Kenneth M. Zeichner - Reflective Teaching: An Introduction
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Reflective Teaching: An Introduction: summary, description and annotation
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This popular text provides a clear, succinct explanation of how reflection is integral to teachers understandings of themselves, their practice, and their context, and elaborates how various conceptions of reflective teaching differ from one another. The emphasis on the importance of both self and context is embedded within distinct and varied educational traditions (conservative, progressive, radical, and spiritual). Readers are encouraged to examine their own assumptions and understandings of teaching, learning, and schooling and to reflect on self and context. The major goal of both this book, and of all of the volumes in the Reflective Teaching and the Social Conditions of Schooling series, is to help teachers explore and define their own positions with regard to key topics and issues related to the aims of education in a democratic society. Its core message is that such reflection is essential to becoming more skilled, more capable, and in general better teachers.
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Understanding Reflective Teaching
- What distinguishes reflective teaching from nonreflective teaching?
- Is there such a thing as a nonreflective teacher?
- If you reflect about your teaching will this necessarily make your teaching better?
- Can reflective teaching be bad teaching?
For many, the term reflective teaching sounds redundant. It raises the following questions: In order to teach dont you have to think about your teaching? And isnt such thinking the same thing as reflecting on your teaching? These questions get right to the heart of the matter. In what follows, we argue that not all thinking about teaching constitutes reflective teaching. If a teacher never questions the goals and the values that guide his or her work, never considers the context in which he or she teaches, or never examines his or her assumptions, then it is our belief that this individual is not engaged in reflective teaching. This view is based on a distinction between teaching that is reflective and teaching that is technically focused. In order to make the most of this initial distinction, we first describe a teaching situation and then offer two accounts of the teachers thoughts about her situation. We begin with a description of her situation.
Rachel, a White prospective teacher in her early 30s, has been student teaching for 8 weeks in a fourth-grade urban classroom that serves an economically and racially diverse population. For the past few weeks, she and her cooperating teacher have been having a problem with six children (five of whom are children of color from low-income families) who cannot seem to remain engaged in academic activity during the daily 40-minute free-choice period. At times, these students sit and do nothing, whereas at other times they get into arguments with each other and other students, disrupting the rest of the class. Rachels cooperating teacher, Sue, had long felt that for a part of the school day students should have the opportunity to choose their own activities. Although Sue was not really questioning the value of her approach, she was becoming increasingly frustrated with the students and her own inability to address the situation. Both Sue and Rachel wanted to figure out a way to help these children make more productive use of their time. And both were concerned about the rough language used by some of these students when they argued with each other. Sue and Rachel left school that Friday with a sense that a solution had to be found. Sue asked Rachel to think about the situation over the weekend and to come back on Monday with some thoughts and suggestions. Sue would do the same.
Initially, Rachel tried to figure out how she could deal with the student disruptions and off-task behavior. She focused on devising ways to present those students with more specific consequences for not complying with the teachers directions. Rachel remembered the Assertive Discipline Program that she had heard about in one of her university methods courses and thought that she would give this program a try to see if it would lead to an improvement in these students behaviors. She sensed that her students just didnt understand or feel the consequences for their behavior. Something like the assertive discipline approach might create a framework for sanctions and consequences that would be connected to the students behavior. Although she didnt want to be the bad guy in the classroom, she felt that if she didnt demand, sanction, and punish inappropriate behavior the entire class would soon be out of control. She felt that if she and Sue were going to be successful they needed to get tough.
During a discussion of this situation in her weekly Friday afternoon student teaching seminar, Rachel began to see the problem somewhat differently. It was odd, she thought, that she had never considered the implications of the fact that all but one of the children that she and Sue had defined as disruptive were minority students and from poor socioeconomic backgrounds. Their classroom was very mixed both racially and socioeconomically. Although Rachel was still concerned about developing strategies for helping the six students make better use of their free-study time and to decrease the amount of arguing among the students, she also began to ask herself questions about the appropriateness of the classrooms structure in relation to the diverse cultural backgrounds of her pupils. She remembered reading an article and sections of a book by Lisa Delpit (1986, 2012) in which the author said that not all children benefited from a liberal child-oriented, progressive approach to reading instruction and that teachers who taught children of color needed to find ways to make a process approach fit and work for all students. Rachel wanted to keep the child-oriented focus of the free-time activity, but thought that she needed to provide a bit more structure so as to facilitate these students choices. Rachel started to design a classroom intervention for her six students that involved closer planning for and monitoring of the students activities during the independent study time.
In the first teacher-as-technician vignette, Rachel locates the problem entirely in the students and their actions and looks for a program or technique to fix the deviant behavior of her six students. Although Rachel is certainly thinking about the classroom, her thoughts operate from a number of fixed assumptions, assumptions that she does not question. She assumes the problem lies with the students. She doesnt attempt to examine the context of the classroom or how the students backgrounds might interact with this context. She also does not seriously question the goals or values embedded in her chosen solution. As a result of this examination, Rachel does not alter the structure of the activity for students but only tries to alter student behavior.
In the second reflective vignette, Rachel begins to examine her own motivations and the context in which the problem occurs. She then designs an intervention for the specific situation at hand, one that does not locate the problem entirely with the students. Rather than sticking with a number of fixed assumptions, Rachel questions the child-centered approach and what this means in her student teaching situation. In this second instance, Rachel restructures the amount of freedom that students are given during free-study period and hopes that this restructuring of the activity will lead to improved student learning and behavior.
When Rachel operated within the technician mode, she accepted the problem as given and tried to solve it. When she was thinking in this mode, the students who misbehaved were seen as the problem. But when Rachel approached the setting as a reflective practitioner, she looked for distinct ways to pose the problem and attempted to get a different purchase on the students and the issues involved. She also questioned her own beliefs and orientations. In what follows, we maintain that the technical approach to thinking about teaching is inadequate. It is a very limited and ultimately, we feel, an ineffectual way to solve educational problems. Although there certainly are many distinct ways to approach reflective teaching, in our view, the teacher as technician is not adequate.
- Has/did your own teacher education program prepare(d) you to be the kind of teacher who questions the educational goals and the classroom and school contexts and who plays an active role in creating and critiquing curriculum and who considers a variety of instructional strategies?
- When you think about a classroom problem, do you try to see it from different angles?
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