Teacher learning from practice: An embedded approach to situated learning

Author(s):

Dan Jazby(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

01. Continuing Professional Development: Learning for Individuals, Leaders, and Organisations

Format:

Paper

Session Information

01 SES 11 C, Dialogue about practice in professional development

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-10

17:15-18:45

Room:

428.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Ruth Kershner

Contribution

As education becomes a dynamic professional field, educators are required to continually develop their professional knowledge and skills (Guskey & Huberman, 1995). Thus, globally, understanding mechanisms which enable teacher professional learning could enhance teachers’ continuing professional growth. This paper presents a case study in which an interviewed teacher (Hannah) attributes their professional learning as occurring as the result of her classroom practice, without an obvious external stimulus. In the area of mathematics education, most investigations of teacher learning employ either a cognitivist or a sociocultural framework (Sowder, 2007). Cognitivist frameworks tend to focus on trying to understand the cognitive processes and knowledge structures which support desirable professional practice. Sociocultural frameworks tend to situate teacher learning as occurring within complex social organisations (Sawyer & Greeno, 2009) and examine how these social entities create communities of practice and shared norms (Wenger, 1998). This paper will show the limitations that both of these approaches have when trying to describe the kind of learning documented in the case study.

The author proposes an ecological framework – Embedded Learning – which may account for, and enable analysis of, this kind of teacher learning. Analysis of the case study seeks to assess whether this framework is able to provide an economical account of teacher learning from practice. Like Clarke and Hollingsworth (2002), teacher learning is posited to occur as the result of interaction between four domains – external, personal, practical and a domain of consequence. Embedded Learning enables teacher learning to be analysed across the personal, practical and outcome domains using an analysis of ‘perception-action cycles’ to detail the interactions between each domain. It is a situated learning framework, but unlike prevalent views of situated learning, which focus on the complex social organisations in which learning occurs (Sawyer & Greeno, 2009), an embedded view focuses on how learning is situated within specific task environments, such as classrooms. Perception guides interaction between a teacher and their environment (J. J. Gibson, 1979) enabling a teacher to receive feedback regarding the actions they have taken (Kirlik, 2007). Perceptual learning (E. J. Gibson, 1969) may occur as a result of this interaction with a task environment. Through this lens, perception is an active process in which a teacher would, theoretically, actively engage with their environment (e.g. a classroom) in order to make sense of their surroundings (J. J. Gibson, 1979). Perceptual learning occurs as familiarity with performing a specific task within an environment enables increased efficiency and discrimination in this perceptual activity (E. J. Gibson, 1969). Environmental entities are viewed as being meaningful to the perceiver and, with practice, a perceiver may learn to associate more nuanced interpretations of environmental events with specific structures in environmental information. Embedded learning builds upon perceptual learning to argue that interactive task performance creates a constant perception-action feedback mechanism that can facilitate learning from practice.

The case study presents an early-career teacher’s account of her learning that took place as she conducted a lesson with 5-year-old students regarding subtraction. Hannah learnt about the need to reduce the level of abstraction of mathematical representations when teaching young children. The analysis suggests that this learning occurred as Hannah associated teaching practices (e.g. using abstract representations) with immediate salient environmental outcomes which she perceived as meaningful (e.g. student body language cues). When viewed as embedded learning, Hannah’s capacity to perceive relevant salient environmental outcomes enables a perception-action feedback mechanism to drive in-situ learning. This raises questions regarding the importance of perceptual capacities with regard to facilitating ongoing learning from practice.

