TEACHING

knowledge bases of
ralph t. putnam

learning to teach
sharon feiman-nemser

methods for studying
james calderhead

KNOWLEDGE BASES OF

Researchers and other scholars seeking to understand and define the knowledge and thinking underlying teaching have focused on numerous issues and bring multiple perspectives to bear on this complex domain. Much of this work has addressed some combination of three sets of interrelated questions:

1. What do (or should) teachers know? What domains or categories of knowledge are important for teaching?
2. How do teachers know? What is the nature or form of various kinds of knowledge needed for teaching?
3. How do teachers think? What thought processes underlie teaching?

Efforts to address these questions are motivated, in part, by the connection between how teachers teach and what teachers think, know, and believe.

Historical Overview

During the first half of the twentieth century the substance and nature of teachers' knowledge was relatively unproblematic. Judging from various assessments for teacher certification of the period, teachers needed to know the content that they would teach students and have some knowledge of pedagogical practice. As systematic programs of research on teaching began to emerge in the 1960s, attention shifted to various teacher characteristics and behaviors associated with increased student achievement. Although this research did not directly examine the knowledge or thinking of teachers, it was grounded in an assumption that knowledge of relationships established through systematic research could provide a "scientific basis for the art of teaching," as the title of the 1978 book by Nathaniel L. Gage suggested.

As psychology shifted from behavioral to cognitive perspectives, scholars of teaching followed suit and began to focus on the mental life of teachers. By the 1980s, cognitive psychologists had established that the accumulation of rich bodies of knowledge is critical to expert performance in various domains, ranging from chess playing to medical diagnosis. Scholars of teaching began trying to characterize the expert knowledge that is needed for good teaching. In 1986 Lee S. Shulman catalyzed interest in the systematic study of the knowledge underlying teaching, arguing especially for the importance of understanding the role of teachers' knowledge of the content they teach.

Domains of Knowledge for Teaching

Teaching is a complex act, requiring many kinds of knowledge. Some of this knowledge is general and fairly enduring–such as knowledge of subject matter content or of general pedagogical principles; some is more specific and transient–such as knowledge of the particular students being taught and what has taken place in a particular class. Various systems for describing the knowledge needed for teaching have been developed with varying emphases and purposes. With any set of categories or domains of knowledge, it is important to keep in mind that these systems are used to bring conceptual order to knowledge that is in reality complex and interrelated. The various categories of knowledge are not discrete entities, and the boundaries between domains are fuzzy at best. With these caveats in mind, the following set of categories of teacher knowledge is loosely based on a 1987 article by Shulman:

• Knowledge of subject matter content
• Knowledge of general pedagogical principles and strategies
• Knowledge of learners, their characteristics, and how they learn
• Knowledge of educational contexts
• Knowledge of educational goals, purposes, and values

Because they are central to the daily work of teachers, general pedagogical knowledge, knowledge about learners, and knowledge of subject matter have been the focus of considerable research and scholarly discourse.

General pedagogical knowledge/knowledge about learners. These closely related categories of teacher knowledge include knowledge about teaching, learning, and learners that is not specific to the teaching of particular subject matter content. One large component of this domain is knowledge of classroom management–knowledge of how to keep groups of students engaged with various classroom tasks. Teachers must have repertoires of routines and strategies for establishing classroom procedures, organizing classroom events, keeping activities on track, and reacting to student misbehavior. Teachers also draw upon knowledge of instructional strategies for arranging classroom environments and conducting lessons to promote student learning. Experienced teachers have repertoires of strategies and routines for conducting lessons, keeping them running smoothly, and promoting student engagement.

Teachers' knowledge about managing classrooms and conducting lessons is intertwined with knowledge and beliefs about learners, learning, and teaching. Theories about how students learn guide teachers' instructional decisions and interactions with students, often in an implicit way. For example, a teacher who conceives of the learner's role as a passive recipient of knowledge teaches differently than one who conceives of the learner's role as an active participant in the learning process. The former typically presents information that students are expected to attend to, followed by rehearsal and practice of the presented information. The latter is apt to present problem-solving situations designed to stimulate students' thinking and knowledge-building.

