Session Information
10 SES 12 E, Experience, Diversity and Critical Thinking
Paper Session
Contribution
Like all education, teacher education requires a deep understanding, both by teachers and learners, of learning processes. Teachers’ learning has primarily been observed and assessed through teachers’ performance due to the process-product conceptualization of teaching which promotes focusing on teachers’ outcomes and orientating teachers towards desirable behaviours (Freeman, 2002; Karimi & Norouzi, 2017). In fact, teachers’ learning involves complex and unobservable cognitive processes and yet these cognitive processes are largely ignored in many studies (Freeman, 2002, p.2). As teacher educators, the authors are motivated to gain a deeper understanding of teachers’ developing cognition about teaching.
Teacher cognition has developed into a widely researched field; studies have focused mainly on teachers’ beliefs and practice about particular aspects of teaching such as teaching grammar and vocabulary. Recently, it has called for more attention to changes in teachers’ cognition, including beliefs, knowledge, and attitudes, after taking particular teacher training courses. However, little attention has been paid to how teachers think more critically during the process of learning to teach, what thinking more critically means, and what influences teachers' critical thinking.
In the literature on critical thinking in general, it is easier to find methods to promote it than models to define, conceptualize, and measure it. There are numerous definitions of critical thinking. It can be interpreted as critical reflection, critical consciousness of what one does, logical thinking, argumentation, or simply a reasoning ability – an ability to ask and answer “why” questions. There are also controversies over whether critical thinking includes transferable generic skills or domain-specific ones. Because of the sophistication of the concept, the authors rejected a behavioural approach which oversimplifies critical thinking into specific, observable, and quantifiable skills. Instead of adopting an existing theoretical framework of critical thinking, therefore, the authors decided to engage directly in teachers’ professional lives, and together with them construct understanding of thinking processes they went through and the intellectual developments they experienced.
As very few studies have been conducted to provide insights into critical thinking of pre-service teachers (İşlek & Hürsen, 2014, p. 294), this research addresses critical thinking in novice teachers and in particular how they develop criticality in their thinking during an important transition period in professional development – the teaching practicum and the first year of teaching.
Method
The longitudinal investigation was conducted within a constructivist epistemology, “becoming” ontology, and a spirit of grounded theory. The authors believe such qualities as teachers’ “critical thinking” or “cognitive development” do not exist as an objective truth waiting to be objectively discovered by some correct research methods. Instead, they are abstract, sophisticated, multifaceted, and dynamic concepts that are manifested and shaped differently in different persons who live and work in different situations. Also, they do not remain unchanged but evolve over time and in various directions. Individuals construct their thinking processes in their own ways and different researchers also make sense of those thinking processes differently. Knowledge of an individual’s thinking process is therefore co-construction by both the individual and the researcher. The first author took an open approach to whatever happened in the reality of novice teachers with the possibility of generating a new theory which describes and explains notice teachers’ critical thinking development. The data collection involved the first author’s working closely with a cohort of 5 student teachers during 4 months of their English language teaching practicum in Vietnam. She was engaged in all their practicum activities as their secondary mentor but not involved in assessment of their performance to avoid conflicts of interest. She read their classroom observation sheets, read their email exchanges with their primary mentor about their lesson planning, observed their teaching practice, attended their meetings with their primary mentor and supervisors, and read their final reflection papers. The cohort and she also had intense group discussions every week, individual talks, written communication in their online diaries, and individual interviews at the end of the practicum. After the practicum, she continued following two of the cohort members into their first year of teaching for 16 months through individual Skype talks, Facebook, and Google-docs chats in order to discuss their experiences and thinking about language teaching in real-life contexts. The authors made use of data analysis techniques of grounded theory in analysing the data. To increase the trustworthiness, the first author kept contact with the participants during the data analysis and checked with them about her understanding of their data. Both authors also co-analyzed some of the data and brought their data to groups of colleagues for fresh perspectives.
Expected Outcomes
The intimate and longitudinal interaction with the novice teachers incrementally constructed a picture of the complexity and dynamics of their thinking in their own pedagogical context. Rather than defining thinking with general skills as found in the literature, the results enabled the authors to specifically describe what the novice teachers focused on as they learnt to teach English as a foreign language (“focus of attention”), how their focus of attention was expanded and deepened to capture more aspects of teaching (“cognitive movement”), and how those different aspects were negotiated to resolve dilemmas and problems (“cognitive negotiation”). Novice teachers’ thinking development was found to be a process of developing multiple perspectives inclusive of four core aspects of teaching and negotiation in solving teaching problems. This paper proposes a theoretical framework of novice teachers' critical thinking development. This theoretical framework offers an approach to understanding novice teachers’ cognitive changes, a framework for novice teachers to reflect on their learning to teach, and a model for teacher educators to design training activities and programmes to promote novice teachers’ critical thinking. The research expects to be able to highlight the decisive role of teachers’ cognition on their teaching performance and professional identities. It thus calls for, in teacher education, an inward discovery, appreciation, and development of teachers’ cognition rather than merely the process-product paradigm of controlling and assessing teachers’ outside performance.
References
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