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TEACHER RESEARCH: MYTHS AND REALITIES
ELEANOR KUTZ
Becoming a teacher-researcher is one way to get better at teaching. This article shows that teacher research is not as daunting as it may at first appear. |
Lately, we've been reading
a lot about research carried out by teachers in their own classrooms. Books
like Seeing for Ourselves, edited by Bissex and Bullock (1987), or Reclaiming
the Classroom, edited by Goswami and Stillman (1987), give us examples of
such research and tell us that the questions we ask and the answers we find
in our classrooms not only help us become better teachers but also help us make
important contributions to knowledge about teaching and learning.
Three myths that come out of.the models of educational research that have been
dominant in universities and that arise from the structures of schools and classrooms
-contribute to teachers' skepticism about engaging in meaningful research. Examining
those myths may help teachers to see the ways that opportunities for valuable
classroom
inquiry may already be imbedded in the ongoing work of their classrooms. Myth #1: Classroom Research Begins with a Big Question, Derived from Other
People's Studies
The most significant work on the relationship between writers' errors and writers' understandings -- between the surface of student papers and the beliefs they represent about language and writing -- also began with a teacher's research: with Mina Shaughnessy's wonderings about how to respond to the unskilled writers who came into her classes at City College of New York when open admissions began. Shaughnessy's preface to the book she wrote about what she learned, Errors and Expectations (1977), stays in my mind as a powerful image of a teacher's early wonderings.
I remember sitting alone in the worn urban classroom where my students had just written their first essays and where I now began to read them, hoping to be able to assess quickly the sort of task that lay ahead of us that semester. But the writing was so stunningly unskilled that I could not begin to define the task or even sort out the difficulties. I could only sit there, reading and rereading the alien papers, wondering what had gone wrong and trying to understand what I at this eleventh hour of my students' academic lives could do about it. (Preface, unpaged) |
The teachers and student teachers I have worked with begin their inquiry with
similar wonderings and informal questions, and the journals they keep throughout
their research start with observations like the following:
I find that certain students of mine do not speak in class unless called on. They are silent, even if outside of school they are quite verbal. What I want to know is how do you bridge that gap between home and school language? (Tracey) |
or
Darrell is always cooperative and willing, but I just can't get any sense of what he's really thinking. He doesn't volunteer in class, and he writes as little as possible. What is going on with him? (Pam) |
All teachers have similar questions about their own classes and students. Good
teaching demands-that we see and resee our students and the work that we do
with them. But how do teachers go about answering these questions?
That gets us to Myth #2 .
Myth #2: Teachers Can't Do Useful Classroom Research Unless They Begin with Formal Methodologies
The reality is that teachers follow their initial questions with a variety of strategies for finding answers. Unlike the formal designs of research studies conducted by university researchers, teachers' strategies are often informal. But they can still be coherent and systematic, giving valuable results. Susan Lytle and Marilyn CochranSmith (1990) have looked at the various methods of inquiry that teachers engage in and the ways that they record what they learn--in journals, for example. They argue that teacher research, defined as "systematic, intentional inquiry," should be recognized as contributing in important ways to the knowledge base for teaching; and they include strategies such as journals, essays, and oral inquiry processes, as well as more formal classroom studies, in their typology of such research. The two teachers whose initial questions appeared under Myth #1 used different strategies to get data that would help them answer their questions. Tracey, the teacher who wondered about how to connect home and school language for her bilingual students, decided to observe 'a variety of bilingual, ESL, and English classes in her school to see what she could find out about patterns of talk and silence in other courses and to create a comparative framework for observing her own classroom. She recorded her observations in a journal, with notes on what she saw in one classroom, as follows:
The class was studying a "found" poem about the suicide of a girl. It was shocking and moving -an excellent way to start a unit. But X did most of the talking and there wasn't much participation. although often times when students did speak, they didn't raise their hands (which might have been expected). |
And in another:
The students had very little opportunity to speak English, or show what they knew, or write in meaningful sentences. Most time was spent listening to the teacher. I know that Y has done some excellent projects-having the students write their life stories, for example -- but I feel that in this class, he over whelmed the students with talk. The class became a monologue, and many of the students were not paying attention. |
Tracey gradually began to see a pattern across the school that was being carried
over into her classroom, one in which teachers talked and students listened.
She used her initial observations of other classrooms to create a framework
for studying the patterns of discourse in her own classroom. Pam, the student
teacher who wondered about her student, Darrell, decided to talk to him, much
as she might with any student who was not really engaged in the work of the
classroom. But because she was part of a teacher-researcher group in her seminar
and was trying to look at her students' work more systematically, -she prepared
some key questions and reported the results of her conversation as part of a
series of interviews with her students about their reading and writing. Her
interview with Darrell shows that sometimes an apparent lack of response, when
analyzed carefully, can give a lot of information.
