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TELLING TEACHING: COLUMN #3
Donald Freeman
Center for Teacher Education, Training, and Research
School for International Training
Brattleboro, VT 05301 USA
email: <teacherknowledge@sit.edu>
web address: /www.sit.edu/

Questioning your teaching: How could I be wrong here?

At the end of the last column (March 2000), I said I'd write more about questioning which I intend to do. But first let me back up a bit to pick up the threads of the story. When Mario first approached me about writing a column in Humanising Language Teaching, we talked about what the focus might be. I told him I was interested in the issues and practices that surround making public what teachers know about doing the work of teaching. For it seems to me that by-in-large, the people who do the work in classrooms are generally consumed by the day-to-day rhythms of preparing, teaching, assessing students, and so on. Rarely are they drawn to public examinations of the knowledge that underlies their actions. So I proposed to Mario this column-- Telling Teaching-- in which I said I'd try to lay out some of my thinking about why going public in this way matters and how we can do it. In the first column (January 2000), I set out the bare bones of the process. I said that telling teaching involved three things: examining what is going on in your classroom, questioning why it happens as it does, and assessing how your teaching is suiting that learning. Like anything embedded in time, these three elements become a process; they form a cycle. The first step in the process involves examining what is going on in the learning and among the learners in your classroom. It means probing the core, which Earl Stevick referred to as 'what goes inside and between people' in the language classroom. In the second column (March 2000), I wrote about seeing as the basis of this process. The problem is that in the classroom-- and indeed elsewhere in life-- we generally see automatically. I wrote of the example of choreographer Merce Cunningham who started taking photographs and videos of his own work. Using this different medium pushed him to see differently what was extremely familiar. He said in the interview, "When I first worked with a camera, I kept seeing something that didn't look right. Then, I'd look at [the same movement] on stage, and it seemed fine. I'd go back, and finally I realized one of the dancers had her foot this way while the others were that way. At first you can't figure out what you're seeing. So you look again. It makes you rethink, open your mind."

Until we push ourselves to see, to really see what is going on, which entails pushing beyond what we assume to be the case, we have no real basis on which to act. Generally, we take things for granted and thus we do not question, look for evidence which might challenge our assumed views. Thus they become immobilized by our status-quo explanations for why things are as they are. 'This tense is always difficult for students. I simply have to drill them until they get it.' 'They always want to use their L1 dictionaries when they read these longer readings.' 'Games are the only thing that will keep them engaged at this point in the term.' and so on. These commonplaces can keep us trapped. Encased in what we think is going on, 'we keep on keeping on' to use the great line from the Bob Dylan song. We do not question because we do not see. While this is human, it is also problematic. The key question is, I think, a very simple one. It is a question that I first heard posed by a professor, Joe Maxwell (1996), while he was teaching about validity in educational research. The basic test of validity, he said, lay in asking yourself the question: 'How could I be wrong here?' By 'here', Joe Maxwell was referring to the conclusions we were drawing from analysis of data in a research project. I later adopted his question to apply to my classroom teaching. When, in the grip of a status-quo explanation for something commonplace that is happening in my lesson, I can push myself to see by asking the question: 'OK, so how could I be wrong here?' 'How could I be mistaken in what I think is going on... in my explanation for why things are happening as they are?' This question is just enough to push me off balance which, like Cunningham's camera, can get me to 'look again... to make me rethink, open my mind.'
Looking again is really what it is all about. Because when you look again at something in the learning that is happening (or not happening) in your lesson, you will be drawn to seek out new information to confirm-- or disconfirm-- your explanations, to stretch your preconceived ideas. As you examine what is going on in a lesson or an activity, how things are playing out, what your students are doing (or not doing), how they respond to what you do, all of this can raise unanswered questions in your mind. And as you surface these dangling question, you begin to look for evidence, for data which can shed some light on them. Sometimes the data is substantial, as in 15 of the 25 students (high schoolers in an EFL class perhaps) did not write up the summary of the video we had watched in class which I asked them to do for homework today... Other times the data may seem even inconsequential, as in Juan Antonio isn't sitting where he usually does next to Fatima, in fact that place is empty.... Any of which can lead you to wonder, to develop alternative explanations, to assess. Assessing in this process means articulating various explanations for why something is happening or has happened, explanations that are grounded in the world of learning in the classroom and in your experience as a teacher. For instance, was the summarizing assignment too hard? Did they have too much to do in other classes? Did they not take the assignment seriously? Or was it a mixture of all of these reasons, and more? Did Juan Antonio and Fatima have a falling out? Or did he just want to sit elsewhere? To test out these explanations, you have to do something, to take some action to see which, if any, of your interpretation is accurate. Otherwise you will be acting (or reacting) based on your hunch and not on grounded information from the learners in your classroom. In the case of the teen-agers most of whom did not do the homework assignment to summarize the video, you might ask the students for oral or written feedback on what happened with the homework summary. You might lead a discussion or you might distribute slips of paper on which you ask them to write in response to your question. Or another approach... you might have them line up across the classroom to form a continuum using the following statements as end points: from 'The assignment was too easy...' to 'The assignment was too difficult.' or from 'I wanted to do the assignment...' to 'I wasn't very interested in doing the assignment.' and so on. Once they have done several of these line-ups, you could lead a discussion on what happened with the homework.
Or you might give them an 'alteration dictation' (a technique I learned from Tessa Woodward). You would dictate several sentences which each student must then modify to make it true for himself or herself. Then you have a discussion about the changes individuals made and why. For example, you dictate the lead sentence:

