Educational assessment as a mirror: Using clinical interviews to enact critical inquiry and reflections in pre-service teacher education

Author(s):

Noriyuki Inoue(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 05 B, Programmes and Approaches: Assessments

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-23

13:30-15:00

Room:

K5.20

Chair:

Bruno Leutwyler

Contribution

This paper discusses a study that examined how incorporating clinical interviews of individual children in a teacher education program helps teacher candidates develop the attitude of critical inquiry and reflections. According to Ginsburg (1997), clinical interviews can not only serve as a window to children’s’ minds but also promotes critical inquiries and reflections of our own assumptions and personal theories. Originally developed by Piaget (1952), the clinical interview method allows us to develop a radically new understanding of how children think and make sense of the world. If it is done meaningfully, it can bring about a significant understanding that can change the way teachers see and interact with their students.

In teacher education programs, clinical interviews can be incorporated as a part of the program where pre-service teachers can learn ways to:

1) deeply understand the source of an educational need of a child as a process to identifying a solution,

2) gain a deep understanding of how a particular child actually approaches or personally conceptualizes a variety of issues in education for improving teaching practice,

3) or identify the limitation of established theories, research or educational innovation by looking into a case that could qualify as a counter-example grounded in a real life context.

In the era of performance-based assessment in education, there is an increasing need to consider such qualitative inquiries not as a mere assessment activity but as a learning and self-transformation opportunity for pre-service teachers (Inoue, 2015). For pre-service teachers, clinical interviews can serve as the opportunities to inquire about a variety of aspects of educational practice as they actually interact with children. Most importantly, it allows pre-service teachers to critically reflect on their interactions with children and its process through which they could consider their future teaching in relation to it. For instance, they could reflect on ways to better interact with and understand their students such as how to help them open up to speak, how to probe unclear and worthy issues for explorations, and so on. After the interviews, they could deeply reflect on following issues:

Why did you decide to inquire about the topic?
What are the things that you did not anticipate before the interview?
What should you have probed further if you go back in time and redo the interview?
What cannot be explained by educational theories and research you learned?
If you can go back in time, what would you do differently and why?
What is your take-away as a new teacher?

In teacher education, such critical reflections can catalyze the process of inside-out transformations where teachers can encounter and update their meaning-making system (Torbert, 2004). It can be seen that such personal inquiries can open up essential opportunities of transformations to become a mindful educator.

In a way, this captures an often-forgotten function of educational assessment: In educational assessment, what is assessed is not only students in the classroom, but also those who teach them for the purpose of teaching improvement. This aspect of assessment can be easily lost if one becomes too obsessed with norm and performance-based assessment.

An important question is what do pre-service teachers actually learn if they are asked to conduct clinical interviews and reflect on their interviews as a part of their teacher education programs. What would be the nature of their reflections that they engage in? What implications can we drive from there?

Method

In this project, a clinical interview project was implemented as the final project in a psychological foundation course required in a pre-service teacher education program in a higher education institution in Southern California. In the course, each pre-service teacher was asked to first organize a proposal that includes the interview protocol with key interview questions and their rationale. After receiving the feedback on the proposal, they conducted a clinical interview with an individual student that they chose. During the interview, they were instructed to flexibly modify their interview questions to maximize the outcome of the interview. They were given the following guidelines on how to conduct the interview by Ginsburg (1997): • The interviewer explains the purpose of the interview • The interviewer avoids talking too much • The interviewer makes informal contact. • The interviewer displays warmth and support • The interviewer encourages verbalization • The interviewer helps the child to introspect • The interviewer remains silent when necessary • The interviewer probes unclear answers • The interviewer avoids using leading questions After the interview, they were asked to reflect on the interview process and what they learned from their interviews in light of learning theories and research that were discussed in the psychological foundation course, how they would change the interview process (if they can go back in time), what they did not anticipate in the interview and their take-always for future teaching. Then they were asked to write a paper that includes the following sections: 1) Introduction (the goal of your interview, why you are interested in the topic, etc.) 2) Student (characteristics of your student in one sentence) 3) Procedure (overview of interview protocol and process) 4) Findings and Discussions (show key findings from the interview and discuss them) 5) Educational Implications (What educators should learn from this project) 6) Reflection (What you learned and how this project helped you develop as a teacher) In this on-going study, the qualitative research methodology was used to analyze 64 clinical interview papers that the pre-service teachers submitted. It looked for chains of evidence to identify the common threads and themes that capture the nature of their reflections that seem to play a significant role for their teacher development (Yin, 1989; Miles & Huberman, 1994). About 55% of the students that pre-service teachers interviewed were elementary school students and the other students were secondary students.

Expected Outcomes

The analyses of the clinical interview papers resulted in extracting the following themes. Theme #1: Missing opportunities of understanding All the pre-service teachers (100%) identified multiple missed opportunities during the interview such as asking more meaningful questions and probing the issues that were worthy of attention. They reflected how they could have gained a deeper understanding if they conducted the interview differently. Theme #2: Much more complex students’ needs than it seems to be 88% of the students pointed out how they initially misunderstood their students’ needs to be much more simplistic (e.g., lack of intrinsic motivation) than they are (e.g., lack of social bonds and positive affective experiences in classrooms). They learned the importance of inquiring students’ educational needs in a more holistic manner. Theme #3: Trickiness of Initial assumptions 84% the students addressed that they learned how their initial assumptions can be betrayed as they interacted with the students. They learned that the issues that they were initially interested in (e.g., cognitive style) are not often the issues that they should be looking into (e.g., quality of teacher-student interactions) as teachers. Theme #4: Fundamental Significance of Relationship A majority of the students (91%) pointed out how establishing good relationships with their students is a key to understanding students deeply. They learned the importance of establishing rapport with their students in any kind of educational interactions. To summarize, the pre-service teachers learned to be more mindful of their actions and assumptions as they reflected on their clinical interviews. The clinical interview experiences seem to have created opportunities for them to see the importance of critical reflections and inquiry as they learned their worldviews are not necessarily in tune with reality. This study implies the significance of incorporating such reflective experiences in teacher education programs.

References

Ginsburg, H.P. (1997). Entering the child's mind: The clinical interview in psychological research and practice. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Inoue, N. (2015). Beyond actions: Psychology of action research for mindful educational improvement. New York:Peter Lang Publishing. Miles, M. B. & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Piaget, J. (1952). The child’s conception of number. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Torbert, W. R. (2004). Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Whitehead, J., & McNiff, J. (2006). Action Research: Living Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Yin, R. K. (1989). Case study research: Design and methods. Thousand Oaks, CA Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Author Information

Noriyuki Inoue (presenting / submitting)

Waseda University

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