Thinking Through Teaching

A Framework for Enhancing Participation and Learning

Susan Hart

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136624179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This work offers a challenging approach to enhancing children's learning through a process of reflective analysis called "innovative thinking". Using practical examples drawn from a variety of learning contexts, the author: provides a framework for reviewing and reflecting on classroom experience, focusing particularly on those aspects of teaching and learning that are surprising, puzzling or worrying; outlines a series of steps that should help teachers generate new ideas and practical strategies to guide the development of their work; offers an approach which emphasizes strategies that can be incorporated into teachers' work with the whole class, and to the potential benefit of all children; and illustrates how "innovative thinking" can assist teachers in enhancing the learning and inclusion of individual children whose classroom responses give cause for concern.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

In fairness to children* Why thinking through teaching is so vital

Why is it so vital that teachers do take time to revisit and reflect on classroom experience? In this chapter, I explain the basis for the main theme of the book: that the process of thinking through teaching is one of the most important sources – if not the most important source – of teachers’ power to make a difference to children’s learning. I use examples drawn from real-life classrooms to illustrate that we cannot fulfil our essential responsibilities and commitments as teachers without an active commitment to the retrospective analysis of teaching.

The trouble with Costas

The first example is concerned with the consequences of judgements arrived at in the course of our moment-by-moment interactions with children. It illustrates how important it is, in fairness to children, that we take time to review and reflect on judgements made about individual children and their learning, especially when these reflect negatively upon children’s qualities and capabilities.

This incident took place in a Year 1 classroom, shortly before lunch time, when everyone was clearing up. The teacher involved, Emer, asked for a volunteer to take a game down the corridor to the library and put it on the table there. Unusually, six-year-old Costas was the first to raise his hand. Pleased at this initiative, Emer gave him the box. He chose a partner to go with him, and off the two boys went.

Five minutes later, realising that they had not returned, she went to the classroom door to look for them. To her surprise, there they were outside the door, still holding the box. Suppressing an impatient sigh (and thinking ‘why does Costas never listen to instructions?’), she asked what they were supposed to be doing with the game. No reply. She rephrased her question. Costas shifted about uneasily and started explaining how to play the game. He seemed to be totally confused. Emer explained again, slowly and carefully, what she wanted them to do, and this time, thankfully, the errand was successfully accomplished.

Emer’s first reaction was to log this interaction in her mind as further confirmation of her concerns about Costas, who, she felt, ‘never listens to instructions’ and ‘is in a world of his own a lot of the time’. As she walked down the corridor, though, after the lesson, and began to review the incident in her mind, a number of different interpretations started occurring to her. For instance, knowing that the Incey Wincey Spider game was Costas’s favourite, she wondered if perhaps, having seen the game and heard the start of her sentence ‘I want someone to …’, Costas had jumped to the conclusion that the teacher was inviting volunteers to play the game, not to put it away. It may not have been that he didn’t listen to her instructions, but that, in his excitement and desire to be chosen, he heard what he thought she was going to say. Indeed, since there was a lot of noise and bustle going on because of the clearing up, he may not have been able to hear clearly her exact words.

Emer realised that because she knew that it was lunch time, she had assumed that the children also knew, and therefore it did not occur to her that they might interpret her request as an invitation to play a game. But was this a reasonable assumption? Had it been explicitly stated? Young children often find it difficult to judge the passage of time, and clearing up is not necessarily a reliable guide. The library was a place where small groups of children often went with a teacher to play a game. And why would Emer have invited Costas to choose a partner to go with him, if the task was simply to put the game away rather than to play?

If this was Costas’s interpretation, it might explain why, five minutes later, he was outside the door with the box under his arm (waiting for Emer to join them?), and why he said what he did when Emer questioned him about what he was supposed to have done with the box. If he appeared ‘confused’ when answering Emer’s questions, this may have been an understandable response to a situation where he was getting the message that he had somehow failed the teacher, yet not knowing what it was that he had done. He was still trying to make sense of what was wanted of him from within his own frame of reference, but becoming more hesitant as he lost trust in his own understandings.

As Emer explored these alternative ways of interpreting what had happened, she found her initial, rather negative, judgements being transformed into an encouraging perception of Costas acting competently within his own frames of reference. It took Emer only a few moments to do the thinking described here. Yet doing so fulfilled a vital responsibility towards Costas, enabling her to question rather than reinforce a negative view of his learning. This changed perception, in turn, helped to bring about a subtle shift in the dynamics of her relationship with him.

