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Krull, Kadajane, Lembinen, and Sisask. Applying experimental methods …
Applying experimental methods for studying differences in teacher professional thinking
Edgar Krull, Tiiu Kadajane, Igne Lembinen, and Sirje Sisask
University of Tartu, Estonia
E-mail:
Telephone: +3727 375 156
Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research in Hamburg (17-20 September, 2003)
Introduction
Professionalism in teaching demands knowledge, skills and experiences that have been developed through years of practice. Pre-service teacher education only helps prospective teachers to make the first steps in their long journey of acquiring professional skills. To the end of insuring further successful professional development newly qualified teachers in many countries are required to work a year or two under the supervision of experienced colleagues in many countries. After the induction period, different teacher in-service training courses become the main resource of teachers’ professional development in addition to their growing school experience. In these three phases of professional development the main task of teacher educators and supervising mentors is to create the most supporting conditions for the professional development of beginning teachers. In reality, these this conditions are far from this goal is rarely achieved, as our present knowledge of the potential and regularities of teachers’ professional development are rather modest.
However, there has been an important progress in the studies of teacher professional development in the last three decades. From them the most promising seems the pioneering research by D. Berliner (1988) and R. Glaser (1985) on differences in teachers’ professional thinking and decision-making. In spite of the fact thatDespite Berliner and his colleagues have introduced and tried out several experimental methods for uncovering developmental changes in teachers’ professional thinking and decision-making, the majority of researchers have limited their studies related to issues of teacher professional development to teacherhave been based on inquiries inquiry methods thus far. For example, Schempp and his colleagues (1998) studied differences in the professional thinking of beginning and competent physical education teachers; Beijaard and his colleagues (2000) studied differences in subject teachers’ perceptions of their professional identity by interviewing them.
Yet, there is an important factor interfering with the application of research findings produced: manifestation of professionalism in teaching is always culturally colored (Berliner, 2001), and the research outcomes in one country are not usually not directly transferable to the circumstances of another country. Therefore, additional studies are often needed for specifying or adjusting general knowledge on teachers’ professional development, discovered by researchers in other countries, to the conditions of a particular country.
The study of teachers’ professional development in Estonia started by inquiring teachers with different school experiences (Krull, 2003). The outputs of this inquiry revealed that developmental changes in teachers’ professional thinking and attitudes depend on the character of educational issues and at least three different patterns of dependence between replies to questionnaire items and teacher school experience were discovered. The results of this study leaded our researchers to a conclusion that the developmental changes in teachers’ professional decision-making are more complicated than they would be predicted on the basis of Berliner’s (1998) five-stages model of teacher professional development. However, mostly due to the limitations of the written inquiry as a research method, many results of this study remained rather of a low reliability.
To the end of improving the reliability and quality of the ongoing research an orientation to introduction of the application of the experimental research methodology was taken. A selection of corresponding research methods was tried out and piloted in the period of 2002 –2003 as a preparation phase for a following phase two of the study. The present paper summarizes some theoretical and practical issues relevant to the preparation and carrying out the pilot this study. The presentation starts with the introduction of issues concerning identification of teachers with different professional expertise and gives a short survey of experimental methods typically used for the experimental study of differences in teachers’ professional decision-making capabilities. Finally, our experience of applying experimental methods for searching professionalism in teaching and its development, and preliminary results of this study are introduced.
Identification of teachers’ professional expertise
Regardless of the nature of methods used for searching teacher professional development, based on cross-sectional studies of single teachers or teachers’ groups with different school experience, a problem – how to ensure that the sample of teachers under consideration really includes subjects with different levels of professional development – always raises. Of course, appointing teachers to school experience groups or cohorts on the basis of number of years they have worked at school would be the simplest way of discriminating teachers for this purpose. Unfortunately, this is a very inaccurate and imprecise approach, as it does not take into account individual differences in teachers’ professional development. Therefore, it is rarely practiced even for teacher certification purposes. As John Dewey (1933) once pointed out, experience could be educative or miseducative. There is no insurance that a teacher who teaches from day to day in a similar way, without reflection, improves as a professional and Dewey’s rhetorical question then remains: is it 10 years of teaching, or 1 year repeated 10 times.
