Jun 14, 2014 - (b) When you set the incident in context, you wrote that the girl, â⦠is ... when a strategy doesn't work as you hope it will, so don't forget to ... confronting because, âIf you won't do this, you can do thatâ is still a (disguised) form of.
A three feature analysis for developing professional knowledge in undergraduate teacher education through students’ self-‐reported classroom teaching experiences1 Dr David Tripp, Adjunct Associate Professor at Murdoch University This is a short account of one process I use to teach both the knowledge and skills of professional practice through incidents produced by the learners themselves in the practicum of the final unit of a Diploma of Education (Primary) course. It also demonstrates the richness of teaching opportunities provided by the analysis of single critical incidents. Rationale and process On the basis that a strategy for good understanding and retention of academic knowledge is to situate it in students’ own experiences2, the following procedure was developed: 1. Working in small groups, the students share short stories about an event they have experienced as undergraduate teachers in a practicum or as school students themselves. 2. They write these up individually, and my feed-‐back to them includes an analysis that identifies three features in their incidents— a. specific management strategies that the students’ and their mentor teachers’ used (or could/should have used); b. how the educational theory and the processes of theorising practice I taught in the unit, informed both the strategies and principles identified in the critical incidents. c. Strategies for, and theory (explanations) of good practice, are two of three components of the more general principles of practice.3 3. The incidents are then returned to each student with the opportunity to respond privately before agreeing to a version that can be shared amongst all students in a weekly ‘critical incident clinic’ that ran throughout the unit. 4. The incidents were then used to connect their experience to the unit texts, and to illustrate teaching points I made in lectures and discussions. To show the content of the process, the following is one student's recounted incident and my feed-‐back on it. For this account I’ve taken only the central part of the student’s originally longer account, and I should also say that what’s presented here includes my later perception of strategies, principles and theory that were not in my original response to the student, partly because I did not have the time for the fairly exhaustive analysis that this became through writing it up for my current teaching material, partly because it would not have been appropriate to give the student so much to deal with at once. However, it does illustrate the complexity of decision-‐making in teaching, and how easy it is to find so much to teach from a single incident. 1 Appendix 4 of a Submission to the Australian Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group by Dr David Tripp (submitted: 14 June 2014). The whole submission is available on http://prinsofprac.com/materials.php 2 A major effect of situating academic teaching and learning in students’ own (and therefore, authentic) experiences is that it captures the powerful energy of the emotional dimension of the experience, which has been much neglected in research on learning, although Dewey was writing about it in 1916. 3 The third and fourth components of a principle of practice (function and values) were not identified here for reasons of overload, but they can easily be found in the components given: the value in in Treat the child with respect, is obvious, as is its function also. © 2009 David Tripp
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Incident 22: Attention seeking #1 (EDU4205/LB) One child can ruin a whole lesson I began the lesson and it was all going really well. I went through the process slowly, waiting for everyone to finish each part before moving onto the next. Everyone was managing apart from this particular student. She wasn’t getting the attention she wanted so she started playing up, saying that she didn’t want to do it. I had a look at what she had done and it was fine. I encouraged her and said she was doing well and she should keep going. ‘I’m not doing it’ she pronounced. I told her sometimes we need to do things we don’t want to do. She kept refusing so I gave her the option of moving away from her desk and sitting at the back so she didn’t disrupt the other students. She kept saying ‘no’ and wouldn't move. I became quite flustered and after some arguing with her my mentor teacher had to step in and tell her to do as she was being asked, and she moved her to the back of the classroom. Unfortunately for me it ruined what was a great