Content knowledge. Obviously, teachers must know something about the content they teach. In drawing attention to the need for more attention to the role of content knowledge in teaching, Shulman in 1986 distinguished three kinds of content knowledge: subject matter content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and curricular knowledge. Subject matter content knowledge is what a content specialist knows, for example what a mathematician knows about mathematics. Pedagogical content knowledge is specialized knowledge needed for teaching the subject, such as understanding how key ideas in mathematics are likely to be misunderstood by learners, and multiple ways of representing important ideas in the domain. Curricular knowledge is knowledge of materials and resources for teaching particular content, including how subject matter content is structured and sequenced in different materials.

Early research sought but failed to establish a clear relationship between teachers' subject-matter knowledge–as measured by the amount of course-work, grades, and tests–and teaching effectiveness; taking more university mathematics courses did not necessarily make one a better teacher of mathematics. Nevertheless, when researchers examined what was learned and hence known by teachers, they were able to establish a connection between the degree of disciplinary knowledge and teaching effectiveness. In general, teachers with rich subject matter knowledge tend to emphasize conceptual, problem solving, and inquiry aspects of their subjects; less knowledgeable teachers tend to emphasize facts, rules, and procedures. Less knowledgeable teachers may stick closely to detailed plans or the textbook, sometimes missing opportunities to focus on important ideas and connections to other ideas. When the goal is fostering student understanding and meaningful learning, as promoted by many U.S. educational reform efforts of the 1980s and 1990s, the demands on a teacher's content knowledge intensify. Helping students understand important ideas in a discipline and how these ideas can be use in varied contexts requires that a teacher know more than the facts, concepts, and procedures they are teaching. They must also know how these ideas connect with one another and to other domains.

Often, when one thinks of understanding a discipline–such as mathematics, biology, or history–one means knowing important concepts and principles in the field, how they are related to one another, and how they connect to ideas in other domains. Additionally, to be truly knowledgeable, or "literate," in a particular field involves knowing how experts in that field think. Knowing science, for example, entails knowing something about rules for evidence and how scientific knowledge is established. Knowing literature involves knowing what makes a good critique or argument about a literary point. To teach particular disciplines well, a teacher must be aware of these aspects of disciplinary knowledge and be able to make them explicit in ways that are accessible to learners.

Nature and Form of Teacher Knowledge

A potential danger in describing various categories of knowledge for teaching is coming to think of teachers' knowledge itself as organized into abstract, discrete categories. In fact, what teachers know is complexly intertwined with other knowledge and beliefs and with the specific contexts in which teachers work. Numerous scholars have posed constructs to try to capture the complex contextualized nature of teachers' knowledge. Some researchers have argued that teachers' personalities and life experiences play a major role in shaping the kind of knowledge they develop about teaching, calling this knowledge "personal practical knowledge." In 1987 Kathy Carter and Walter Doyle argued that much of what experienced teachers know is "event-structured knowledge"–knowledge organized around the activities and events they have experienced in classrooms. Others have argued for the importance of articulating the "craft knowledge" of teaching–the implicit theories, skills, and ways of perceiving that teachers develop through their work.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, such efforts to understand knowledge for teaching have intersected and been informed by a more general movement in psychology and education to view knowledge and cognition as situated. Situative theorists posit that how and where a person learns a particular set of knowledge and skills become a fundamental part of what is learned. An individual's knowledge is intertwined with the physical and social contexts in which it was acquired. All of these efforts to characterize the ways in which knowledge for teaching is intertwined with contexts, other people, and personal histories help one appreciate the rich and complex nature of what teachers need to know. A number of important implications arise from this work.

What teachers know and how they know it are tied to particular contexts. Developing expertise in teaching entails working and learning in the contexts of teaching. Much of what teachers know is connected to particular tools–such as textbooks and instructional materials. Much of what teachers know is routinized and automatic. Just as a person driving a car with a manual transmission is not conscious of the coordination of movements of feet and hands as they drive–unless a problem arises–much of how teachers interact with students is similarly guided by routine. It is having much of what they know embedded in these routines that enables teachers and students to manage in a highly complex social environment. A downside of much of teachers' knowledge being routinized and automatic is that it can be difficult to examine and change when desired.

