What Doing Research Looks Like

Notes on Teacher Development

So this morning I am trying to think about teacher development, about my own development as a teacher. I feel like the story I am trying to tell in this book is wrapped up in my own process of development as a teacher, and I feel like I need to find someone who can help me talk about this. In other words, I felt the need, this morning, to do some research. To find other people who have studied what I’m interested in and see what I can learn from them.

Problem is, this means researching outside of my area of expertise and so I am basically a novice. I was fortunate to stumble upon a book that looks useful. And from this book, I was off to the personal website of the author, to see if she has written any articles that might be useful for me to look at. I found her and found an article and this lead me somewhere helpful. The article—well, within the first few pages, I knew I was onto something, but I was sort of also not on to something. I discovered a journal that might be useful for me—Teacher Education Quarterly—and I found, within the first few pages of her article some things that were definitely seeming to be on the right track.

The problem is, before I get to those, the problem is, this is a journal aimed primarily at people who teach teachers to become teachers, teacher education folks. So, I’m thinking, okay, I’m interested in the professional trajectory of folks in higher education, the journey that teachers in college settings go through, but perhaps these are similar to the journeys that teachers in the K-12 world go through. So, I’m following this source, allowing myself to look into it, within a given time-frame that I’ve established (a time frame whose end is quickly approaching!!!).

I felt like I was onto something on the first page of the article, when I discovered her research questions:

·      How does the pedagogical understanding of teachers grow or change over time?

·      What are some of the personal and professional influences on teachers' thinking?

These looked enormously promising! These are MY questions, as well, so I kept going.

Then, I stumbled upon something that looked REALLY interesting for me—and useful, although the dated nature of the material worries me a bit.

Levin references “a model of the development of teachers' thinking in the pedagogical domain.”

Development of teachers thinking. That’s what I want to know about. I want someone who can give me a model to help ME think about the development or trajectory of my own thinking, over time. As I encountered this framework and noted the names of the authors, so I could go look into their work myself, I felt myself growing really excited! And the firmness and confidence of this line really sort of blew me out of the water:

Since that time the model has been evaluated empirically in several studies (Animon, et al, 1985; Hutcheson & Anmon, 1986; Levin & Ammon, 1992, 1996) and found to represent the developmental trajectory of teachers' thinking about teaching and learning, behavior, and development.

Um, wow. This line suggest that not only is there a model out there, this model has been tested and proven, so to speak, empirically. Note the lack of “hedging” terms in that passage. So, this is a pretty good model, apparently. I stopped when I got to the bit about Appendix A and I scanned down to the bottom of the article to take a look. Maybe I should have gone out to look at the model itself, first? Or, this is the model. Okay.

So, I have spent a few minutes looking at this model and thinking about it. I note the word “cognitive.” She writes that this model is a “cognitive-developmental structure.” This is helpful. The word cognitive makes me think about mental growth or development and this is good, but as I spend some time with the table, I am interested, but I begin to realize that it’s not quite what I want. It’s helpful, but not quite what I want. The model seems to take the reader from empiricism through behaviorism to contructivism, with this last being the most highly-developed form of teaching. As I look at this model, I am asking myself if I do these things when I teach and where I fit into the framework, but I am also realizing that it’s not quite what I want.

And the word that I’m thinking about is the word emotional. I’m thinking about how teachers FEEL about their teaching and about their teaching journey. I’m thinking about how I feel about the kind of teaching I did early in my career and then as I progressed and then, also, now. It’s not just the cognitive growth or development that interests me. It’s the emotional development and disposition towards ones teaching that I want to learn more about. That’s the part I think about.

And so, there is new or more work to do, but first, I need to spend a bit more time with Levin’s article, just to be sure that it’s definitely NOT what I’m looking for.

Is this a dead-end?

Not really.

My concern going in was about the appropriateness of her research on K-12 teachers for me, given my interest in college-teachers. That concern is still there.

But, I’ve identified a journal I’d like to search in further and she has helped me to clarify my thinking about what I’m looking for or what I want to find. That’s a big part of the process it seems. You have a felt sense of what you want, but it’s hard to put into language. The revelation of the past 20 or so minutes, for me, is the realization that what interests me is both the cognitive development of a teacher but also how one FEELS about one’s teaching. The emotional development of a teacher.

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Key Research Type: Case Study (what about in higher education?)

things that he is in flux about (35)

Goals and Pedagogical Beliefs

Developmental Stage Models (37)

“Still believed”

Not all teachers even identify-their sense of "self' as a teacher (Nias. 1989). (42)

Genre: Teacher Memoirs (Ayers, 1993)—see p. 45

Research on Teacher’s Professional Lives (46)

Stages of Development

Longitudinal studies

Essay collections, see Amazon.