The modernization of pedagogical education

Professor Harry DanielsDepartment of Education

University of Bath Bath

BA2 7AYh.r.j.daniels@bath.ac.uk

Responsive Teaching

“Monitoring children’s activity, remembering what one had said or done to prompt that activity and responding quickly to their efforts at an appropriate level is a demanding intellectual feat. Effective teaching is as difficult as the learning it seeks to promote.”

Wood, D. (1991) aspects of teaching and learning. In P.Light, S. Sheldon, and M. Woodhead (Eds) Learning to Think (pp. 97-120) London: Routledge

reciprocal teaching

• Summarizing: identifying and paraphrasing the main idea in the text.

• Question-Generating: self-questioning about the type of information that is generally tapped on tests of comprehension and recall.

• Clarifying: discerning when there has been a breakdown in comprehension and taking the necessary action to restore meaning (eg., reading ahead, rereading, asking for assistance).

• Predicting: hypothesizing what the structure and content of the text suggest will be presented next (from Palincsar and Brown 1988).

Scaffolding and its dangers• The recruitment by an adult of a child’s involvement in a

meaningful and culturally desirable activity beyond the child’s current understanding or control;

• The titration of the assistance provided utilising a process of ‘online diagnosis’ of the learner’s understanding and skill level and estimation of the amount of support required;

• The support is not a uniform prescription – it may vary in mode (e.g. physical gesture, verbal prompt, extensive dialogue) as well as amount;

• The support provided is gradually withdrawn as control over the task is transferred to the learner.

• ‘Adult wisdom does not provide a teleology for child development . Social organization and leading activities provide a gap within which the child can develop novel creative analyses.’ Griffin and Cole (1984) p.62

Recent pedagogic developments

• Cognitive apprenticeship• Funds of Knowledge• Communities of practice• Fifth dimension • Third space pedagogy

Stigler and Hiebert (1999) - The Teaching Gap

• Japanese classroom there are students and there is knowledge and the teacher serves as a mediator between them.

• German classroom there are also knowledge and students, but teachers perceive this knowledge as their property and dispense it to students as they think best.

• American classroom there are teachers and there are students, but the status of knowledge is uncertain.

Scientific and spontaneous concepts

SpontaneousConcepts

Scientificconcepts

•Impose on child logically defined concepts •Scientific concepts move ‘downwards’ towards greater concreteness•Evolve in highly structured and specialized activity of classroom instruction

•Concepts emerge from the child’s own reflections of everyday experience•Spontaneous concepts move upwards towards greater abstractness•Develops in child’s everyday learningenvironment

Mature concepts

Object

Concept

• a circle would be introduced through the examination of the shapes that may be drawn by placing one end of a piece of string at a fixed point and drawing with a pencil fixed to the other end whilst the string was taut. This contrasts with the introduction of a variety of shapes and sizes of circles to a pupil who is expected to understand the essence of the circle on the basis of this empirical ‘everyday’ experience. In the Vygotskian model the ‘scientific’ concept informs the design of the instruction.

A Critical/Constructive/Collaborative Pedagogy (Garrison & Archer, 2000)

• “…Knowledge is actively constructed by individuals or social communities.” Tynjala, 1999: 364

• Collaboration is essential for social validation of personal meaning making

• Critical thinking and metacognitive awareness enable learners to become more self-directed/autonomous

A Collaborative Pedagogy

• social learning space• In-class discussion• Collaborative group blog• Learners encouraged to share and draw

upon each others learning resources• Student-led teaching sessions• Group role-play

A Constructivist Pedagogy

• Pre-existing conceptions exposed at start of each class

• Issues presented as ‘live’ , and real-time engagement encouraged

• Learners encouraged to construct narrative for module in terms of their own learning journey– Individual learning journals– Culminate in assessed e-portfolio– E-portfolio as fusion of subject and self

• What kinds of teachers will we need?

Implications for organisations and individuals in:• Partnerships for Initial Teacher Education• Partnerships to prevent social exclusion• Partnerships for research

What kinds of teachers will we need?

•Government wants a modern labour force with flexible working practices responsive to changing national priorities

•Teacher educators want autonomous professionals with own expert knowledge and values able to make their own independent judgements

Furlong, J. (2002)Ideology and reform in teacher education in England, Educational Researcher 31 (6) 23-25

The risks of the romance of autonomy

• ‘Headless chickens’ and ‘hero innovators’

• Rigid systems and social practices in schools to protect potentially vulnerable teachers

• Schools are tightly bounded systems and we talk of individuals who do the ‘boundary crossing’ –

From autonomy and boundary crossing to flexible open networks

• Distributed leadership within schools (Spillane)• Distributed expertise beyond the school - Reconfiguring

children’s services in England sometimes seen as setting up local networks of expertise which include schools and which work together to support a child

• Calls for a more fluid collaboration e.g. to follow a learner’s developmental trajectory

• But – it is risky work outside safe ‘institutional shelters’

What kinds of teachers: skills needed in networks of distributed expertise

• Knowing what, how, why, when, where (i.e. established expertise)

• Knowing how to know who

• Knowing how to work with others to expand understandings of the problem

• Knowing how to work with others to respond to the problem

• Relational agency* an enhanced form of personal agency

Edwards, A. (2006) Relational Agency: learning to be a resourceful practitioner, International Journal of Educational Research. 43. 3. 168-182.