. "I [meaning the student] did the video summary last night because it was easy and interesting ." 
One student might alter the sentence to write down (the alternations are in bold):

. "I didn't do the video summary last night because, although it was easy, and it wasn't very interesting ."

Another student might make different changes:

. "I did part of the video summary last night because it was easy and interesting then my friends came over and we watched a football match on TV. Sorry."

Or a third might write:

. "I didn't do the video summary last night because I left my notebook at school."

The point is that these techniques-- asking for oral feedback, doing student line-up's, or doing the alteration dictation, and many, many more-- make public information about the learning process. As the teacher. they move you from reacting based on your preconceptions and opinions, to acting based on information. Like many processes-- the action research cycle (Stringer 1996), or teacher learning (Johnson 1999), or John Dewey's description of reflective practice (Zeichner and Liston 1996)-- this probing, assembling information, and acting is about building knowledge from experience, which you then integrate back into the experience. But the dynamism in the process stems from putting yourself off-balance, from being unsure rather than sure, from asking yourself the question, 'Yeah, I know what's going on but... how could I be wrong here?'

REFERENCES
If you want to go further with the ideas I have written about, I'd suggest the following references.

Johnson. K.E. 1999. Understanding language teaching: Reasoning in action. Boston MA: Heinle/ITP.
. This book, which is part of the TeacherSource series, provides a rich and textured examination of how teachers can question their work. It includes case studies, references to interesting literature and research, and hands-on activitivies or investigations.

Maxwell, Joe. 1996. Qualitative research design: An interactive approach. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications
. While this book is about designing qualitative research projects, particularly in the contexts of doctoral work, it is an excellent and readable discussion of the research process. Chapter 6 deals with questions of validity.

Stringer, E, 1996. Action research: A handbook for practitioners. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications
. This book is an excellent overview and introduction to the full range of ideas in action research. I recommend it over other treatments that I have seen in ELT, which tend to be narrower.

Zeichner, K. and D. Liston. 1996. Reflective teaching: An introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. . This short book is an excellent introduction and sophisticated treatment of reflective teaching, and particularly its social and political dimensions. Although it is anchored in examples from US preservice teacher education, I have found it to be the best book of its kind. The authors do an excellent job explaining Dewey's ideas as well.