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Analyzing teachers’ rule-basedcompetencies in practice

Jukka Husu

University of Helsinki

Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, University of Geneva, 13-15 September 2006

abstarct Rule-based competence in teaching implies that teachers rely on rules, and therefore the rules are justified, because their values are proven and therefore approved. Teachers think, both implicitly and explicitly, that their rules of practice work. And because they work, teachers apply the rules accordingly. Rules structure how teachers see their professional tasks, possibilities, and limits. By locating events in a system of teacher knowledge, rules define what teachers perceive as ‘real’ and important. This study aims to clarify 1) what is the content of rule-based competency in teachers’ knowledge?, and 2) how teachers’ rule-based competency functions in teaching situations? Within this task, the study tries to uncoverthe notion of action competence in teacher knowledge framework. In order to analyze their use and function, this study employs the concepts of recognition rules and realization rules. The aim was to investigate how the rules teachers acknowledge (recognition rules) are put into practice in their teaching (realization rules). By distinguishing among different kinds of rule-governed practices may help teachers to respond in ways that recognize and realize both their personal and professional needs and those of their pupils in classrooms.

Introduction

Educators are called upon to mediate many private and public interests that pertain to personal, professional, organizational, and societal values. This plurality of understandings is an integral part of the teaching profession. It is one of the teachers’ professional tasks to discern how the competing interests can be served practically.The purpose of this study is to shift focus on the scene where the conditions and contingencies of this competence may be found. This means by exploring day-to-day details of pedagogical encounters to see what they might offer in putting forth an understanding of teachers’ pedagogical action competence. To explore this idea necessitates interpreting teaching encounters for the way they promote or prohibit conditions for competent professional action.

This study investigates teachers’ professional action as a rule-governed action (cf. e.g. Elbaz, 1983; Boostrom, 1991; Jordan et al.,1995; Kansanen et al., 2000; Weber, 2002). The stance presupposes that rules are not merely teachers’ instrumental tools, but rather that they are structures of meaning used by teachers to make sense of their professional world. This study aims to clarify

1) What is the content of rule-based competency in teachers’ knowledge?

2) How teachers’ rule-based competency functions in teaching situations?

This study aim is to shift from individuals to social practices of teaching in which both teachers and students participate. This study seeks to look at the character of the rules used and their relation to the classroom setting in which they take place. In this paper we investigate how teachers use their knowledge of rules as a means for gaining control and creating meaning in their professional settings. Preliminary findings of interview and observational studies presented in this paper suggest that rules are not merely instrumental tools of classroom management, but they are also structures of meaning teachers use in order to make sense of their professional action.

Competence in teaching

The competence approach focuses on what professionals can actually do. The basic idea of the stance is the capacity of the practitioner to perform or deliver in real-world context in the midst of uncertainty and conflicting priorities. It is assumed that ‘competence’ transcends the levels of knowledge and skills to explain how knowledge and skills are applied in an effective way (Westera, 2001, p. 75). The approach implies that what people do and the way they dot it can be specified in quite clear and specified terms. Squires (1999, p. 19) sees three advantages in its use: 1) ‘Competence’ places emphasis firmly on professional field where it should be: on performance, rather than on the often vague ‘knowledge’ and ‘understanding.’ 2) It can offer clear objectives for professionals, and thus provides an explicit and a shared basis for working together. 3) In terms of learning and professional development, it allows one to disaggregate large blocks of learning into smaller more manageable units, and offers a way to recognizing learning that has (perhaps not) taken place.

Competencies do not just refer to tasks, they must be associated with the characteristics and backgrounds of the persons involved in them. As McCelland, (1998) argues, “[p]eople agree more readily on who is outstanding than on what makes them outstanding” (p. 332). The notion of competence goes beyond skills to include the attitudes and stamina needed to carry action (even) through difficult circumstances.

Action competence in teaching

The concept of action competence includes the capacity to act – both in its present and future tense, and to be answerable for one’s own actions. Thus, “action competence is not identical with acting, nor can action competence be described/explained by describing the actions performed” (Jensen & Schnack, 1994, p. 13). However, performing actions in their professional contexts help teachers to develop their action competence but this relation is complex. Due to this complexity, a discussion of some components of action competence might be helpful.

Naturally, professional knowledge is regarded as a necessary component of a competent teacher action. What we mean by teacher knowledge, however, is another matter. Clark (1986, pp. 8-9) has traced the past development of teacher knowledge research and has found three interconnected and partly overlapping phases in its development: 1) The teacher as a decision-maker, in which the teacher’s task was to diagnose needs and learning problems of students and to prescribe effective and appropriate instructional treatments for them. 2) The teacher as a sense-maker, in which decision-making was seen as one among several activities teachers performed. The stance assumed that reflectively a professional teacher interpreted and skilfully applied his/her knowledge to particular situations in which she/he performed. 3) The teacher as a constructivist, who continually builds and elaborates her/his personal theory of teaching and education. This third phase meant the widening of teachers’ problem space: no more is it believed that teachers solely could define and resolve problems they encountered in their work by themselves. In short, in teacher knowledge research we have moved away from internally consistent and mechanical paradigms towards more inconsistent, imperfect and incomplete ways of perceiving and analyzing teacher knowledge (Husu, 2002).

