Teaching

Teaching has been the subject of systematic inquiry for several decades. The first American Educational Research Association Handbook of Research on Teaching, edited by Nathaniel L. Gage, appeared in 1963 and later editions have appeared at approximately ten-year intervals. Since the 1960s there have also been a number of significant reviews of this research, such as Arnold Morrison and Donald McIntyre's 1969 and 1973 editions of Teachers and Teaching and Penelope L. Peterson and Herbert J. Walberg's Research on Teaching (1979). Such reviews have highlighted both the complexity of teaching and the fact that it is amenable to study from a number of perspectives, using a variety of methods.

Inquiry into teaching has been pursued for essentially three different purposes. First, researchers and practitioners aim to understand better the processes involved, to develop the knowledge base of teaching, and to contribute to theoretical frameworks, which help to conceptualize teaching. Second, inquiry into teaching has also been pursued for the purposes of improving practice. This is particularly the case, for instance, in action research studies that generally follow a cycle, beginning with the identification of a practical problem or area of concern, followed by the gathering of evidence using various research methods, decisions about how to change practice, and then the gathering of further evidence to monitor the effects of the change. Such cycles are frequently repeated and provide a means of constantly monitoring and improving practice as well as developing an enhanced self-critical awareness. Third, inquiry is intrinsic to professional preparation, and research methods may be employed by student teachers, for example, in helping to make sense of their observations of teaching and in developing their own practice. Classroom interaction schedules, for example, have frequently been used to help student teachers to structure their observations and to note the ways in which teachers ask questions, or move from one task to another within the classroom, or deal with student behavior problems. Any one research project, however, may be being pursued for any or all of these purposes and could draw upon a variety of different research methods in order to achieve its aims.

Research Methods

Various methods have been used to gather information about teaching. The most common fall into the following categories: systematic observation, case study and ethnography, survey techniques, simulations, commentaries, concept mapping, and narratives. Each yields its own distinctive type of data about teaching, and may be more or less appropriate for different purposes as discussed below.

Systematic observation. Ned Flanders in 1970 was the first to popularize the use of observation schedules in the study of teaching. His Flanders Interaction Analysis Categories (FIAC) identified ten categories of behavior that characterised teacher-student interaction within the classroom. Observers, once trained in identifying and categorizing these behaviors, could then code their observations, which would later be studied for interaction patterns. Flanders's work has since been elaborated with numerous schedules designed for specific purposes. Observation schedules essentially provide a checklist of behaviors that the researcher is interested in, and enable a sample of teachers' interactions to be described in quantitative terms. Sometimes the schedule is more oriented towards studying a sequence of teaching behavior rather than the quantity of different types of behavior and may be used to identify the ways in which behaviors change over time or as a result of an experimental intervention.

The major advantage of systematic observation is that it provides a relatively objective account of classroom behavior. For instance it might describe the proportion of questions that a teacher asks that are open-ended, or the proportion of teacher commands that have a disciplinary focus, or the relative number of times that teachers or students initiate interaction. The method, however, is rarely able to offer much information about the context of particular interactions, and is unable to illuminate the interpretations that teachers and students place upon their own and others' behavior. A question directed toward a student, for instance, may be a matter of simple recall for one, an intellectually challenging task for another, a largely social exchange in one context or an implied reprimand in a different context, and the observer may be unable to distinguish sufficient cues to appreciate fully its significance. Systematic observation may be useful, therefore, in considering the general impact of new curriculum materials on instructional behavior, for example, but may have limited value on its own in identifying the full complexities of teachers' work, why teachers behave as they do, and the reasoning that guides their actions.

Case study and ethnography. Some have argued that case study and ethnography refer more to approaches to research than methods in themselves. Frequently they draw upon interviews and semi-structured observations, though occasionally on other evidence as well, in order to come to an understanding of a particular teacher's practice. One of their distinguishing features is that they involve indepth study. Over a lengthy period of time, the researcher is able to appreciate the context in which a teacher works, and through interaction with the teacher about their practice is able to develop insights into how they view their work. These insights can then be tested against future observations or other data. Gaea Leinhardt (1988), for example, observed several mathematics lessons taught by one teacher and interviewed her at length both about her teaching and about her past experiences of mathematics. As a result, she was able to piece together an understanding of the ways in which the teacher's own learning of mathematics as a student and her experiences of professional training had come to influence her approach to teaching the subject. Case studies have frequently highlighted the ways in which teachers cope with the complex competing demands that they face in their work or the ways in which beginning teachers encounter and overcome the initial difficulties of learning to teach.

Case studies and ethnographies frequently involve the analysis of very large amounts of qualitative data, and some writers have drawn attention to the possibility that researchers can extract from these their own particular interpretations. The potential of ethnographic research to yield generalizations about teaching has also been debated, with some researchers arguing that the merit of the approach lies in the insights about particular aspects of teaching that such studies can provide.

Survey techniques. Surveys on teachers and teaching have relied on the use of questionnaires, structured interviews, checklists, tests, or attitude scales. Surveys have been used to describe the characteristics of teachers as a professional group, such as their attitudes towards children, their opinions about a particular innovation, or their own aspirations and feelings of job satisfaction. They have also been used to collect teachers' own descriptions of their practices or the professional concerns they have at different stages of their careers.