This was, in one sense, a trivial interaction, but for Costas the consequences were far from trivial. If Emer had left her immediate interpretation unquestioned, it would have provided one more bit of evidence reinforcing her view of him as someone who ‘does not listen to instructions’ and is ‘in a world of his own’. These perceptions would have continued to influence Costas’s classroom experience and shape his identity as a learner within the class group. Fortunately for Costas, she took time to check out her judgement and consider other ways of interpreting what happened. In the process, a new understanding of the situation emerged, helping to free herself and Costas from what might otherwise have become a self-perpetuating cycle.

The conditions of classroom life are such that teachers are always under pressure. One of the skills that teachers develop is an ability to make rapid judgements about what is going on and what action is required, and to move smoothly to action much of the time without consciously deliberating alternatives. Yet, as this incident shows, reliance on intuitive judgement may not, in some cases, always serve children’s best interests. Once Emer had carried out this analysis, she realised how her pre-existing view of Costas had influenced her interpretation on this occasion. The interpretation that first sprang to mind fitted with what she expected to see and screened out many other features of the situation which needed to be taken into account in order to arrive at a fair judgement, and have confidence in using this to inform teaching.

As soon as Emer had a bit of space to think, she was able to generate a much more complex, contextualised understanding of what had occurred, which shed a quite different light on Costas’s response. Her considered analysis explored possible connections between Costas’s apparent failure to carry out the instructions and features of the context in which the request was made. She tried to remember what she had actually said, in order to see if there might have been some ambiguity or unnoticed complexity about the way in which she had phrased her instructions. She recalled the inevitable noise and bustle in the classroom at clearing-up time which might have affected the audibility of what she had said.

Her considered analysis also managed to pinpoint some assumptions about shared knowledge – the fact that it was lunch time – which may not in fact have been shared by Costas, and so contributed to the breakdown in communication. She brought to mind relevant knowledge of the child – his love of that particular game – which helped to appreciate how he might have been prompted to construe the situation differently from her. This in turn triggered a realisation of how the invitation to choose a partner could easily – and perhaps more logically – have been interpreted as fitting Costas’s meaning rather than her own. In achieving this insight, she needed to move outside her own existing frame of reference and try to see the situation afresh from the child’s point of view.

She also took account of the way that her spontaneous feelings of impatience may have affected both what occurred and the sense she made of it (she was tired, it was the end of the morning, she was suffering from a heavy cold). Although she took steps to check whether or not Costas knew what she had asked him to do, before making the judgement that ‘he had not listened’, she was aware of suppressing a sigh of impatience on finding the two boys outside the classroom door, and this may well have communicated itself to them. She realised that their lack of response might not be an indication that they did not know what they were supposed to be doing, but that they were reading her displeasure and trying to work out how to respond to that. They were responding not to her question but to its subtext, reflected in her body language. Moreover, the negative feelings may unconsciously have caused her to give emphasis to the more negative, rather than the more positive, readings of the situation, that she was readily able to bring to mind in her reflections outside the classroom.

Emer’s thoughtful reconstruction of these particular classroom events reminds us how cautious we need to be in the authority that we give to any interpretations of children’s learning, and especially those which construct the meaning of the situation in terms of deficiencies of the child’s characteristics or abilities. Our interpretations are constructed through a process of meaning-making which is highly complex and uncertain. The understandings that we reach depend upon the possibilities that we consider (whether consciously or intuitively), which in turn depend upon the limited time, information and resources available. As Emer’s analysis shows, the high speed at which interpretations and judgements have to be made in a busy classroom mean that the significance of what is occurring may be missed. It is therefore always possible that retrospectively we will discover a new meaning which shows children’s activities in a quite different light. Every act of making meaning simultaneously excludes alternative possibilities, and those alternatives may be lost from view permanently if we do not have time to go back and review our earlier thinking in the light of subsequent experience, or if it does not occur to us to question existing interpretations.

This is one important reason why, in fairness to children, it is so vital for teachers (to the extent that time and circumstances allow) to revisit their classroom experience – their judgements as well as their actions – and explore the implications for future work. All day long, in the context of fleeting encounters of this kind, teachers make judgements about the meaning of children’s responses that contribute to an accumulating picture about each child. We pay little attention to them, yet they help to shape our expectations and these expectations in turn guide our subsequent interactions with the child and the learning opportunities that are made available. Though we may never explicitly give voice to them, they are subtly communicated to children and help to shape the way that children perceive themselves as learners, and how they behave in response to our teaching.

