BOOK REVIEWS 441

a suitably intricate treatment makingRobot Worlda thought-provoking and worthwhileread.

JOHN MAXWELLCentre for the Study of Curriculum and InstructionUniversity of British ColumbiaVancouver, BCCanada V6K 1R5

DOI 10.1002/sce.10050

The New Science Teacher: Cultivating Good Practice,by Deborah J. Trumbull, 1999.Teachers College Press, NY, USA. xix+ 121 pp. ISBN 0-8077-3874-3.

It is not easy, and hence not common, to do longitudinal studies of beginning teachersover a period of 6 years. For this reason alone this is an interesting and valuable book. Thisunusual study, with data from before, during, and after the participants’ teacher educationprograms, allows insight into the impact of college courses, teacher education, and thenteaching, on the teachers’ practice and beliefs about practice. The book offers a fascinatingpicture of “the struggles of the six new teachers to develop their own visions for themselvesas teachers and to survive and thrive in their diverse settings” (p. xv). Some flaws in theresearch and in the structure of the book mean that it did not do all that it set out to do.Nevertheless, it offers some important new insights and provides challenging data for bothteacher educators and system-level administrators to consider about the development ofgood teachers and of good teaching practices.

The study involved interviews of six biology teachers over 5 or 6 years (the total studylasted 8 years). Importantly, the interviews with each of the participants after they had begunteaching were accompanied by Trumbull’s full-day visits to the school. Her classroomobservations formed a basis for her subsequent interviews. It is not easy to maintain acoherent research program over such a long period; inevitably one’s research questions willchange and, as Trumbull points out, her ideas of what research is and how it should beconducted and reported changed during the 8 years of the project. She was aware that, asthe teacher’s instructor, she was an active participant in what she was researching and shewas concerned not to impose her views on their teaching practice while interviewing them.This concern made her reluctant to ask leading questions in the interviews. In addition tothis concern, she did not want to impose a single meaning to her data and has tried in thisbook to present them in ways that allow for multiple interpretations by different readers.Thus in the chapters on each teacher, Trumbull restricts her comments to statements aboutwhat the teacher said, did, and seemed to believe. She avoids drawing out any insights orconclusions that are common to the teachers and makes no connections back to the ideasthey were exposed to during their teacher education. While she presents some legitimatereasons for these decisions, as I argue later, they did weaken the value of the book for me.

The book has an excellent forward by Jean Clandinin and a preface that lays out somebackground and the goals of this research. Chapter 1 provides some context with descriptionsof where the six teachers are now working (two are no longer in schools). It also definesviews of learning and teaching that are salient to the study. These include the related areasof students’ alternative frameworks, conceptual change theory, and constructivism. These

442 BOOK REVIEWS

areas were central in a new teacher education program—Teacher Education in Science andMathematics (TESM)—that she helped design and that all six of her participants took. TESMgave student teachers experience in identifying alternative conceptions held by nonsciencecolleagues and was based around the view that learning to teach also involves conceptualchange. Tracking the changes (if any) in the six teachers’ views about learning was one ofthree frames that Trumbull used to report her data. The ideas that were central to TESM arecommon in science teacher education and I was interested in the opportunity to check thelong-term impact of such a program.

Trumbull’s second frame was the teachers’ views of the discipline of biology. InChapter 1 this issue is discussed in the light of reform movements in science education.In this discussion Trumbull explicitly raises some interesting problems and issues that sheargues are not recognized in many reform documents. Unfortunately, she makes no mentionof whether or how these ideas appeared in TESM—an omission that weakens the value forthe reader of the teachers’ comments on biology. Her third frame is the teachers’ views onthe role of laboratory work. The discussion of this in Chapter 1 is weak. There is a briefsynopsis of three contributions to the literature, but no analysis or synthesis of these, noindication of Trumbull’s ideas (which are important since she was the teachers’ instructor),and no indication that this issue was dealt with in TESM. Once again, these omissionsmake the teachers’ subsequent views in this area less informative for teacher educators. Theremainder of Chapter 1 outlines data collection, analysis, and how Trumbull’s views of theresearch approach she wanted to use evolved over the life of the project.

Chapters 2–7 contain the data from each of the six teachers (four women, all EuropeanAmericans). Each of these chapters groups much of the data under the three frames justdiscussed, but also includes rich contextual detail about their teaching situations in boththeir teacher education and their first 2 or 3 years of employment. The final chapter extractssome themes from what has gone before. This chapter makes a number of important points,although I was surprised that the insights from such a large project were discussed in onlysix pages. I feel that considerably more could have been extracted from such rich data.