Surveys allow data to be collected about large numbers of teachers, and if appropriate sampling techniques are used and a sufficiently high return rate is obtained, it is possible to make generalizations about teachers as a whole or about particular groups of teachers, such as elementary school teachers, or teachers in a particular subject area or geographical region. Surveys, however, can only collect information that teachers can easily report, and other methods are required if the researcher wishes to penetrate more deeply into the complex interactions of teachers' thinking and behavior and the contexts in which they work.

Simulations. A variety of simulation techniques have been developed that involve presenting teachers with a task or situation similar to one that would be encountered in their normal work and observing how systematic variations in the nature of different tasks or situations affects the ways teachers aim to deal with them. Such techniques have been used to investigate how teachers plan lessons, how they are influenced in their decision-making by external constraints, or how they are influenced in their interactions with students by different student attributes. Mary M. Rohrkemper and Jere E. Brophy (1983), for example, provided teachers with descriptions or vignettes of children in a variety of classroom situations, each presenting a particular challenge to the teacher. By examining the relationship between the teachers' judgements or decisions and the factors varying within the vignettes, it was possible to identify those features of children that are influential in teachers' thinking about problem situations. Simulations can be used to elicit the knowledge that teachers have and use in their everyday practice and that might be difficult to access through other methods.

Commentaries. Understanding the processes of teaching involves understanding the meaning teachers attribute to their actions and the rationales they have for behaving as they do. Attempts to access the ongoing thinking and decision-making of teachers have necessitated the use of methods particularly geared toward eliciting teachers' knowledge and thought processes. This has included think-aloud protocols where teachers, while engaged in a planning or assessment task, for example, have attempted to verbalize their thoughts at the same time. The thinking and decision-making of teachers during active teaching have been elicited using stimulated recall techniques in which a lesson is videotaped and later played back to the teachers who attempt to recall their thinking at the time. Some researchers have also used the notes taken from observation of lessons to structure interviews with teachers afterwards in order to construct a commentary on what the teacher was doing and the reasons for their actions.

Research in this area has raised several issues about the status of teachers' verbal reports on their practice: Do they genuinely reflect teachers' real thinking at the time, or are they after-the-event justifications? And can the thought that accompanies practical action be adequately represented in terms of words alone, or is "real" thought as much tied up with images, metaphors, and feelings? There are several conceptual issues concerning this type of research method, and clearly care must be taken to consider potential sources of distortion in self-report data. Nevertheless, steps can be taken to minimize such influences, and these methods have been used effectively to explore some of the cognitive aspects of teachers' work.

Concept mapping. Several techniques, loosely labelled as concept mapping, have been used to represent teachers' understanding of various aspects of their work. They generally follow a three-stage process, beginning with brainstorming on a particular topic to identify concepts, followed by a process of indicating how these concepts are interrelated, and finally naming the relationships between the concepts. The end product is a visual representation of teachers' understanding as it relates to a particular topic. Greta Morine-Dershimer (1991), for example, used the technique to identify the ways in which different student teachers think about classroom management: some student teachers, for example, would link classroom management to concepts of personal relationships, classroom climate, and an ethos of mutual respect, whereas others would link it to concepts of rules, sanctions, rewards, and praise. Such techniques can help to illuminate the different understandings that student teachers hold of key concepts or may be used to identify the changes that occur in teachers' understandings over time or as a result of inservice training or curriculum development.

Narratives. Narrative studies aim to provide an account of teaching in teachers' own words. They support an experiential approach to describing teachers' work, taking particular note of the teachers' "voice" and placing teachers' experience within the context of other life events. Narrative researchers have frequently argued against more mechanistic approaches to describing teaching and have argued for a storytelling approach in which the researcher acts as a facilitator helping teachers to recount their experience with due recognition of the personal and contextual factors within which it is framed. D. Jean Clandinin (1986), for example, develops narrative accounts of three primary teachers. Each narrative highlights a key image or guiding metaphor that is influential in shaping how the teacher thinks about teaching and learning. One teacher, for instance, held an image of "language as the key" and language was perceived as the basis of all classroom activity. Another held the image of "classroom as home" and this image manifested itself in her relationships with children and in her organization of the classroom. In 1994 J. Gary Knowles, Ardra L. Cole, and Colleen S. Presswood charted the difficulties of student teachers on field experience through the construction of narratives, drawing largely on the students' own autobiographies, diaries, and discussions. This approach to research has grown rapidly in recent years and has stimulated several debates about the status and veracity of narratives.

Conclusion

Research on teaching has involved a wide range of different methods. Each has its own advantages as well as its drawbacks. Each has the potential to illuminate particular aspects of the teaching process. Different methods are appropriate for different questions. Moreover, certain orientations towards research–such as cognitive or experiential–predispose researchers to certain types of inquiry and therefore particular methods. Teaching, however, is a complex process and the rich and diverse modes of inquiry currently available enable researchers to pursue those complexities and to contribute to their understanding more fully.