The Psychology of Teaching and Learning in the Primary School

David Whitebread

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134612116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This book reviews recent work in psychology which sheds new light on important areas of concern to primary school teachers, providing clear guidelines for good practice. The Psychology of Teaching and Learning in the Primary School details the current controversies regarding the effective teaching of reading and numeracy, how to deal with emotional and behavioural difficulties, the best methods of assessing learning, as well as teaching children to think and develop their creativity.
It is a useful text for tutors and students on initial teacher training courses, and to teachers involved in professional development.
Each chapter contains an editor's summary, a list of further reading, a full list of references and activities to develop and deepen the readers' understanding in each area. At the same time, the book is written in an accessible style ideal for the non-psychologist and is well illustrated with practical classroom examples.

1 The nature of classroom teaching expertise

Donald McIntyre

EDITOR’S SUMMARY

By way of introduction, this opening chapter explores the evidence about the essential prerequisites for effective Primary school teaching. In doing so, it explodes some of the common myths. It emerges that there is no ideal personality for a teacher; people with very different personalities can be excellent teachers. There is also no one best style of teaching. The best teachers use a repertoire of various styles and strategies; it is not the strategies they use that make the difference, but the skill with which they use them. Being a person (rather than a machine) turns out to be vital. Good teaching is complex and relies upon the sensitivity and empathy of which only a person is capable. It is the capacity for fluent, insightful, almost instantaneous, only half-conscious intuitive judgement, like that of the artist or highly skilled craftsman, which is most characteristic of the highly experienced and expert classroom teacher.

Introduction

What is ‘teaching’? Teaching can be the most exciting and challenging of all human enterprises, or it can be soul-destroying drudgery. Which it is depends on how one interprets the task. At its worst, teaching is the communication to learners of what A. N. Whitehead (1929) memorably described as ‘inert ideas’, slabs of knowledge which the learners are asked to accept and to remember without questioning it and without using it for any purposes of their own. But teaching can be more positively seen in many different ways.

One splendid tradition of teaching stems from the classical Greek philosopher Socrates, who thought of teaching as the art of asking good questions, and apparently practised it that way. On one hand, Socrates believed that by being asked to consider successive good questions, any learners could be brought to reveal the truth to themselves. Plato, in the Dialogue Meno, represents Socrates as, for example, teaching Pythagoras’ Theorem to a slave boy solely by asking him questions. But Socrates’ ‘good questions’ were not simply aimed at getting people to learn: they were aimed at leading people to search for the truth, a potentially unpopular activity in any society; and so it proved for Socrates, since in the end he was condemned to death for ‘corrupting the youth of Athens’. A modern example of this excellent tradition is the book by Postman and Weingartner (1971), Teaching as a Subversive Activity, in which they urge schoolteachers to replace the teaching of inert ideas by the teaching of such skills as ‘crap-detecting’.

Another very valuable tradition of teaching was first clearly articulated in the eighteenth century by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau described how he would ‘teach’ his pupil Emile until late adolescence entirely through Emile’s learning from experience and from the ‘natural’ consequences of his actions. One vivid model which he used was that of Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: Emile, like Robinson Crusoe, was to discover for himself what he needed and how he could best meet his needs. In this same tradition are the nineteenth-century theorists, Pestalozzi and Froebel, with their emphasis on natural development, on the natural learning of children from their mothers as the model for at least the early stages of schooling, and on learning through play.

Probably the person whose ideas about teaching are currently most influential is the psychologist Vygotsky (1962, 1978), whose pioneering work in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-twenties and thirties became well-known in the west only during the eighties. For Vygotsky, human learning is inherently a social process, and happens most effectively when the learner is jointly engaged with others, such as a teacher, notably on tasks which he or she understands and can usefully engage on in that collaborative setting, but would not be able to cope with on his or her own. Vygotsky talked about these tasks as being in the individual’s zone of proximal development, which is not only of course specific to the individual learner but also constantly changing. In articulating this powerful idea, Vygotsky thus not only gives us valuable guidance but also reminds us how challenging the task of teaching is.

What is the common element across such different ideas about teaching? Little more, perhaps, than the common goal of helping others to learn as effectively as possible. Teaching is one of the most pervasive of human enterprises, encompassing as it does any activity designed to facilitate learning. Teaching is done in many ways, for example through explaining ideas, through showing people how tasks can be done, through making and enforcing rules, through giving people the opportunity to see things for themselves, or to discover patterns, or to suffer the consequences of their actions, or through commenting informatively on people’s performances. Similarly, we are all teachers, in that we all at one time or another try to help others to learn: parents, brothers and sisters, friends, colleagues, officials in every context that is new for us (e.g. transport systems, places of entertainment, government offices) and even casual acquaintances are among those who teach us; and in the same way we teach diverse others in different kinds of contexts. It is quite an interesting exercise to reflect on whether any valid generalisations can be made about ‘teaching’ across the whole enormous range of things that are taught, of people who are taught, and contexts in which teaching occurs. It is difficult to think of any beyond the definition: what we mean by ‘teaching’ is acting so as to facilitate learning.