The book does a number of things well. It provides six fascinating sets of data on thedevelopment, and sometimes lack of development of beginning teachers’ ideas during theirfirst few years of teaching as well as the pressures and concerns that were important to themduring this period. There were few commonalities: they all loved biology as a discipline,they were all critical of “recipe” labs from their own teacher education, and they all struggledwith various issues of assessment in their early years of teaching. Apart from this list, oneof the clear impressions from these chapters is just how different they were in what theysaw as important in teaching biology, the local pressures on them, and how their practiceevolved in response to local pressure. As Trumbull says, the new teachers were not inductedinto a general profession of teaching, but rather into the system that operated in their school.There is a powerful message to system administrators about the total lack of any impact ofnational reform initiatives on individual teachers. The rhetoric of reform documents about,for example, rethinking the way biology is presented as a discipline appeared to have had noimpact whatever on the practice or thinking of the six teachers. These top-down initiativesdid not touch the daily pressures on the teachers and their schools. Systems need verydifferent strategies if they are to have any impact on practice.

Another strength of the book is its demonstration of the difficulty that teachers have inarticulating the basis of their practice. This may be because the complex reality of practiceneeds richer and more sensitive frameworks than were available to these teachers, or (sadly)that teachers’ thinking about their practice is dominated by short-term, local pressures. Theseare not mutually exclusive alternatives and Trumbull argues for the importance of helpingteachers develop an “elaborated, personal vision” of what they want to achieve (p. 106).

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The current systems for teacher education and professional development do not provideways by which this may occur. The above statements do not mean that the book shows nodevelopment of the teachers’ ideas about and understandings of their practice over time.There was development, but much of it was reactive to local, short-term pressures, and onetheme is the extent to which the teachers had to limit the degree to which they reacted toout-of-class demands.

For me, a fascinating aspect of the data was the complete lack of impact on the ideas oflearning that were so central to the TESM course on what the teachers were doing and choseto tell the author. There was no reported use by any of the teachers of any of the framesthat were described in Chapter 1. The one reported impact of TESM was a desire to beinnovative, although what that meant was not clearly defined. Trumbull describes how oneof the things she has learnt as a teacher educator is that she needs to place a greater emphasisin her course on crucial issues of subject matter knowledge. This an important point; moreresearch is needed on what sorts of discussion of content and rethinking of content is neededin a teacher education program that is aimed at students with an apparently strong subjectmatter background.

The shortcomings of the book flow from the lack of any clear structure of ideas, withthe inevitably messy and complex data not being mapped onto any insights or argumentsthat connected the different teachers and connected their comments to what Trumbull knewwere the perspectives offered in TESM. Having made this criticism, an important part of theproblem is a consequence of a strength of the study—its 8-year span. As already mentioned,Trumbull’s ideas developed over that time and it is probable that what she asked the teacherschanged as well. Given this, it is not surprising that the data has what Clandinin called gapsand silences, and that Trumbull is honest about gaps in her interviews. There is no doubtthat too many leading questions too early could have weakened the validity of the study.However, the structure of analysing and reporting much of the data against the three framesthat she established, invites comparisons among the teachers. Unfortunately, making thesecomparisons requires a greater structure and commonality in the interview protocol thanappears to have been the case.

Although the study was not constructed as an evaluation of TESM, given the discussionabout this course in Chapter 1, I was surprised that Trumbull made no comment on anyaspect of what she saw in the data (only a fraction of which could be presented in this book)about the apparent impact of her course. She said in her preface that “at times I may havecarried this attempt at neutrality too far and prevented myself form asking probing questions”(p. xviii). I agree, and as a consequence, the book is less useful to teacher educators than itcould have been.

Finally, while the book is rich with one of the stated aims—illuminate the factors thathinder the development of young teachers—it contains less data and discussion of the(stated) complementary aims of identifying the factors and conditions that supported suchdevelopment. Nevertheless, the book’s great strength is the insight it gives into the influencesthat really affect how young teachers develop. It is a humbling book for those who wouldtry to direct change and reform.

IAN MITCHELLFaculty of EducationMonash UniversityVictoria, Australia 3800

DOI 10.1002/sce.10051