General teacher education research and knowledge transfer

contradicted their stated principle of using L1 to explain difficult material (Liu, Ahn, Baek, & Han, 2004: 605).

These problems have often been framed as a problem of teaching contexts preventing teachers from using their general conceptions for teaching, rather than SLTE programs failing to prepare teachers to use conceptions under such local constraints. “A considerable body of literature now exists documenting the role of context, and particularly constraints, that can hinder teachers from implementing their stated beliefs”

(Basturkmen, Loewen & Ellis, 2004: 246). However, every practitioner needs knowledge which takes into account the normal constraints of their practice. Architects need to know about the strength of building materials or the effect of wind on buildings, cooks need to know how to vary their menus due to the availability of ingredients in different seasons, and teachers need to be able to use concepts given the constraints of their practice. If knowledge gained in SLTE programs does not include knowledge of how to adapt concepts to the everyday constraints of teaching, then it is not surprising that teachers do not find such knowledge very useful.

expect from high school students or what to do as teachers…I had been out of high school for a long time and I felt I needed to get back in touch with students” (Kagan, 1993a: 132).

Subject matter knowledge gained during or before teacher education programs seems to have little impact on teachers’ practice. Feiman-Nemser and Buchmann (1987) studied two novice teachers during student teaching and found that although they were knowledgeable about the subject matter, they were not able to use this knowledge to identify or utilize learning opportunities for L2 students. Even worse, these novice teachers seemed to ignore their subject matter knowledge when evaluating their learning as teachers. They thought that learning to teach was a matter of learning classroom management. When they had managed to learn to keep their classes under control, they felt as if they had become successful teachers regardless of the level of their students’

learning.

Likewise when Calderhead and Shorrock (1997) followed the progress of four beginning elementary school teachers from the last year of their teacher education program through their second year of teaching, they found that the teachers did not rely on their subject matter knowledge to guide teaching decisions. Instead, these teachers relied more on their knowledge of specific teaching activities and knowledge of the learning of the students in their class to guide their planning. The National Center for Research in Teacher Learning (NCRTL) investigated the learning of novice teachers in ten different teacher education programs, following teacher students from entry to their exit from these programs. They found that the teacher students in all but one program did not deepen their subject matter knowledge during teacher education. These teachers also reported valuing teaching experience over academic knowledge. “Teachers at all career stages value firsthand experience as the major source of knowledge and a means of learning to teach” (NCRTL, 1991: 69). In addition, Schuyler and Sitterley (1995) studied a class for novice teachers in the practicum aimed at promoting reflective practice. They found that the class resulted in very little acceptance or use of reflective practice.

Wideen, Mayer-Smith and Moon (1998) summed up their review of research on teacher education thus: “In this review of recent empirical research we found very little evidence to support an approach to learning to teach which focuses primarily on the provision of propositional knowledge…Beginning teachers were not able to integrate those experiences in ways that would help them learn to teach” (Wideen, Mayer-Smith and Moon (1998: 160).

Other studies have also shown that teachers tend to rely on experiential knowledge instead of academic knowledge. Gitlin and colleagues investigated the attitudes of two cohorts of teachers (one elementary one secondary) towards research both before and after their teacher education program. They found that these teachers did not see academic research as the foundation for their teaching. “It wasn’t research that provided a frame to analyze teaching but instead, their intuition on what was working with their students” (Gitlin, Barlow, Burbank, Kauchak, & Stevens, 1999: 764). Another problem was that the teachers had not been trained to access research in teaching contexts where access to academic literature was often very difficult.

Teachers in general do not seem to regard their experiences in teacher education classes as important for teaching. Kremer-Hayon (1994) surveyed 199 teachers from a variety of schools, levels and subjects about what knowledge they used in their teaching. The

teachers rated personal/practical knowledge significantly higher than formal knowledge (3.28 vs. 2.61 on a 5 point scale). In a survey of 1,789 teachers (47% elementary, 53%

secondary) Smylie (1989) found that teacher education and inservice education were rated last as sources of knowledge for teaching.

Despite the general lack of transfer between teacher education programs and the practice of teaching, there is evidence that some programs do have a positive effect on teaching.