Teacher Thinking

As psychological perspectives shifted from behavioral to cognitive in the 1970s, a number of researchers began to focus on the thinking processes entailed in teaching. Much of this research focused on teachers' planning and decision-making. Research on planning suggests that it occurs at different levels (e.g., across a year, across a unit, across a day), that it is mostly informal (i.e., formal written plans play less of a role than does informal thinking about what to do), and that planning requires a broad knowledge base (i.e., of the various categories discussed above). Research that focused on the decisions made during interactive teaching itself found that teachers made few decisions as they taught and that those decisions dealt primarily with keeping planned activities on track. Other research suggests, however, that the well-established routines that teachers and students have developed do much to determine the nature of instruction and minimize conscious on-the-spot decision-making.

See also: English Education; History, Teaching of; Language Arts, Teaching of; Mathematics Education; Reading; Science Education; Social Studies Education; Teacher Education; Teacher Evaluation; Teaching, subentry on Learning to Teach; Writing, Teaching of.

bibliography

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Carter, Kathy, and Doyle, Walter. 1987. "Teachers' Knowledge Structures and Comprehension Processes." In Exploring Teachers' Thinking, ed. James Calderhead. London: Cassell.

Clark, Christopher M., and Peterson, Penelope L. 1986. "Teachers' Thought Processes." In Handbook of Research on Teaching, ed. Merlin C. Wittrock. New York: Macmillan.

Connelly, F. Michael, and Clandinin, D. Jean. 1985. "Personal Practical Knowledge and the Modes of Knowing." Review of Research in Education 16:3–56.

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Gage, Nathaniel L. 1978. The Scientific Basis of the Art of Teaching. New York: Teachers College Press.

Leinhardt, Gaea. 1990. "Capturing Craft Knowledge in Teaching." Educational Researcher 19 (2):18–25.

Leinhardt, Gaea, and Greeno, James G. 1986. "The Cognitive Skill of Teaching." Journal of Educational Psychology 78:75–95.

Putnam, Ralph T., and Borko, Hilda. 2000. "What Do New Views of Knowledge and Thinking Have to Say about Research on Teacher Learning?" Educational Researcher 29 (1):4–15.

Shulman, Lee S. 1986. "Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching." Educational Researcher 15 (2):4–14.

Shulman, Lee S. 1987. "Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform." Harvard Educational Review 57 (1):1–22.

Ralph T. Putnam

LEARNING TO TEACH

The meaning of the phrase learning to teach seems clear and straightforward, but in fact, its definition raises a host of empirical, conceptual, and normative questions. What do teachers need to know, care about, and be able to do in order to teach effectively in different contexts? How do teachers build a strong teaching practice and develop a professional identity over time? What role should teacher education play in learning to teach? How do the conditions of teaching shape the content of teacher learning? How do views of teaching shape theories of learning to teach?

Learning to teach is an emerging priority for policymakers and educational reformers. For example, the report of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, issued in 1996, placed teacher learning at the heart of its comprehensive blueprint for reform. The report asserts that what students learn is directly related to what teachers teach, and what teachers teach depends on the knowledge, skills, and commitments they bring to their teaching.

Myths About Learning to Teach

Conventional wisdom about learning to teach is rooted in social attitudes toward teaching and the experience of being a student. Some of these ideas contain half truths; some have influenced educational policy.

Teachers are born, not made. Some people believe that the ability to teach is a natural endowment like being musical. Some teachers seem to be "naturals" and some theorists posit an innate tendency in human beings to explain things. Even the founders of the common school believed that teaching was "women's true profession" because it tapped their instinct for nurturing the young. Still, the belief that teachers are born, not made rests on a narrow view of the intellectual and personal requirements of teaching. It ignores the growing understanding of teaching as a complex, uncertain practice, and minimizes the role of professional education on the grounds that the practice of teaching cannot be taught.

If you know your subject, you can teach it. Whatever else teachers need to know, they need to know their subjects. There are teachers whose abundant knowledge and love of their subject make them extremely effective even though they have had no special preparation for teaching. Other teachers who possess extensive subject matter knowledge are unable to present this knowledge clearly or help others learn it. Research is beginning to clarify what it means to "know" one's subject for purposes of teaching it, and why conventional measures of subject matter knowledge are problematic.