Partnerships for ITE: schools as closed systems*

• Increasing numbers of schools are working with more than one HEI

• Schools starting to set the training agenda – leading to consistency of experience within each school for students from different HEI - at the cost of consistency of experience within each HEI programme

• Schools are enthusiastic about ITE for school-centred reasons and are incorporating ITE into their systems

• Schools are operating as tightly bounded closed systems with some boundary crossing to HEI for ‘procedures and paperwork’

Schools as learning environments for student teachers

• Student teachers are easily integrated into schools which are keen to accommodate them

• Some school departments are knowledge-rich environments and the presence of students can stimulate this (Burn, Childs and McNicholl – ongoing)

• Some are not - instead student teachers are heavily reliant on individual mentors for whom ITE is not a primary concern (Boag-Munroe 2007)

From closed systems to open networks

• Local systems offer ‘stability, mutual trust and durability’ but can be limited and ‘exclusionary’. Instead we need to create systems which are ‘open’ and ‘develop mutual engagement and obligation’ (Sennett, 1999)

• Can we begin to think of ITE as local networks of distributed expertise which are focused on a student teacher’s learning trajectory?

Partnerships to prevent social exclusion: schools are safe bounded

systems If a child comes to school and they have come from a

dreadful home situation where there terrible violent crime and abuse and the parenting is poor or non-existent because of addiction problems and so on and so forth, the kid hasn’t had much…they can’t read and write to any standard that enables them to learn and access the curriculum. And it is true to say that it can be awful out there, but you don’t have to fail in school because we’ve got this for you, that person is there for you…..And I think it is a sanctuary. (teacher with responsibility for an extended school)

Schools need to move on from being school-centred to being client-centred

It is particularly important that extended schools do not fall into the trap of imposing professional views of what is ‘needed’ on the communities they serve.

• Cummings, C., Dyson, A. & Todd, L. (2004) Evaluation of Extended Schools Pathfinder Projects. RR 530. London: DfES.

Distributed expertise to prevent social exclusion: unsettling the boundaries

• Vulnerability to exclusion becomes clear when you look across several aspects of a child’s life

• Need several perspectives on the child’s life and co-ordinated responses which follow the child

• Schools cannot remain bounded systems which simply refer children on to other services – they need to become part of the solution to a child’s difficulties which is devised in partnership with e.g. social services, housing, health etc.

New skills for new forms of client-centred collaboration outside the safety

of schools• Looking outwards beyond the boundary of the school• Knowing how to know who• Knowing how to interpret a child’s trajectory with

others• Knowing how to align one’s responses to those

interpretations with the responses of others• Risky work – calling for (i) an enhanced sense of

professional confidence (not the same as autonomy) and (ii) a capacity to work with others

Some lessons for the content of ITE from research on multi-professional work

• Working with other professional training bodies – placements etc. to develop a professional multilingualism

• Focusing on fundamental professional values and the extent to which they are shared with other professionals

• Being clear about what teacher expertise is and where the boundaries lie

• Being confident about pedagogic and curricular expertise

Some lessons for the structure of ITE from research on multi-professional work

• Following the learner’s (i.e. student teacher’s) trajectory.

• An understanding of what different professionals are able to offer the learner and how the HEI contribution aligns with it.

• Acknowledging how learners may help to tailor the services they are receiving.

• Being confident about HEI-based expertise

Partnerships for research: developing education

…the more open and comprehensive the science community is, the more socially robust will be the knowledge it produces….socially robust knowledge can only be produced by much more sprawling socio/scientific communities with open frontiers.

Gibbons, M. (1999)Science’s new social contract, Nature 402 11-17.

Research collaboration as distributed expertise

• A focus on joint knowledge production

• Different expertise in different parts of the network

• Contributing to the professional knowledge base by making professional knowledge public

Hiebert,J. Gallimore, R. & Stigler, J. (2002) A knowledge-base for the teaching profession: what would it look like and how can we get one? Educational Researcher 31 (5) 3-15

What has been holding us back?• Teacher autonomy and the need for rigid systems in

schools• ITE partnerships were initially driven by accountability

and managed through politeness so systems were rarely disrupted

• Schools have been largely independent organisations in a purchaser provider environment (in England at least)

• Research relationships between HEI and teachers are often based on funding for assessed courses

• We’ve been thinking of partnerships and not networks of expertise