For example, Grossman (1990) studied six secondary English teachers in their first year of teaching. Three of the teachers had gone through a teacher education program while the other three had gotten alternative certification based mainly on their level of subject matter knowledge. Grossman found that the teachers who had gone through teacher education programs better understood student learning and how to structure the subject matter for learning than the alternative route teachers. Since the alternative route teachers had at least the same subject matter knowledge as the other teachers, this represents transfer from the methodological and experiential aspects of the teacher education programs.

One program studied by the NCRTL (1991), did succeed in providing subject matter knowledge for teaching. This was due to a program that differed from traditional teacher education programs by specifically aiming to provide subject matter knowledge for teaching, rather than subject matter knowledge for academic research.

One preservice program managed to alter prospective teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about good mathematics teaching through an intense and innovative three-course mathematics sequence followed by a math method course. In these courses, students had opportunities to experience the learning of mathematics in ways that differ radically from their own encounters with mathematics as elementary and high school pupils. The emphasis was on problem-solving through the creation of a mathematics learning community. Students also saw demonstrations of this kind of mathematics teaching live and on videotape (NCRTL, 1991: 67).

Other evidence supports the hypothesis that if information is presented in ways that make it easy to use, teachers will indeed use such knowledge in their practice. For example, Huberman (1993a) studied 12 research projects aiming to help vocational education programs. He found that the more researchers were in contact with the teachers whose practice they wanted to change and the more the researchers explained their findings in the terms of teachers’ practice, the more research knowledge was used.

When researchers essentially hand over a study to a set of practitioners, low levels of

’problem awareness‘ and low ‘permeability to un-welcome findings‘ usually spell instant oblivion for the study, no matter how valid and well-packaged its findings…When, on the other hand, researcher teams remain active in the setting over time, and negotiate their presence carefully, we are likely to get an upward shift in the level of problem awareness and a far clearer sense of which findings are, in fact, discrepant with local objectives and mores (Huberman, 1993a: 47).

Finally, a survey of 1,027 teachers showed that they felt professional development activities were successful when they helped integrate new knowledge into the teachers’

existing practice and provided extended time for teachers to work on and understand the ideas presented (Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2001), much like the qualities of the programs cited above (e.g., Grossman, 1990; Huberman, 1993a; NCRTL, 1991).

3.3.2 General conceptions or principles: teachers in general

Within educational research, studies also show that teachers find it difficult to acquire or use new conceptions of subject matter or teaching in their practice. Both Foss and Kleinsasser (1996) and Tillema (1998) surveyed novice elementary teachers’

conceptions before and after a methods course. Neither study found changes in conceptions as a result of the course. Furthermore, Kennedy (1999) engaged 53 novice teachers in 4 different kinds of teacher education programs in a series of teacher-like tasks, for example commenting on a student paper. She found that “there is very little relationship between the ideas teachers mentioned as generally important in learning to organize a text and the ideas they saw as relevant when they examined this particular disorganized text” (Kennedy, 1999: 65). This led her to conclude “[t]here is also a strong likelihood that even if novices are persuaded by their faculty’s ideas and are persuaded to adopt a different frame of reference to thinking about teaching, they will not know what actually to do to enact these new ideas” (Kennedy, 1999: 71).

Similarly, Borko and Niles (1982) gave 67 elementary school teachers a task involving sorting students into work groups. They also found that the teachers did not use their conceptions of what makes a good group in forming student groups. Hoffman and Kugle (1992) used a questionnaire to assess the teaching conceptions of 35 elementary school teachers. However, observations of their classes revealed no direct relation between the conceptions recorded in the questionnaire and the patterns of instruction in their classrooms. Phillips and Owens (1986) investigated the effects of an inservice teacher development course for a cohort of teachers from Indonesia. They found that despite the teachers accepting the validity of the conceptions presented in the course, they did not use them in their practice because these conceptions clashed with local values for educational practice. Lederman (1999) studied the extent to which two experienced and three novice science teachers used their conceptions of what science in planning lessons.

His data showed that “neither of the two [experienced] teachers was intentionally attempting to teach in a manner consistent with their perceptions of the nature of science.

Indeed, neither teacher had students’ understandings of the nature of science as an instructional objective or specified as a goal” (Lederman, 1999: 923). In addition there was no evidence that the novice teachers used a concept of the nature of science to construct and carry out science lessons.

