ABSTRACT
Why would systematic questioning about one’s own teaching practice lead to more confidence and better teachers? What is it about the process of research in the midst of one’s own profession, about one’s own work, that can help promote continuing interest and curiosity, passion, and judgment in teaching children well? In spite of the overwhelming obstacles that the world of teaching presents, being a good teacher can be a fulfilling and inspiring profession, provided one can maintain that curiosity and passion. A stance that encourages such a perspective, that allows one to step back from
one’s practice and think about what one is seeing in a systematic and organized way, gives one control of what one is doing. Thus, when a teacher wonders why something she does works or not, she is beginning to develop an attitude that is beyond the minimal “I’m effective” or “I’m not effective.” This development gives her some control over what she is doing and allows her to go beyond a set of routines or methods to begin thinking about which things are working (or not) in which circumstances. She begins to develop some generalizations about her practice, in her own particular context, with her own group of students. It allows her to begin to develop a personal set of theories about teaching and learning, theories informed explicitly by personal practice and experience. Because inquiry is systematic and reflective, the teacher is not reacting at a holistic or gut level or an emotional level (although what your instinct tells you is very important). By employing a systematic look at her practice, she begins to develop habits or routines, schema, that allow her to make connections across contexts. Susan, for example, instead of simply adding on what she believed was a better
curriculum, could have asked herself, “What is it about this scripted curriculum that might work for my students and where is it not meeting their needs?” Once she had identified what she hypothesized was the problem, she could then have asked, “Which of these parts of the lesson that I must teach can I modify to meet the needs of my students?” Since she had strong beliefs about what effective literacy instruction could be for English Language Learners and children who did not have a strong traditional literacy set, she could have also postulated, “What if
material with way, she would have been teaching children what they needed in a way that she believed would be more effective, and at the same time she would have continued to meet the demands of the district. Such a solution is both challenging to the novice teacher and a bit scary, but Susan’s solution to eliminate recess for her first graders was already in violation of district expectations. Had she changed the curriculum in a systematic and inquiring way, she would have had data and a system for exploring her hypotheses, and been able to defend what she was doing with actual student learning achievements. She would also have begun to develop schema for thinking about her practice in a way that would enable her to respond to her students’ learning needs; she would have begun to develop her own personal theories about children’s literacy learning in her classroom; and she would also have been developing a way of managing the uncertainties of teaching.
