Beliefs – Perspective from Helen Timperley
Delwynne has identified important parallels between her own practice and that of the teachers at Waiharara School. She realises that she had replicated in her facilitation those teaching practices about which she had so many concerns. Many excellent classroom teachers fall into this trap when they become teacher educators.
When things go wrong, we sometimes attribute it to others’ resistance rather than acknowledging that it is probably what we do that leads to the so-called resistance. We ask teachers to adopt a learner’s perspective in the classroom and to find out what the learner understands from the lesson. An important aspect of this case is that Delwynne took a step back when things were not going well and re-examined her approach from the perspective of the learner – in this situation, the classroom teacher.
Delwynne also enlisted help from others because it is very difficult to recognise discrepancies between espoused theory and theory-in-use for ourselves. Her recognition of manipulative questioning is particularly important, at both the teaching and the facilitation level. One test of whether a question is manipulative or genuine is whether the reason for asking the question has been disclosed. Genuine co-construction requires that the other person knows why a particular question is being asked.
There are many parallels between creating effective learning conditions for teachers and for students, even though adults have a much greater knowledge base on which to draw. This parallel is articulated in the ground-breaking work on how people learn by Donovan, Bransford, and Pellegrino (1999). The first principle they identify is the importance of engaging the learner’s understanding of how the world works. For students, we typically call this process “engaging prior knowledge”. For teachers as learners, it involves engaging their existing ideas about students, how best to teach them, and what they should learn. Then they can explore the similarities and differences between their existing ideas and the new ideas that the ISTE is introducing. The risk with such an approach is that the participating teachers will challenge the worth of the knowledge and practice being promoted by the ISTE. Provided the touchstone for judging worth is students’ learning, then such challenges can form the basis of genuine engagement and change.
Reference
Donovan, S. M., Bransford, J. D., and Pellegrino, J. W., eds. (1999). How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