Duffy and Anderson (1984), in study of 24 elementary school teachers found that the main organizational influence on teachers’ instruction was not their conceptions of subject matter or teaching, but the teaching materials that they had access to. Likewise, when Duffy and Roehler (1986) investigated the effect of an inservice course on reading instruction, they found that the teachers only used ideas from the course when they were being observed by the inservice course instructors. The NCRTL study reported on one teacher education program which did seem to have a significant effect on teachers’

conceptions of subject matter and teaching. However, while “[t]eacher candidates in this program displayed dramatic changes in their conceptions of mathematics, of themselves, and of mathematics pedagogy. Still, intensive longitudinal case studies of students in this program revealed that they were nevertheless inclined to teach in more traditional ways in the classroom” (NCRTL, 1991: 29). Holt-Reynolds (1999) found that an English teacher did not use her personal knowledge of reading when thinking about or designing reading instruction.

There are a few studies, however, showing that in some circumstances transfer of conceptions to practice is possible. For example, two summer math programs for teachers were successful in changing elementary teachers’ conceptions of math and math teaching in ways that these new conceptions were used to guide subsequent teaching.

These programs differed from traditional teacher development programs in that (a) over 50% of the time was spent exploring what the general principles of the program meant in terms of each teacher’s specific practices in their contexts and (b) teacher educators met periodically with these teachers over the course of a school year to help them implement the approach in their teaching (Carpenter, Fennema, Peterson, Chiang, & Loef, 1989;

Fennema, Carpenter, Franke, Levi, Jacobs, & Empson, 1996; Schifter & Fosnot, 1993).

Richardson, Anders, Tidwell and Lloyd (1991) found that the conceptions of the 39 elementary school teachers in their study often did not match their practices. However, in a follow-up study of one of these teachers, they found that over a year this teacher slowly changed her practice, showing that it is possible for conceptions to help develop practice.

Unfortunately, there was only one teacher in this study, so it is unclear how common this phenomenon is.

Cohen’s (1990) longitudinal study of one elementary teacher’s development shows that academic theories can be used by teachers, but perhaps not in the ways that academics intended.

The teacher used a new mathematics curriculum, but used it in a way that conveyed a sense of mathematics as a fixed body of right answers, rather than as a field of inquiry in which people figure out quantitative relations….Mrs. O was teaching for understanding.

The work with number sentences certainly was calculated to help students see how addition worked, and to see that addition and subtraction were reversible…Yet it was difficult to understand how or how well they understood it, for the didactic form of the lesson inhibited explanation or exploration of student’s ideas. Additionally, mathematical knowledge was treated in a traditional way…No answers were unpacked (Cohen, 1990: 313).

It is not just school teachers who experience difficulties in using their general conceptions for teaching. For example, Foss (1997) studied a university professor’s teaching of a teaching methods class. Although the professor had well developed conceptions of what good teaching should be based on constructivism, she had great difficulties developing teaching activities that matched her conceptions and finally gave up and taught the class in a traditional manner despite her conceptions of what teaching needs to be like. Luneberg and Korthagen (2003) investigated the teaching of five Dutch teacher educators. They found that, for the most part, the teacher educators’ teaching did not match their conceptions about what teaching should be like. For example, while they saw the construction of knowledge and mental models by teacher students as central to their teaching, none of them invested time in helping their own teacher students construct their own knowledge and mental models of the subject being studied. Finally, it is important to point out that it is not just teachers, but many kinds of university graduates, who find it difficult to use conceptual knowledge gained in university settings to solve new problems in different contexts (Gräsel, 1997a).

3.3.3 Summary

Research on teacher education in other subject matter areas shows that, just like SLTE programs, these programs suffer from a lack of transfer to actual teaching. Not only do teachers not seem to use knowledge gained from teacher education programs, but they do

not seem to regard that knowledge as important for their development as teachers.

Similar to findings in LTE, it seems that it is only those aspects of teacher education which are very similar to teaching and those programs which actively focus their courses on future teaching which achieve some measure of transfer. Furthermore, many studies show that general principles do not guide teachers practice. Teachers of a variety of subjects as well as teacher educators seem to find it difficult to use general concepts in their teaching practice. The only situations where significant transfer was found were programs which focused not only on how teachers talked about teaching, but also on how they actually performed teaching and teaching-related tasks.