lesson. Although all the other students achieved the outcomes I had set for them, I finished the lesson feeling like I had failed. Individual feed-‐back (first to student and then to whole class): (a) Think about the theory (why it works) here. Give a child who refuses to comply the option of doing something different, can work because it’s a way to Give the child some room to move and to Allow the child to retain some sense of power by Allow her to get you to negotiate with her; both of these tend to De-‐escalate the emotions and Enable the child retain a sense of dignity (and achievement, and thus self-‐worth). All these are a part of your professional obligation to Always treat the child with respect. (b) When you set the incident in context, you wrote that the girl, “… is known to be disruptive and gets moody when she doesn’t think she can do it. She is known to want to get attention.” That suggests you were seeing two separate motives for her refusal to finish the task, whereas being disruptive to get attention could be how she tries to get help with something she feels she cannot do by herself. Attention seeking is a kind of behaviour, and Behaviours are a response, not a cause, so Don’t just deal with the behaviour, look for the motivation for it and deal with that too. (c) So I think you got things back to front when you decided that that, She wasn’t getting the attention she wanted so she started playing up, saying that she didn’t want to do it. Try to reverse your thinking so that it becomes: She didn’t want to do it, so she started playing up, and that should lead to, Ask why she didn’t want to do it. The point is that Every child has a reason for their behaviour which, even if it’s habitual, will always be triggered by something in the moment. So her seeking your attention is actually her solution to a problem she has, and To deal effectively with her and her unacceptable behaviour, you must find out what that is. (d) That the child is disruptive and moody when she doesn’t think she can do something, tells you that the generic, I don’t want to do it, could be a face-‐saver for, I can’t do it (which means, I’m dumb), or I feel I won’t be able to do it (which means, I lack confidence). Decode implied meanings behind the actual words of children’s explanations of their actions. (e) You did well to tell her that, sometimes we need to do things we don’t want to do, but it’s also a good idea to, Tell children why they do need to do each particular task, perhaps with an “I-‐statement”: … and I’m asking you to do this because it’s a way to learn how to … , which is just one an example of a possible implementation strategy. (f) Good, too, to try to Avoid power struggles by using the “Give the child a choice” strategy. © 2009 David Tripp
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(g) It’s disappointing when a strategy doesn’t work as you hope it will, so don’t forget to Always try to understand why a strategy did or didn’t work. Also remember There’s no such thing as a sure-‐fire strategy in teaching, and in this case the strategy probably escalated the power struggle: giving an option can still be confronting because, “If you won’t do this, you can do that” is still a (disguised) form of “You will do as I tell you”. So I think you needed to do more preparatory work before employing the strategy. It was a good move to look at what she’d already done, and then to encourage her to continue by praising what she’d already done, but hearing, “I don’t want to do it” doesn’t, Get the full story. (h) She needs to trust you to give you her story, so it’d probably have helped to have begun with an active listening strategy such as Acknowledge the feeling: Yes, I can see you don’t want to do it, but … . (i) If she won’t tell you outright why she doesn’t want to do it, make suggestions (Implementation strategy for getting the full story). Maybe start with the idea that she’s seeking your attention because she didn’t feel confident to do it without help: Sounds like you’re asking me to help you with the next bit, and then deal with her response to that. (j) Something you can always say to a child who feels they cannot do something is, Well, if you thought you could do it, what would you do first? In other words, If a child feels unable to do something, find a way to just get them started on doing it. (k) A direct challenge to our authority will often leave us floundering at first, so When nothing seems to work, get out of the situation to buy time to develop some options. Some exit strategies are to: • break off the confrontation: OK, think it over and I’ll come back to you in a minute; • involve someone else: Ask her neighbour to help her get started; • take control differently: OK, if you’re not going to do it now, you can do it later.