Historically, a liberal arts education was considered sufficient preparation for teaching secondary school. Policies that require academic majors for both elementary and secondary teaching candidates represent a contemporary variation on this theme. There is mounting evidence of teachers with a major in their subject not being able to explain fundamental concepts in that subject; this situation raises questions about such policies.

Scholars have identified three dimensions of subject matter knowledge for teaching: knowledge of central facts, concepts, theories and procedures; knowledge of explanatory frameworks that organize and connect ideas within a given field; and knowledge of the rules of evidence and proof in a given field. How is a proof in mathematics different from a historic explanation or a literary interpretation? In addition, teachers must be able to look at their subjects through the eyes of students, anticipating what students might find difficult or confusing, framing compelling purposes for studying particular content, and understanding how ideas connect across fields and relate to everyday life. Future teachers are unlikely to acquire this kind of knowledge in academic courses.

Teacher education prepares people to teach. Whereas the previous myths reflect considerable skepticism about teacher education, this myth reflects confidence that pre-service programs prepare people to teach. The typical program consists of a two-year sequence of education courses and field experiences. Common components include educational psychology, general and subject specific methods, and student teaching. What these components consist of varies across institutions.

Some studies show that teacher education is a weak intervention compared with the socializing effects of teachers' own elementary and secondary schooling, and the influence of on-the-job experience. Other studies suggest that intense, coherent teacher education programs do make a difference. Even the best program, however, cannot prepare someone to teach in a particular setting. Some of the most important things teachers need to know are local and can only be learned in context. Pre-service preparation can lay a foundation for this complex, situation-specific work, but the early years of teaching are an intense and formative phase in practice of learning to teach.

Phases in Learning to Teach

It is hard to say when learning to teach begins. From an early age, people are surrounded by teaching on the part of parents and teachers, and these early experiences with authority figures unconsciously shape teachers' pedagogical tendencies. The experience of elementary and secondary schooling has a particularly strong impact. From thousands of hours of teacher watching, prospective teachers form images of teaching, learning, and subject matter that influence their future practice unless professional education intervenes.

Liberal studies affect the way teachers think about knowledge and approach the teaching of academic content, although not always in educative directions. At their best, education courses and field experiences cultivate a professional understanding of and orientation toward teaching. Learning to teach begins in earnest when novices step into their own classroom and take up the responsibilities of full-time teaching.

Efforts to describe the stages teachers go through in learning to teach generally posit an initial stage of survival and discovery, a second stage of experimentation and consolidation, and a third stage of mastery and stabilization. These stages are loosely tied to years of experience, with stabilization occurring around the fifth year of teaching. Self-knowledge is a major outcome of early teaching. Novices craft a professional identity through their struggles with and explorations of students and subject matter. Over time, teachers develop instructional routines and classroom procedures and learn what to expect from their students. Experience generally yields greater self-confidence, flexibility, and a sense of professional autonomy. After five to seven years most teachers feel they know how to teach. Whether we call these teachers "masters" or "experts" depends on what kind of teaching is valued and how mastery and expertise are defined.

Models of teacher development serve as a reminder that the process of learning to teach extends over a number of years; however, the current structure of professional education and the conditions of beginning teaching do not reflect this. Continuity of learning opportunities between pre-service preparation and new teacher induction is rare. The assignment of beginning teachers does not reflect their status as learners. Most beginning teachers have the same responsibilities as their more experienced colleagues, and often get the most difficult classes because they lack seniority.

The rise of formal induction programs signals a recognition on the part of some educators and policymakers that learning to teach occurs during the early years of teaching. About thirty states have support systems for beginning teachers and most urban districts offer some induction support, usually in the form of mentor teachers. Still, few programs rest on a robust understanding of teacher learning or help novices learn the kind of ambitious teaching advocated by reformers. Many programs treat induction as short-term support designed to ease the novice into full-time teaching.

What might a developmental curriculum for learning to teach entail? Which tasks belong to initial preparation and which to the induction phase? Despite gaps in knowledge and a lack of consensus about the best ways to prepare teachers and support their learning over time, it is possible to conceptualize a continuum of learning opportunities for teachers.