The example of Emer and Costas shows that taking time – however brief – for detailed, systematic reflection on classroom experience can transform perspectives in ways that profoundly affect the course of children’s school experience. Moreover, teachers need not fear that the time invested in such retrospective reflection benefits only those individuals. After discussing this experience with colleagues, Emer resolved to stop and think every time she found herself making negative judgements about children’s responses in the course of ordinary teaching. Although the conditions of classroom life do not allow much opportunity for extended deliberation, she increasingly found that, when a child did something ostensibly ‘wrong’, she was able to suspend judgement for an instant and look at the response afresh from the child’s perspective. Gradually, this became quite a ‘routine’ response which she was able to incorporate flexibly into her teaching.

The benefit of hindsight

Classroom dynamics are so complex and children’s responses so unpredictable that it is impossible for teachers to foresee, in every case, how their well-intentioned words (instructions, suggestions, questions, requests and invitations) might be open to misinterpretation or simply construed in ways which they did not expect or intend. It is often only once the child has done something unexpected – and maybe undesired – that we are able to recognise and make explicit the tacit assumptions and expectations informing our thinking, and consider any possible mismatch between these and the interpretations arrived at by the child.

Another of the teachers in the Enfield research group (see Introduction p. v) reported an occasion when she was surprised to be presented by a Year 4 child with a story carefully written out in capital letters. She was surprised because her current assessment of the child’s development in this area was that he did have a reasonable understanding of the appropriate use of capital letters. She was about to revise this assessment and consider what action to take, when she suddenly remembered an interaction with the child, shortly before he had begun writing, which she had concluded by saying to him ‘Remember your capital letters!’

It occurred to her that the child might have written the piece in capitals because he thought that this was what the teacher was urging him to do. Maybe what he understood was ‘Remember to write in capital letters’. He then went on obediently to follow this instruction, even though it conflicted with what he knew and understood to be the appropriate use of capital letters in the context of ordinary writing. Teachers’ purposes are frequently not entirely transparent to children – maybe the piece written in capitals was less an indication of limited understanding of punctuation than an indication of the child’s willingness to defer to the teacher’s assumed purposes, even when these did not make very good sense to the child.

It was only once the child had responded by writing the piece in capitals that the teacher was in possession of the evidence that alerted her to the possible ambiguity associated with her original instruction. It was only then that she was in a position to reconsider what had occurred in the light of her knowledge of the child, and reshape her understanding accordingly. In this case, the memory of what she had said and its possible impact on the child’s response was recalled to mind, there and then on the spot, as she registered her surprise and reflected upon how to react. The realisation that she might have unwittingly misled the child influenced both the way that she responded to him at the time and her judgement about what follow-up might be needed.

Learning from experience

As well as revising spontaneous judgements, the retrospective analysis of teaching also provides the means for continually refining, adjusting and developing practice in the light of children’s responses. Through this means, we take steps to ensure that whatever can be done is done to enhance children’s participation and learning. This is particularly important when children do not appear to have learnt what we hope and intend that they will learn, as the following example illustrates.

Two teachers, Niv and Una (the co-authors of Chapter 8), were working with their Year 4 class on a history topic on the Tudors. Although they often struggled to find time to plan activities jointly, on this occasion they had managed to plan very carefully. The purpose of the afternoon’s activities was to encourage the children to explore why the Spanish Armada had failed. There was a lively story/presentation on video, followed by carefully structured tasks using plenty of visual support material. Children were actively encouraged to work collaboratively and talk ideas through together. Niv and Una felt that they had planned the activities in a way that would support the learning of every child, including and especially Asad – a boy of Bangladeshi heritage – whose learning was giving them some cause for concern. However, Asad did not respond as they had hoped to the activities. He took a long time to settle down and seemed distracted a lot of the time. He did not make use of the support provided (e.g. teacher modelling, working in pairs, opportunities for discussion); and an exchange with him at the end of the afternoon suggested that he had not grasped the main points of the lesson.

Niv and Una were disappointed that the activities had not been more successful in promoting Asad’s learning, and that he had not made more use of the support strategies available. They had assumed and expected that the children would have the opportunity to talk the ideas through orally as well as in writing; yet Asad had chosen to work alone. It was possible, of course, that Asad’s response that afternoon was affected by something quite unconnected with the task or learning context; but since he was responding to a situation that they were directly instrumental in creating, they saw it as their responsibility to think back carefully over what had occurred in order to see if there was anything that they could have done differently that would have been more helpful for Asad, and consider how they might u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Bibliography
• Index