As you experienced it at the time, an incident like this is all exceedingly complicated and fraught, so the fact that you needed help from your teacher mentor with it at this stage of becoming a graduate teacher doesn’t surprise me a bit, so Don’t be disappointed in not managing it successfully first time, that’s why your mentor is there for you. Remember that to a large extent it’s because as a student teacher you’re in a very difficult situation: you don’t know the students or the material that well, the children know you’re not a ‘real’ teacher (yet), and you’re also new to them, so they’re trying you out to see who you are by what you do. All that will change when you have your own class, but for now your mentor teacher is there to help because you are not expected to perform as an experienced teacher when you’re not: you’re there to learn, and rather than looking back on this as some kind of a ‘failure’, try to see it as for the useful learning experience that it can be. Follow up with your group 1a ‘Attention seeking’ is used as a ‘black box’ category of unacceptable behaviour, and the term turns behaviour that could be being caused by what the child is experiencing into an unmotivated personality trait, and as that’s the child’s problem it avoids the teacher having to look any further into it because she's then "an attention seeker". But how many times have you heard a child’s behaviour dismissed as the child’s fault because it’s “just attention seeking”? © 2009 David Tripp
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1b Ask your group for their experiences of similar problems and suggestions and discuss those in the light of some further reading. Eg: http://www.interventioncentral.org/behavioral-‐ interventions/challenging-‐students/breaking-‐attention-‐seeking-‐habit-‐power-‐random-‐ positive . 1c Conclude by seeing if you can, Describe any symptoms which differentiate attention seeking from other motivations for unacceptable behaviour (such as power play or enhanced peer group status). 2a I’d also like you to think about the strategy of waiting till everyone’s finished before moving on to the next stage of a whole class task. The strategy does have a limited place in teaching, but, What side-‐effects does waiting for everyone to finish have for different students? The more able finish quickly and then become bored waiting for the rest, while the less able are shamed by always being last. Next time the strategy is used, Observe a couple of children at each ability pole to see how they are coping. 2b Try to Find ways to mitigate the negative side effects of this strategy, and we’ll discuss it in class next week. Three concluding observations 1 Theory and practice I have observed that most teacher mentors seldom if ever refer to any social or psychological theory, nor do they often seek to explain how or why a strategy works (ie. theorise their practice), but this analysis shows that explanation is essential to understanding in two ways. First, theory is encapsulated in principles of practice because it explains what is happening and why in general terms, and it informs what particular strategy is most likely to succeed in a particular instance. Second, in view of the lack of educological theory, theorisation in terms of practitioners constructing their own explanations from their observations of the results of their actions, is essential to knowing what strategy is most likely to succeed as well as it being a successful mentoring process. Given the lack of attention teachers’ theorisation of their practice has received from educational researchers or is given in teacher education courses, the kind of analysis presented here also shows how surprisingly frequent relevant theory is in practice; indeed, it is more necessary for a beginning than an experienced teacher to know the theoretical components and employ theorisation processes in their practice, because beginners are constructing their understanding of strategies and their skills in using them, from experience, rather than simply trying one they have learned as good thing to do, hoping it will work on this or that occasion. 2 The 3 component analysis The categories of strategy or principle are not always clear cut; for instance, it's not immediately clear whether, Get the full story, is a principle of practice or a strategy. The rule I use and have applied here is to categorise it as a principle of practice because there are a number of different ways (ie. strategies) to implement it. Similarly, Observe a couple of children at each ability pole to see how they are coping, can be a strategy or a theoretical process. I think how one classifies it should depend on the purpose of the observation: if it’s to answer, What do I do now? during a lesson, I’d see it as a strategy. Here, however, I saw it as theoretical because I was asking my group of beginning teachers to produce data on how their students cope with time constraints in order to understand children’s learning, and perhaps to uncover a principle from which they can develop teaching strategies. © 2009 David Tripp
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I regard difficulties in categorisation such as those as a positive in that they tend to occur between strategy and principles of practice or between principles of practice and theory, but not between theory and strategy, which demonstrates how both theory and action are present in, and are combined by, a principle of practice. 3 Reporting A written account of incidents is necessary for this kind of analysis: it allows for repeated revisiting and is the best medium for developing research data on both teaching and the mentoring of it. Students and mentors need to journal their experiences for their own learning, as well as to build to contribute to an archival record of the profession’s practitioner knowledge, for teaching beginning teachers. Note: There’s more about Dewey and emotion in teaching in the 2011 preface to Tripp, D.H. (1993) Critical incidents in teaching: developing professional judgement. London and New York: Routledge (now published in the Routledge Classics of Education series). For more on principles of practice, go to www.prinsofprac.com
© 2009 David Tripp
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