Understanding the world of others is a challenge: Exploring teacher thinking

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present and describe approaches aimed at gaining access to teacher thinking, their attitudes and beliefs about their complex profession. The paper starts by reporting the development of teacher research in the past century. In the final decades of the 20th century a new ideology emerged in researching teachers and teaching (Goodson 1992a; Shulman, 1987). This kind of research is based on constructivist philosophy. Its main aim is to understand teachers and to gain a deeper understanding of their attitudes and beliefs about teaching. New concepts were developed to describe teachers’ thought processes: cognitions, beliefs, personal theories, personal practical knowledge, and subjective theories to name but a few. Teachers’ personal theories are based on moral values and they comprise both an intellectual and emotional dimension (Pope & Denicolo, 2001). Accordingly, the key to gaining insight into and understanding teachers’ personal theories, is to listen and give voice to teachers (Elbaz, 1990). Although previous research methods, named the process-product research, which mainly focused on teachers’ observable behaviour, were important and yielded significant knowledge about teaching, a new approach was called for to obtain a more qualitative knowledge. The aim was to gain knowledge on how teachers reason about their multifaceted work. Teachers were now seen as agents of their own professional growth. For this purpose, various approaches, methods and techniques have been developed over the past decades. One important issue is that we no longer talk about research on or about teachers but research in cooperation with teachers. Teachers are not seen as research objects but as co-workers where both partners are looking for a more comprehensive and deeper understanding of the individual teacher´s thinking. To get even closer to the core of teachers’ personal theories it has been found fruitful to elicit what it is in the lives of teachers, their milieu and work, which they perceive as being influential in forming their theories and embedded values. This interest in investigating teachers’ life history reflects a radical turn in our understanding of teaching. To obtain this kind of data, four methods are demonstrated in detail in this paper: classroom observation, river of life, life history, and a self-characterization sketch. To better understand how these approaches can be implemented, the life history of one teacher is exemplified in depth in this paper. His professional life is reported and he describes how he has grown as a teacher over the years. His life history illustrates how his personal theories have developed, both in depth and breadth. The case study starts with classroom observations where Ingi, a secondary school teacher, is teaching English to many classes of diverse proficiency. Subsequently Ingi draws up his river of life and the following life history he shares with the researcher is based on his river of life. To eliminate the researcher’s influence on the story as far as possible no beforehand written questioning is used. Lastly, Ingi writes his self-characterization sketch. It is important to be aware that this kind of research makes high moral demands on the researcher; sensitivity and caution are essential. It should be emphasised that as the researcher and the storyteller are co-workers, the story cannot be published without the story teller’s consent. To conclude, it should be pointed out that although teachers and their professionalism are the focus of this research, these methods can and have been implemented to understand and give voice to other professionals.