The other issue related to the identification of teachers with different professional expertise is more complicated and it concerns the notion of teaching expertise itself. As a rule, this notion is implicitly defined in the school practice by introducing complex criteria for teacher certification procedures usually serving promotion purposes. A widely known and rigorous system of expert teacher certification is practiced by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) in the USA (see Bond, et al., 2000; Helms, 2001). Less rigorous criteria for the certification of teachers’ professional expertise are practiced almost in all countries. For example, Estonian schoolteachers can have consecutive positions that of junior teacher, teacher, senior teacher, a teacher methodologist based on the decisions of certification boards (Conditions …, 2002).
However, theoretical foundations for definition and reliable identification of teachers’ levels of professional expertise are only emerging. The corresponding studies have tried to define the stages of teacher professional development by originating from an analysis of teachers' professional activities and describing these stages as changes in these aspects of teachers' professional backgrounds: knowledge, skills, and behaviors; attitudes, expectations, and concerns; and job tasks (Burden, 1990, p. 314). For example, Fuller (Fuller & Brown, 1975) questioned teachers of varying school experiences in order to learn about their professional concerns and she identified the following sequence of development: preteaching concerns, early concerns about survival, teaching effectiveness concerns, and concerns about pupils' developments. Burden (1980), in his study, asked teachers to describe themselves in terms of their professional development and identified stages of survival, adjustment, and maturity in the run of a teaching career. McDonald (1982) described the teacher professional development sequence as consisting of the stages of transition, exploring, invention, experiencing, and professional teaching.
Introduction of a model describing developmental stages in teacher professional thinking and decision-making by David Berliner’s (1988, 1994) can be considered as a qualitatively new step in discriminating teachers’ levels of professional development. This model, based H.Dreyfus & S.Dreyfus’ (1986) concept of professional development in five stages, is an attempt to bridge the research on teacher professional development with the more general studies on the professional development of human beings. Hence, Berliner has repeatedly pointed out and even proved in his writings that there is no basis to believe being differences “…in the sophistication of cognitive processes used by teachers and experts in other fields …” (Berliner, 2001, p 471). Therefore, the studies of experts in other field might be helpful for uncovering secrets of expertise in teaching, also. Though the Dreyfus and Dreyfus’ prototype model was initially meant for describing learning of single professional skills, its adopted version by Berliner applies to teaching – a rather complex system of professional activities. However, by now, the majority of studies that have examined expertise have found this model useful, and have adopted the view that the acquisition of professionalism in teaching is based on gradual changes in teachers’ pedagogical thinking and decision-making (Bond et al., 2002, p 17).
However, in spite of the fact, that the Berliner’s model discriminates five consecutive stages – novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient and expert teacher levels (Baron et al., 1996, pp 1131–1133) – in teacher professional decision-making, it has not been used as a comprehensive classification tool for the discrimination of teachers on the basis of their professional expertise. If applied, as a rule, a simplified version is typically used, in which two stages (that of beginning and experienced teachers) are usually taken into consideration. From the point of view of Schempp and his colleagues even a partial application of this model could be an exaggeration as they have stated : “There exists no reliable, valid, or empirically acceptable method for identifying a teacher’s level of expertise, nor for distinguishing expert teachers from those in the lower stages of expertise development” (Schempp et al, 1998, p 11). Therefore, different approaches used thus far for the discrimination of teachers by their expertise have been based rather on indirect indicators than on direct evidences of teaching skills. For example, G. Leinhardt and J. G. Greeno (1986) considered as experts teachers whose students’ results were among the top 15% for several years. K. Agne (1992) considered as expert teachers those who have been recognized as teachers of the year. In some other studies, expert teachers were identified on the basis of more complex criteria. For example, the study of R. A. Mills (1997) relied on the ratings given by the school administration, colleagues, parents, and pupils. H. L. Swanson, J.E.O’Connor, and J. B. Cooney (1990) considered teachers to be experts if they: (1) had ten or more years of teaching experience, (2) had completed at least a master’s degree, (3) were designated as outstanding teachers by their principals, and (4) were selected as mentor teachers within the California Public School System.