Pam: what about writing? Do you like writing? Darrell: Not really. if I write too much, I have to stop because 1 get tired. When I get tired, I make mistakes. Pam: When you write something, what atmosphere works best for you? Where do you go? What do you-need? Darrell: To the living room, or my room. I'd rather be at home because I can have more time to get it right, make sure there's no mistakes 'n' stuff. Pam: How do you make sure it's "right"? Darrell: 1 go back sometimes and rewrite what I wrote, change the words around till it sounds right. Pam: What exactly do you do when you write? Do ' you try to write in any specific way? Darrell: I just try to think about what I'm supposed to write, and then I write what comes into my head. Pam: If you had the choice to answer a question by writing out an answer or by speaking/saying what you thought, which way would you choose? Darrell: I'd rather write it down than say it out loud because I'd have a better chance to get it right. |
A couple of things struck me as I interviewed Darrell. One of the most prominent was his extreme concern for doing things the "right" way and, in my opinion, earning the respect of his teacher. Darrell, like most students, knows that the bottom line in getting good grades is getting, or coming up with, the right answer or response. What I find disturbing about this, with specific reference to his writing process, is that making his work "right" overrides any concern for thought development or thought stimulation. When Darrell writes, he first enters into the process by trying to think about "what I'm supposed to write," rather than thinking perhaps about what he has read, what he thinks about the reading, and then formulating a response. What I noticed here, upon going over my notes on the interview, was his use of the words "supposed to"; he undoubtedly must feel that every teacher is going to grade him on how close he comes to writing out some preconceived "right" answer in the "right" way. |
Being part of a teacher-researcher
group helped Tracey
and Pam figure out how to look more
systematically for questions about their classrooms. But the methods of inquiry
came out of their ongoing school and classroom contexts,
rather than being imposed from outside. This gets us to a third myth .
Myth #3: Although External Communities like Teacher-Researcher Groups Can Help, the Teacher Will Be Left, Finally, with Only Her Own Observations of Her -Own Classroom
The isolation of the teacher-researcher arises from the isolation of the classroom teacher within the walls of her classroom. But there are alternative strategies we can use to create collaborative research communities that penetrate classroom walls. Creating a network with other teachers in the school by conducting reciprocal observations of each other's classrooms is one strategy. Collaborating with student teachers or prepractice teachers or tutors to record and share systematic observations of the classroom is another.
There are many examples of such collaborative research with students at all levels.
I. for instance, am particularly interested in questions of literacy, differences
in spoken and written language, and schooling. All of my students-from freshman
basic writers to graduate students -- research with me the key issues of our course
and our classroom. As part of that research, my students have:
In each of these instances, the information that many students brought together provided a data pool from which we could gain larger understandings. For example, one student, looking for data about her early literacy acquisition, found a box of her old report cards. On one report card from second grade, she had failed reading; and the teacher had written a comment that explained that she was failing because she was in too much of a hurry to get to her library book, so she was rushing through her worksheets. Alone, this piece of data offered a dismaying example of one student's experience. When all the data collected by. 35 students were analyzed, an important pattern of most schooling emerged-one which enlarged our understanding of the ways school experiences with exercises and worksheets have limited our common definition of literacy.
Such collaborative research can be done with students in elementary and high school as well as college classrooms. Shirley Brice Heath, in Ways With Words (1983), describes classrooms in which fifth-grade students and teachers collaborate to gather and record the scientific knowledge of their communities, interviewing local people about crops, planting, and weather and translating this local knowledge into scientific terms.
One of my graduate students,
a teacher in a first/second-grade bilingual classroom, decided to involve her
students in her research. She was concerned about an issue similar to the one
raised by Tracey,
about her students' language and it, silence in the classroom. All of her students
spoke Cape Verdean Creole, but those who had begun to read and write had been
learning to do so either in English or in Portuguese. Alice had observed that
when she asked students to tell a story in the classroom, those who had come
in from other classrooms, who had begun to read and write, told abbreviated
and somewhat empty stories, even in Creole, as part of this school task. The
children who couldn't read told much richer stories. She decided to ask her
students to help her make a collection of Creole stories-to get family members
to tell favorite stories and to come in and tell the stories to the class. She
asked the readers and writers whether these stories could be written in English
or Portuguese and was told "no." So she got the students.to write the
stories in Creole, with invented spelling. Then the class worked together to
translate them into English. Finally, she asked the students why they had thought
these stories couldn't be written in English. And she learned that because the
only stories the students had ever read in English were from basal readers,
"they thought that the only stories that could be written in English were boring
ones, with limited words and limited actions. Good stories could only be told
in Creole." Of course, all good research results in changes in our practices.
For Alice, the first change was to set aside the basal readers and to bring
in and read a rich variety of stories in English.
Finally, in answer to the three myths that so often keep teachers from research, there are three opposing realities:
Reality
#I:
We can begin our
teacher research with any informal question that arises from our own daily classroom
experience.
Reality
#2:
We can begin to
research that question through informal means of inquiry-through making notes,
keeping a journal, recording bits of conversations, and saving artifacts of
students' literacy.
Reality
#3:
We can create
communities of researchers, not only through formal networks with teachers and
other colleagues, but above all, in our own classrooms with our students.
If we keep in mind these
three realities, our teacher research can become not a competing demand on our
time and energy but work that directly supports our teaching and our students'
learning .
References
Bissex, G., & Bullock, R. (Eds.). (1987). Seeing for ourselves: Case study research by teachers of writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Emig, J. (1971). The composing processes of twelfth graders. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Goswami, D., & Stillman, P. (Eds.). (1987). Reclaiming the classroom. Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook.
Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language .,,, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lytle, S., & Cochran-Smith, M. (1990). Learning from teacher research: A working typology. Teachers College Record, 72, 83-103. Shaughnessy, M. (1977). Errors and expectations: A guide for the teacher of basic writing. New York: Oxford University Press.
Eleanor Kutz is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and coauthor (with H. Roskelly) of An Unquiet Pedagogy: Transforming Practice in the English Classroom (Portsmouth. NH: Heinemann BoyntonlCook, 1991), a book shaped in part by the classroom inquiry of the student teachers and teachers she has worked with in Boston-area schools.