Uncertain nature of teaching necessitates dynamic knowledge

Teaching situations differ so widely, even for one teacher in one school, that it is next to impossible for teachers to anticipate all the factors which they feel should be considered over the course of a whole lesson.

The presence of 20 to 30 children in a single classroom means there are 20 to 30 possibilities for an interruption in one’s plans. Even apart from these routine disturbances, though, students may get into fights with one another, get sick, or simply ask a question that is difficult to answer. All of these actions, from major to minor, are disruptions to the scenarios that teachers have planned and make it difficult for teachers to predict with any certainty how a lesson will proceed, how long it will take, whether students will find it engaging, or whether they will ‘get it’ (Kennedy 1997: 6).

McDonald (1992) considers uncertainty a central characteristic of teaching. “Teaching is not like building bridges between stable points, but like building flexible webs among constantly moving points – among, for example, the evanescent images of a poem and twenty-two different minds, including mine” (McDonald, 1992: 20-21). It is impossible to get rid of this uncertainty because “too many contingencies within the school are beyond the control of teachers” (Huberman, 1989: 48). Therefore, teachers only make a rough plan for teaching and further develop this plan in class using information from student interaction with materials and activities (Llinares, 2000). For instance, one of the findings from Wood’s (1996) intensive study of eight ESL teachers was “how tentatively the course was planned, even by the most organized and prepared of teachers, and how much of what was planned was scrapped or altered as further information became available” (Woods, 1996: 168). The 20 EFL teachers in Appel’s (2000) study also reported that they were only able to plan a lesson to a limited extent and that additional planning was made in class in response to student cues. Similar findings in teachers of other subjects indicate this is common in the practice of teaching. Borko and Livingston studied the planning and teaching practice of three expert math teachers. They found that

“these teachers work from mental scripts that consist of general outlines of their lessons.

They fill in the outlines during interactive teaching to ensure that their instruction is responsive to student performance” (Borko & Livingston, 1989: 483).

Christine, the 5^th grade art teacher in Field and Latta’s (2001) study, clearly articulated the dynamic nature of teaching in her reflection of how an activity went in her class:

I realized halfway through that it was not working. I felt comfortable to abandon [the lesson] and move on…The reaction from the class caused me to make that decision.

Something just clicked as I was teaching…I thought they’ve got it, I do not need to go further with this particular activity – it is not going to make a difference (Field & Latta, 2001: 890).

Not only classroom instruction, but other areas of teachers’ practice were also developed in dynamic, unpredictable ways, for example Christine’s report on her lesson planning:

As I rehearsed the lesson in my mind in advance I discovered that reading the story was going to feel way too long. I knew I needed to find ways to get the students more deliberately involved. I needed to find ways to get them to shift from listening to role-playing, to looking, to guessing, and so on. I made these changes before I actually taught the lesson (Field & Latta, 2001: 888).

Due to the inherent uncertainty of their practice, teachers are constantly using their implicit, practice-specific knowledge to evaluate student understanding, student interest, and possible ways of further developing the activity they are engaged in. Such knowledge is dynamic because different bits of knowledge are continually being combined to form on-the-spot conceptions of what is going on in class and what the teacher could do next. Evaluating such factors using general, a priori frameworks would not be possible in most cases because of the lack of time and the explicit cognitive processing capacity it would require. Furthermore, given the time constraints on teachers outside of class such as planning instruction, marking student work, cooperating with the school administration, and extra curricular activities, it is not likely that teachers would have much more time and processing capacity outside actual instruction than when engaged in teaching. Schön (1983; 1987) refers to this kind of dynamic knowledge as

“knowing-in-action”, a kind of knowledge embedded in and created by the process of participating in the activity rather than knowledge acquired beforehand: “in much of the spontaneous behavior of skillful practice we reveal a kind of knowing which does not stem from a prior intellectual operation” (Schön, 1983:51).

One example of such dynamic knowledge-in-action comes from a study by Borg (1999b) on the use of grammatical terminology by four experienced EFL teachers. He found that:

decisions about the use of terminology were also influenced by events which occurred in specific instructional contexts. For example, students’ questions about grammar sometimes prompted teachers to use terminology; on other occasions, when teachers saw that students were confused about an explanation they had given, terminology was avoided in the subsequent explanation. To a certain extent, then, teachers’

decisions about terminology were also taken interactively, in real-time during the course of their work, and not simply predetermined (Borg, 1999a: 121).

As mentioned previously, actions by teachers are principally guided by dynamically generated knowledge rather than static, general rules (Tudor, 1998, 2001, 2003). For example, in their longitudinal study of the literacy instruction of 24 elementary school teachers Duffy and Anderson (1984) found that the teachers’ instructional decisions were based more often on the teaching materials and the students’ reactions to them than their espoused theories on learning to read. Furthermore, Liu, Ahn, Baek, and Han (2004) studied the L1 use of 13 EFL teachers in Korea. They found that although the L1 use often followed from principles the teachers had develops, L1 use was just as frequently used in ways and situations that did not follow from these principles. In addition, the

three novice ESL teachers in Tsang’s (2004) study showed that their actions followed their general personal teaching maxims only about 50% of the time.