Of some help could be four dimensions of differences between the stages of teacher professional development for the identification purposes introduced by Kagan’s (1992): (1) the way a teacher monitors classroom events; (2) the degree of conscious effort involved in classroom performance; (3) the degree to which performance is guided by personal experience and the degree to which the teacher can predict events accurately; and (4) the teacher’s focus, as student work and academic tasks become the major organizing framework of instruction (as cited in Beijaard et all, 2001, p 753). A comprehensive study by Bond and his colleagues (Bond et al, 2000), which was aimed at subjecting the system of expert teacher certification of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to an extensive construct validation, identified 13 hypothetical prototype features or dimensions teaching expertise. The 13 prototypic features discriminating NBPTS certified expert teachers from those who were not certified appeared as (Berliner, 2001, pp 469 – 470):
- better use of knowledge;
- extensive pedagogical content knowledge, including deep representations of subject matter knowledge;
- better problem solving strategies;
- better adaptation and modification of goals for diverse learners, better skills for improvisation;
- better decision making;
- more challenging objectives;
- better classroom climate;
- better perception of classroom events, better ability of to read the cues from students;
- greater sensitivity to context;
- better monitoring of learning and providing feedback to students;
- more frequent testing of hypothesis;
- greater respect for students;
- display of more passion for teaching.
Learning outcomes the instruction of the expert teachers, rated high in the listed dimensions in this study, was hypothesized to lead to students’ (1) higher motivation to learn and higher feelings of self-efficacy, (2) deeper understanding of subject matter, and (3) higher levels of achievement.
Finally, a deeper analysis of the discriminant function of the listed above teaching characteristics revealed that three of them had the greatest ability to discriminate between expert and non-expert teachers. These were: (1) the degree of challenge that the curriculum offered, (2) the teachers’ ability for the deep representations of the subject matter, (3) teachers’ skillfulness in monitoring and providing feedback to his/her students (Bond et al, 2000, pp. 111–112). It was shown that the relative status of teachers on these three teaching dimensions alone is sufficient to identify 80 percent of expert teachers certified by the NBPTS.
In certain sense the issues related to the studies of teacher professional development and identification teacher stages of professional development form a kind of vicious circle in which a failure of identifying objectively teacher actual level of professional development interferes with the research of teacher professional development and vice versa. Hence, Bond and his colleagues (Bond et al, 2000, p 17) are certainly right when concluding that from previous studies in teaching expertise the biggest interest for practical purposes present the way those studies have defined or operationalized the notion of an expert teacher and what methodologies were used to examine expertise in teaching. Consequently, a research strategy capable to promote the current knowledge in the field, calls, on the one hand, for the application of the best methods currently available for the identification of teachers’ levels of proficiency, and, on the other hand, for an in-deep search of differences in teaching skills characterizing the levels of teacher professional development initially identified.
Methods for searching differences of teacher professional capabilities in experimental settings
Though the written inquiry is often used as research method for studying differences in teachers’ pedagogical decision-making and the thinking underlying it, this is not the most suitable tool for this purpose as questionnaire items often fail to transmit the context to all respondents in the same way. Therefore, studies of differences in teacher professional thinking and decision-making tend to produce more reliable data if carried out in experimental settings. Yet, these studies have serious limitations due to their high cost in comparison with the written inquiry of teachers with different levels of professional development. This is the main reason why studies of teacher professional development carried out until the early nineteen nineties, as stated by Berliner, “… have been small, generally qualitative, and highly interpretative. They have tended to be descriptive rather than experimental" (Berliner, 1994, p 184).