished asking the question, or that we are already looking around the classroom for likely respondents while we are asking the question. Therefore, we can easily justify a short wait time and in so doing, minimise the importance of that knowledge in our own practice. So an immediate problem is evident. Knowledge of wait time alone is not sufficient to change our normal wait time behaviour. Further to this, even when we acknowledge the importance of wait time we do not see that a lack of wait time exists in our own teaching; that is, it exists out there in other teachers’ practice but not in our own. Thus there is an inherent contradiction between our knowing and our doing. So how do we bridge that gap?

Rowe’s initial empirical results led to interesting research outcomes associated with the impact that changes in wait time can have when teachers provide at least three seconds of silent wait time after posing a question and similarly after a student response—doing so promotes learning as students have time to think about, reflect on and recall relevant prior knowledge. Increasing wait time encourages more thoughtful responses to the questions asked. Results showed that if the average wait time (both I and II) is extended beyond three seconds other improvements flow, which include:

• increased length of student responses;

• more frequent student contributions;

• increased logic of students’ explanations;

• an increase in the use of evidence to support inferences;

• an increase in the frequency of speculative responses;

• an increase in the number of student questions; and

• an increase in participation from more reluctant learners.

One obvious conclusion is that teachers, regardless of the teaching environment, should increase their wait time and decrease their air time. When this happens and it is consciously applied it has been found that teachers:

• increase their use of higher-level evaluative questions;

• decrease the percentage of teacher talk; and

• become more flexible in their responses.

Therefore, if wait time knowledge is directly and purposefully applied in practice, real...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Understanding Teaching and Learning
• Part 2: Knowledge of Practice in Action
• Part 3: Professional Learning
• Bibliography
• Index