Method

The case study presented in this paper was drawn from a larger study of teachers’ in-the-moment decision making during primary mathematics classes (Jazby, 2014). The interview was conducted using Critical Decision Method (CDM). CDM is a semi-structured, recall-based interview technique developed by researchers of human decision making (Crandall, Klein, & Hoffman, 2006). The method asks interviewees to recall a time in which they felt that their decision making within a specific task environment was put to the test. This incident – referred to as a ‘critical incident’ – is then subjected to four ‘sweeps’. Sweep one involves asking the interviewee to recall possible critical incidents before one incident is selected to be investigated further. In sweep two, the interviewee is asked to describe the selected incident while a timeline of events is constructed. Sweep three is referred to as ‘progressive deepening’. In this sweep, the interviewee’s cognition and perception is queried around key points which are captured in sweep two. The final sweep entails asking the interviewee a series of hypothetical questions relating to the incident (such as, “what if the content area of this lesson had been different”). This study defines an incident as critical in the context of a primary maths classroom if: the interviewed teacher identifies the incident as non-routine; the incident relates to students’ understanding of mathematics (rather than a behaviour management issue, for example); the interviewed teacher felt that the incident was challenging; the teacher did not have a ready response to the incident. No objective record – such as a video recording – of the incident is collected as the kind of events which meet the criteria of a ‘critical incident’ may be rare and difficult to capture when a teacher is being directly observed (Crandall et al., 2006). Donmoyer argued that analysis of single case studies may provide insights which assist “in the forming of questions rather than in the finding of answers” (2000, pp. 51 - 52). The embedded account developed in this study is then compared to cognitivist and sociocultural accounts. As Lipshitz (2010) has argued in relation to CDM data, the economy of each account and the potential research questions raised, can be used to assess the potential utility of each account.

Expected Outcomes

Compared to cognitivist and sociocultural accounts, an embedded learning framework provides a more economical account of Hannah’s learning. There is no need to refer to an external stimulus or change in internal knowledge representation to explain how this classroom incident led to professional learning which changed subsequent practice. There was no ‘knowledgeable other’ to guide participation within a complex social entity (Wenger, 1998). Instead, interaction with a task environment, facilitated by perception-action cycles, enables a claim to knowledge to become situated within the context of classroom practice. A set of environmental cues (both body language and particular mathematic representations) become meaningful to Hannah. This creates a perception-action routine which connects Hannah’s knowledge claim, to cues which suggest when this knowledge is relevant and to actions which can be employed when these cues are perceived. This analysis raises questions regarding the impact that perceptual capacities may have on a teacher’s capacity to learn from their own practice. If Hannah’s learning is guided by her perception of meaningful environmental structures, and if different environmental structures were associated with different meanings, the feedback Hannah would have receive from the environment would have been different. Potentially, perceptual capacities, like knowledge, attitudes and beliefs in Clarke and Hollingsworth’s (2002) model, may account for between-teacher differences in the ability to learn from practice. Also, embedded learning may hinder attempts to facilitate teacher learning from an external source. Given the importance of ongoing teacher professional learning internationally, further investigation of teachers’ perceptual capacities is warranted.

References

Clarke, D., & Hollingsworth, H. (2002). Elaborating a model of teacher professional growth. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18(8), 947-967. Crandall, B., Klein, G. A., & Hoffman, R. R. (2006). Working minds: A practitioner's guide to cognitive task analysis. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Donmoyer, R. (2000). Generalizability and the single-case study. In R. Gomm, M. Hammersley & P. Foster (Eds.), Case study method: Key issues, key texts (pp. 45-68). London: Sage. Gibson, E. J. (1969). Principles of perceptual learning and development. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Guskey, T. R., & Huberman, M. (1995). Introduction. In T. R. Guskey & M. Huberman (Eds.), Professional Development in Education: New Paradigms and Practices (pp. 1-6). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Jazby, D. (2014). Do teachers make decisions like firefighters? Applying naturalistic decision-making methods to teacher in-class decision making in mathematics. In J. Anderson, M. Cavanagh & A. Prescott (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th annual conference of the Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia (pp. 303-310). Sydney: MERGA. Kirlik, A. (2007). Ecological resources for modeling interactive behavior and embedded cognition. In W. Gray (Ed.), Integrated models of cognitive systems. New York: Oxford University Press. Lipshitz, R. (2010). Rigor and relevance in NDM: How to study decision making rigorously with small Ns and without controls and (inferential) statistics. Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making, 4(2), 99-112. Sawyer, R. K., & Greeno, J. G. (2009). Situativity and Learning. In P. Robbins & M. Aydede (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (pp. 347-367). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sowder, J. T. (2007). The Mathematical Education and Development of Teachers. In F. Lester (Ed.), Second Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning (Vol. 1, pp. 157-224). Charlotte, NC: NCTM. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice : learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Author Information

Dan Jazby (presenting / submitting)

The University of Melbourne

Melbourne Graduate School of Education

University of Melbourne

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