This is true even at the level of mental models. Mental models are not for explicit, serial computation of all the factors involved in the model. Rather they help their users to focus on important information and solutions emerge from the interaction of this information with the mental model (Groen & Patel, 1988; Patel, Groen & Arocha, 1990). In fact, mental models are not static, but are reconstructed each time with different feature depending on the needs of the task. For example, when crucial parts of patient x-rays were obscured by overlapping organs, the radiologists in Lesgold’s (1984) study were able to construct mental models which helped them decipher what was happening with parts of anatomy which were blocked or obscured by other anatomical parts in the x-ray.

The flexibility of mental models may also be very important in teaching. As mentioned earlier, not only did the experienced PE teachers in Housner and Griffey’s (1985) study of lesson planning demand much more information about the teaching context than the novices, five of the eight experienced teachers flatly refused to complete the task until they were personally shown the gym where the lessons would take place. This is evidence that teachers build new mental models of each teaching situation.

The dynamic nature of teachers’ knowledge is what leads teachers to answer “It depends…” when asked about their understanding of language learning or language teaching. Such “It depends…” statements do not indicate indecision or lack of knowledge by the teacher, but rather that classroom situations cannot be reduced to simple formulas such as “Get it right at the beginning” or “Teach what is teachable”

(Lightbown & Spada, 1999). Instead, it appears that teachers’ knowledge needs to be flexible and dynamic enough for teachers to construct understandings of specific situations in specific contexts. “As we listen to teachers’ voices and their stories, we realize that the comment, ‘It depends…’ doesn’t represent fuzzy thinking; it gives voice to a deeper wisdom and understanding” (Freeman, 1991b: 15). For example, Carless (2003) investigated three EFL teachers’ use of task-based teaching. One finding was that task-based teaching was much easier to perform with more proficient L2 students than with less proficient L2 students. Thus, the decision whether and to what extent to use task-based methodology depends not solely on the teachers’ judgment of the general effectiveness of task-based teaching; it also depends on the effectiveness of the approach for different groups of students, in different contexts, and using different materials.

With academic knowledge the focus is constructing a full model of a situation which explains all factors in the question under study. Teachers, however, need a flexible network of (implicit, practice-specific) knowledge which can be used to quickly combine elements to form ad hoc conceptions of a particular problem or situation. Spiro and his colleagues call this “Cognitive Flexibility” and claim that it is central to professional competence (Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, & Anderson, 1988a, 1989b; Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson, & Coulson, 1991a; 1991b; Spiro & Jehng, 1990; Spiro, Vispoel, Schmitz, Samarapungavan, & Boerger, 1987). They claim that professional practice such as teaching is ill-structured: “all domains which involve the application of knowledge to unconstrained, naturally occurring situations (cases) are substantially ill-structured”

(Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson, & Coulson, 1991: 26). This refers to practices which are complex, not amendable to simplistic solutions, and for which there is no way of knowing what the optimal course of action was or will be. According to Cognitive Flexibility Theory, generalized conceptions will not provide answers to specific

problems or questions in such practice. Instead, professionals need to be able to generate or assemble representations of the specific situation (and possible solutions) quickly and effortlessly.

A key feature of ill-structured domains is that a single prepackaged schema or prototype case will typically be inadequate as background knowledge to support the processing of a new case. Thus, intact schema retrieval (or prototype retrieval) as a knowledge-based processing mechanism must be replaced by situation-specific schema- and precedent-case assembly (Spiro & Jehng, 1990: 186).

Such dynamic construction of knowledge does not have to be done explicitly. In general, knowledge is not recalled whole, but the very process of recognizing something and recalling knowledge fundamentally involves the dynamic construction of knowledge to fit the situation (See LeDoux, 1996, for review of this research). “Information is created by the observer, not given, because comprehending is conceiving, not retrieving and matching” (Clancey, 1993: 91). However, for this to happen teachers need to have an organized network of implicit, practice-specific knowledge that they can use for this process.

Teaching is an activity filled with uncertainty. The activity that went so well in your 4^th hour class may bomb in your 5^th hour class; students who used relative clauses with great facility in one activity may struggle to do this in a different activity. This means that teachers are constantly constructing on-the-spot understandings of what is happening in the classroom. To do this teachers need dynamically linked knowledge; in other words, knowledge which is linked in such a way that each piece can be combined easily with other relevant pieces if a need arises. This might also be the answer to the problem pointed out by Larsen-Freeman (1983) that one cannot give teachers the specific knowledge they need for all teaching situations in an SLTE program. If teachers have a solid variety of knowledge about teaching in specific contexts, it is more likely that they will recognize the similarity between what they already know and phenomena in another context. In some cases recognizing similarity may not be not enough, so teachers need to be able to create understandings and practices which fit the particular configuration of factors in that contexts. If their knowledge is organized into a tight network for teaching, it will be easier for teachers to create dynamic, on-the-spot understandings of that context. For example, Gott and his colleagues studied aviation mechanics who were required to learn new activities due to restructuring in their organization. It was found that those mechanics who had actively worked on developing a deeper network of understanding of what they did before were able to use knowledge of their previous activity for the new one. Those whose knowledge was not as well connected were not able to do this and learned the new activity like beginners (Gott, Hall, Pokorny, Dibble &

Glaser, 1993)