In most societies, however, there have been people, the holders of certain positions, who have had a formal position as teachers of what has been viewed as especially important knowledge. Often these people have been priests or occupants of other religious positions. There have too been professional teachers in many societies: in Europe, for example, the history of professional teaching goes back for over two and a half millennia. (It is worth noting that almost universally most teaching has been done by parents and other family members, but that this teaching has generally been taken for granted: it is the additional specialist teaching that is formally recognised.) Even professional teaching, however, has been very diverse in its purposes, its content, its methods, the contexts in which it has been carried out, and also in the nature of the people taught, although on the whole these have been relatively young people.

It is only relatively recently – during the last two centuries – that what we are currently accustomed to has become the norm. Aspects of this norm include the development of national education systems, the assumption that education in these systems will be through attendance at schools, and the aspiration that almost all young people should attend these schools for a number of years. For our purposes, an even more fundamental and striking feature of this recently established norm is that young people (pupils) are organised in classes and that the teaching of these classes is conducted in classrooms. That classroom teaching has become the norm makes it a little easier for us to generalise about professional teaching in schools: it seems likely that classroom teaching expertise has much in common across different contemporary education systems. Yet it is also important to remember that classroom teaching is a historical phenomenon: it will not last for ever; indeed it may quite possibly give way, even during the careers of some of those currently learning to teach, to other and possibly better ways of organising teaching and learning in schools.

Classroom teaching and the expertise required

This chapter is concerned with the nature of the expertise required for good classroom teaching. Gaining a general understanding of the nature of that expertise seems an important first step for those who wish to acquire it.

Classroom teaching is a complex and very demanding professional activity (see Figure 1.1), but it is also almost unique among professional activities in that everyone spends a lot of time as a child in classrooms with teachers. In particular, those who wish to become teachers have already spent many years in what has been called an ‘apprenticeship of observation’ (Lortie 1975); and this apprenticeship of observation seems likely to have exercised a major influence on most people’s decisions to become teachers and on their preconceptions about what teaching will involve. In many respects this must be helpful: beginning teachers have a better idea of what they are letting themselves in for than do entrants to most professions. On the other hand, there is a danger that prospective teachers (like other members of society) may be inclined to take the expertise involved in classroom teaching too much for granted. Because one is so familiar with it, what teachers need to do may seem obvious, whereas in fact it is much more complex than is apparent to the observer. Here as in other contexts, skilled performances tend to look simple to observers, just because they are so skilled.

Figure 1.1Teaching a class of Primary school children is a complex and demanding activity requiring human sensitivity and empathy

This chapter will examine several different views of the nature of classroom teaching expertise, all of which have some claim to plausibility.

Personality

‘Teachers are born not made’; ‘She’s a natural teacher’ ‘It’s all a matter of personality’. Statements like this are common whenever classroom expertise is being discussed, in school staffrooms as much as anywhere else. There would therefore seem to be good grounds for taking this view seriously. Is it the case then that being a good teacher is a matter primarily of the kind of person one is? The question is one that has intrigued many educational researchers, and still does, but the answer was pretty well established many years ago. Such authoritative reviews as that by Getzels and Jackson (1963) of the extensive research in the area already published then concluded that:

● teachers vary in personality about as much as the whole population does

● effectiveness of teaching (however measured) is unrelated to personality.

More recent research has not led to any different conclusions. There are among classroom teachers those who are extroverts and those who are introverts, those primarily interested in abstract ideas, or in people, or in concrete things, those who tend to be anxious and those who tend to be happy-go-lucky, and all can be excellent teachers. Why then does the idea persist that personality is so important?

Partly, no doubt, the answer is that the kind of person one is certainly tends to be reflected in the kind of classroom teacher one is. And of course some observers will find certain kinds of personality and the related kinds of teaching more or less attractive. Different people certainly teach in different ways, but there are no good reasons for believing that the quality of teaching is related to teacher personality.

A more fundamental reason for the persistence of the belief that personality is important is that it is undoubtedly true that people are important as teachers. The fact that as a classroom teacher one is a person matters greatly in at least three ways.

● Drawing on one’s personal experience is often very important in making things interesting and comprehensible to one’s pupils; more generally, being able to understand and empathise with one’s pupils’ experiences is crucial in helping them to make sense of things.

● Sensitivity to emotional aspects of learning is also important: the frustrations, efforts, successes and excitements of pupils need to be recognised and sympathised with.

● Human intelligence is important in working out what’s happening in a classroom and in deciding what to do.

What matters, then, is not the kind of person that one is, but rather the fact that one is a person with experiences of one’s own, with feelings and capacity to empathise, and the ability to think intelligently and creatively about what one is doing. These are fundamental to classroom teaching.

It is important that beginning teachers should not believe that in order to become good teachers they have to become a certain kind of person. On the other hand, they should believe and remember that the full range of their humanity, all their experiences, all their sensitivity, all their talents and all their intelligence can...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 The nature of classroom teaching expertise
• PART I Organising the learning environment
• PART II Teaching the curriculum
• PART III Educating all the children
• Index