The notion of commitment is central to how teachers reason and justify their pedagogical ideas and actions. Often, instead of using the concept of “commitment”, teachers report the amount effort and energy they put in their work (Husu, 2000). Teachers are not only committed to their pupils; they are also concerned with the improvement of their school, and they strive to reach higher professional standards in their work. Therefore, when teachers justify their pedagogical agenda and actions, their personal strivings tend to serve as adequate justifications for their actions. Within this process, ‘intuitive high hopes’ are often placed above the ‘reasoned facts’ (Elbaz, 1992).

The practice of teaching largely consists of habits, more or less routinized or even automatic behaviour. At first, it may seem odd, but there is nothing wrong with this state of affairs. We cannot imagine a teacher’s daily job in his/her classroom where there every single piece of his/her behaviour is pre-planned. Bourdieu (1977) calls this practical orientation as the habitus, the principle which negotiates between context and practices. Regarding teaching, it is a complex and dialectical process where teachers (and students) largely implicitly adopt certain ways to act in their practical settings. For Dewey (1988), human conduct is mainly composed of and structured by habits. Importantly, habits here mean neither “bad habits” to be corrected nor mere repetition and routine to be avoided. Concerning teachers and teaching, Dewey (1988, p. 25) argues that the teacher’s agency and efficacy – its ‘will’ – are located in and through its habits, not in opposition to them. In a way, teachers are their habits; there is no thinking of who the teachers are apart from the habits that they embody in their work. This is because habits largely constitute teachers’ knowledge and, as such, provide them agency in it. To acquire a habit is for teachers to learn a new behaviour in their teaching, one that opens up the meaning of teachers’ world and provides them with expanded powers to act in their complex professional settings.

In sum, action competence in teaching depends on teachers’ personal presence and their relational perceptiveness of what to do in various contingent situations. It is a question of teachers’ knowledge of their professional action possibilities and their belief in their influence, and teachers’ commitment to act. It is part of the teachers’ professional task to be attuned to these experiential dimensions teachers face all the time in their work. These “current concerns” (Fuller & Brown, 1975) do not wait. Instead, as Roth et al. (2001, p. 185) postulate, they continuously unfold. Frequently, a teacher has not (adequate) time to reflect (at all). The pressure for action tends to be immediate even in “simple situations”, the complexities emerge quickly as teachers contemplate what kind of action to take. (Ershler Richert, 2005). This implies that to hesitate is to lose (Jackson, 1968; Lortie, 1975). Some kind of an action is always required even if that action is non-action. Due to this, the whole teaching situation is far less under control than we/teachers usually think of.

But how do teachers choose how to act when there are so many competing circumstances and possibilities for what they should do? According to teacher knowledge research (Elbaz, 1983; Clandinin & Connelly, 1995; Husu, 2002), teachers tend to turn to some set of core ideas to help guide them in their work. According to Eraut (1994), learning to become a teacher and cope in the classroom involves developing and adopting “routines and short cuts, internalizing classroom decision-making and reducing the range of possible ways of thinking to manageable proportions” (p. 70).One of the central aspects of pedagogical decision-making are pedagogical rules that teachers employ in their teaching.

Rule-based competence in teaching

In practice, teaching often tends to become routinized activity where norms and rules play an important part. This is because teachers tend to develop implicit ways of action in order to make their professional life tolerable and more manageable. Simply, there are too many variables to take into account at once, so teachers develop routines and decision-habits (rules) to keep their mental effort at a reasonable level (Eraut, 1994, p. 31). Teachers’ conscious and intentional behavior largely focuses on selection, combination, or adaptation of routines and rules-based actions to meet the situations they face or have to deal with in their work. Their place in instruction is incidental and their influence on learning often indirect (Boostrom, 1991, p. 196).

Rules are often seen as the necessary means of creating an orderly environment for student learning. According to Elbaz (1983), the rule of practice is simply what the term suggests: a brief statement of “what to do in a particular situation frequently encountered in practice” (p. 132). Classroom rules such as “No talking while I am teaching” and “Always follow teachers’ directions” are easily applied both to broader situations and more specific incidents during lessons. Teachers largely establish their pedagogical decisions on a set of If-Then rules which cover a vide range of possibilities. Accordingly, these If-Then rule statements can be represented as follows:

IfI allow (any) talking while I am teaching

ThenI have to do it (all over) again

Teachers rely on rules, and therefore the rules are justified, because their values are proven and therefore approved. Teachers think, both implicitly and explicitly, that their rules of practice work. And because they work, teachers apply the rules accordingly. Teachers justify this link by reasoning that there is a connection between the rules of practice and their supposed or intended outcomes. As Fenstermacher (1994) argues, the rules tend show that “an action is the reasonable thing to do, on obvious thing to do, or [even] the only thing to do under the circumstances” (p. 44).