Teacher Preparation and Learning to Teach

If teachers are to learn a version of teaching that they have not experienced as pupils, they need to develop new frames of reference for interpreting what goes on in classrooms and making decisions about what and how to teach. Positioned between teachers' past experience as students and their future experience as teachers, university-based teacher education is well situated to encourage this shift in thinking. Unless pre-service teachers reconstruct their early beliefs about teaching, learning, students, and subject matter, continuing experience will solidify these beliefs, making them even less susceptible to change.

A second task of teacher preparation particularly suited to university-based study is helping future teachers develop conceptual and pedagogical knowledge of their teaching subjects. Current educational reforms have prompted renewed interest in teachers' subject matter knowledge because they call for a kind of teaching that engages students not only in acquiring knowledge, but also in building and communicating about knowledge. This task depends on contributions from arts and sciences, and education.

To build bridges between subject matter and students, teachers must understand what children are like at different ages, how they make sense of their world, how their ways of thinking and acting are shaped by their language and culture, how they gain knowledge and skills, and develop confidence as learners. This background knowledge becomes increasingly critical as teachers work with children whose racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds differ from their own.

In order to learn from teaching, teacher candidates must develop the necessary tools and dispositions. This includes skills of observation, interpretation and analysis, the habit of supporting claims about student learning with evidence, the willingness to consider alternative explanations. If teacher candidates work on these skills with others, they may begin to see colleagues as resources in learning to teach.

Although teachers need to know many things, effective teaching depends on the ability to use knowledge appropriately in particular situations. Pre-service teachers can begin developing a repertoire of approaches to curriculum, instruction, and assessment during pre-service preparation. Learning to adapt and use this knowledge in practice is an appropriate task for teacher induction.

Teacher Induction and Learning to Teach

Induction happens with or without a formal program; however, the presence of a strong program can minimize the survival mentality that grips so many beginning teachers and orient their learning in productive directions. Beginning teachers need to learn the goals and standards for students at their grade level, and how these expectations fit into a larger framework of curriculum and assessment. They must get to know their students and community, and figure out how to use this knowledge in developing a responsive curriculum.

If teacher preparation has been successful, beginning teachers will have a vision of good teaching and a beginning repertoire consistent with that vision. A major task for beginning teachers is acquiring the local understandings and developing the flexibility of response to enact this repertoire. The challenges of teaching alone for the first time can discourage new teachers from trying ambitious pedagogies. Induction support can keep them from abandoning such approaches in favor of what they perceive as safer, less complex activities. It can also help novices focus on the purposes and not just the management of learning activities and their meaning for students.

To teach in ways that respond to students and move learning forward, teachers must be able to elicit and interpret students' ideas and generate appropriate teaching moves as the lesson unfolds. Listening to what students say and constructing responses on a moment-to-moment basis; and attending to the needs of the group while attending to individuals requires considerable skill and practice: It represents a demanding learning task for beginning teachers. Beginning teachers must create and maintain a classroom learning community that is safe, respectful, and productive of student learning. Issues of power and control lie at the heart of this task that is tied up with novices' evolving professional identity. Often beginning teachers struggle to reconcile competing images of their role as they evolve a coherent professional stance.

If teachers are asked how they learned to teach, they will say they learned to teach by teaching. Although experience plays an important role in learning to teach, there is a big difference between "having" experience and learning desirable lessons from that experience. To learn from the experience of teaching, teachers must be able to use their practice as a site for inquiry. This means turning confusions into questions, experimenting with new approaches and studying the effects, and framing new questions to extend their understanding.

The ongoing study and improvement of teaching is difficult to accomplish alone. Teachers need opportunities to talk with others about teaching, to analyze samples of student work, to compare curricular materials, to discuss problems and consider different explanations and actions. Many reformers believe that this kind of intellectual work can best be accomplished by groups of teachers working together over time.

See also: Language Arts, Teaching of; Mathematics Education, subentry on Preparation of Teachers; Motivation, subentry on Instruction; Reading, subentry on Teaching of; Science Education, subentry on Preparation of Teachers; Social Studies Education, subentry on Preparation of Teachers; Teacher Education; Teacher Learning Communities; Writing, Teaching of.

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Shulman, Lee. 1986. "Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching." Educational Researcher 15 (2):4–14.

Sharon Feiman-Nemser

METHODS FOR STUDYING

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.

See also: Research Methods; Teacher Education; Teacher Evaluation.

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James Calderhead