It is in the context of everyday classroom life that the significance of rules is revealed (Boostrom, 1991; Jordan et al.,1995; Kansanen et al., 2000; Weber, 2002). Rules structure how teachers see their professional tasks, possibilities, and limits. According to Douglas (1973, p. 9), rules provide “a recognizable epistemological viewpoint,” and with the aid of this viewpoint, teachers perceive their work settings by making their meanings.Douglas (ibid.) emphasises that in “[in teaching]there can be no meaning without rules”.

The construction of rules is a local affair: in different classrooms different rules prevail – if not in content at least in measure. By locating events in a system of teacher knowledge, rules define what teachers perceive as ‘real’ and important. As Boostrom (1991) puts it: “It is as if they [rules] are saying, ‘Hang onto this, and you will go in the right direction’” (p. 202). The rules speak of aims whether or not teachers put them into those terms. Also, a particular feature of teachers’ work is the need for confidence and credibility: the teacher has to believe that s/he is doing ‘the right thing’ (Eraut, 1994, p. 47) – and rules serve that purpose, too.

The rules present teachers’ practical know-how which is inherent in their action and cannot be separated from it in propositional form. They are stated within a social context of a school, put into effect by an individual teacher or teachers, and often enforced with sanctions upon its violation (Turiel, 1983, p. 79). Therefore, the way we think of rules and the way we put them in action is important. As Boostrom (1991, p. 212) emphasizes, it is not just a philosophical point, but also a very practical one. This is because rules and principles need to be exercised rather than being merely reproduced. The choices for how to act are never clear, nor the consequences clear in advance of any action a teacher takes in his/her teaching. In classroom, in themidst of her/his teaching, a teacher needs to turn to her-/himself to decide what s/he believes would be professionally ‘right thing’ to do. This involves drawing on a core set of rules and principles that a teacher brings to her/his teaching in the first place.

In sum, investigating rules is to look at them for what they are: (also) a (moral) ordering of the classroom for which teachers are mainly responsible. Here, the point is to see rules as reflections of something that goes beyond themselves. Rules are an integral part of the teacher knowledge that can be organized in terms of separate, though overlapping domains, each with unique characteristics. Next, this paper presents a more elaborated formulation of the concept of rules in order to approach their use in teaching practice.

Recognition and realization rules

This study employs Bernstein’s (2000) theoretical concepts recognition rules and realization rules adopted from his theory of pedagogical discourse. The concepts are used for their capacity to analyze teachers’ rule-governed practices in a more detailed manner. The concepts are closely connected to socially constructed meanings, which often go unnoticed in classrooms but which play an important role in how successfully teachers can perform their professional tasks. The basic idea of using the concepts of recognition and realization rules is the hope that our knowledge of teacher competence would benefit from investigating pedagogical rules and habits within teachers’ educational experiences. According to Bernstein (2000), the means of developing teaching are referred to as rules that are distributive by their nature. The approach presupposes that in order to operate successfully within a particular context a teacher needs to posses both the recognition and realization rules of that situation.

Recognition rules relate to the ability of teachers to recognizethe need of their successful teaching actions,their contextsand therelevant features in which the performances are produced (Mutch, 2004, p. 440). If a teacher has appropriate recognition rules of her/his professional practice, it is usually seen in her/his (successful) orientation in her/his teaching. In this sense, it is possible to make conclusions of a teacher’s competence on how s/he navigates in her/his teaching practice, and to determine what recognition rules s/he possess. However, sometimes teachers may lack the ability to recognize some essential features of their teaching and its contexts, or see the difference from other situations. As a result, they cannot recognize that something different is required for a competent performance (see Daniels, 1995).

Realization rules refer to a teacher’s skills to put her/his ideas into practice. They highlight the abilities of a teacher to communicate what s/he knows in a manner that is acceptable and understable to her/his students. A teacher may, for example, possess recognition rules of her/his students’ classroom work and these rules may, in turn, give her/him perception of what is happening in her/his classroom. Depending on the recognition rules, different perceptions of ‘what is happening’ in the classroom take place. However, situations vary: a teacher can recognize that something is required, but lack particular means to deliver a competent performance. In these terms, teachers can lack the knowledge and application of their realization rules to a various degree. Here, Bernstein (2000) speaks about passive and active realization rules. Passive realization rules enable teachers “to select the appropriate meanings” for their practice (Morais etal., 2005, p. 417) but teachers fail to implement them successfully in their teaching. In the active realization, rules are successfully put into teaching practice.