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Teacher Education and the Educational Foundations Knowledge Base
Teacher Education and the Educational Foundations Knowledge Base F B Murray, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA ã 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Teacher educators are doubly interested in teaching as it is both their subject matter and their method. Like all teachers, it is important for them to know how much of the subject matter their students have already mastered so that they can build on their students’ prior knowledge of the field. Long before there were teacher educators and teacher education programs, there was effective teaching because we are after all a teaching species, a species whose young cannot, and do not, survive unless they are taught, invariably and historically, by persons with no formal schooling in teaching, let alone in the disciplines of the foundations of education (psychology, philosophy, history, and sociology). Some have argued (e.g., Gilbert and Borish, 1997) that teaching is so basic to life that it can be found at the cellular level, but most researchers find that teaching requires (1) an intention to teach, (2) a belief that the pupil does not know something, and (3) the teacher’s implicit understanding of the pupil’s mind (Strauss and Ziv, 2004; Premack and Premack, 1996). Even if teaching was as simple as requiring the presence of a teacher when an activity was performed repeatedly, there are few documented cases of new learning in nonhumans in these instances (Visalberghi and Fragaszy, 1996, p. 286). Children as young as 3 years have been shown to teach (Ashley and Tomasello, 1998) and Strauss et al. (2002) found that children’s style of teaching a new board game (or building something) changed from demonstration and modeling at 3–4 years to predominately verbal explaining at 5 and 6 years (i.e., from show to tell). Seven-year-olds can adapt their teaching on occasion to their perception of what their pupils already know and can do. They sometimes ask their pupils if they have understood and tailor their teaching to the learners’ mistakes. The way children teach is also influenced by schooling itself. Maynard (2004) found that older Mayan children (6–11 years) who had been to school were also able to adopt schoollike teaching with their younger siblings (didactic teaching at a distance) in place of indigenous teaching practices used in families for cooking and weaving (close-up interactive demonstrations). Teacher education students come to attend teacher education programs, as Olson and Bruner (1996) also argued in their account of folk pedagogy, with two natural strategies already in place – showing and telling. Before they begin their teacher education programs, teacher
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education students have also acquired a naı¨ve, but serviceable, theory of the human mind (see Heider, 1958; Baldwin, 1980 on naı¨ve psychology). In this naive or common sense psychology, they see the pupil’s school achievement as tied to only four factors – the pupil’s ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck. With these four factors, they think they can explain completely the pupil’s success or failure by attributing the level of the pupil’s work to his/her ability, effort, to the difficulty of the school task, or to plain luck. The problem with this naı¨ve account is that it is unduly limiting insofar as ability is concerned, to take only one example, which is not fixed or stable but varies from moment to moment interactively with many other mental factors, not just the few in the naive theory (Baldwin, 1980; Murray, 1991). Regrettably, even after the completion of a teacher education program, many experienced teachers’ reasoning about teaching is still fairly limited and constrained by views of teaching that the prospective teacher had before beginning a teacher education program. Strauss and Shilony (1994) interviewed both experienced and novice science and humanities’ teachers about how they would teach a topic of their choice to children of various ages (7–17 years). Both novice and experienced teachers in both disciplines conceptualized teaching only as the flow of information from their heads to their pupils’ heads, acknowledging that their own role was only to devise manageable and interesting ways of entry into the students’ mind so that the information could be stored and anchored appropriately. The student is passive, a receptacle waiting to be filled, and if the information fails to flow to its destination, the receptacle was taken to be too small and/ or the student was inattentive. The novices and experienced teachers were indistinguishable in their responses and therefore, Strauss and Shilony attributed their responses to their preteacher education training and preexisting common sense naı¨ve views of teaching. There is also some clear evidence that experienced teachers perform differently from novices (Berliner, 1988). They are able, for example, to read highly contextualized cues in the classroom that allow them to spot trouble and also contribute to the smooth functioning of the class. These skills, however, were seemingly learned on the job and not in their teacher education program. Astington and Pelletier (1996) cataloged the following tenets of prospective teachers’ beliefs about teaching:
Teacher Education and the Educational Foundations Knowledge Base
(1) children are born with abilities and capacities that unfold linearly in time, (2) instructional sequences should match developmental sequences, (3) learning occurs sequentially within a hierarchy of skills, and (4) student errors are attributable to incomplete learning or inattention. When the pupil is to learn to do something, the teacher need only demonstrate or model it, and when the pupil is to know something, the teacher need only tell the pupils what they need to know. Teachers’ reasoning about their pupil’s accomplishments, in fact, proves to be surprisingly indistinguishable from the layperson’s explanations. Kuhn (1991) found, for example, when she asked teachers, ‘‘What causes children to fail in school?’’ the teachers’ reasoning was that the pupil ‘‘shows no superiority over reasoning regarding the other topics. . .performance for the school topic is in fact somewhat inferior to their performance for the other topics. . .’’ (p. 249). Their reasoning, like about half the other subjects in her study, tends to be absolutist, that is, they believe it is possible with sufficient study to know with certainty the causes of a phenomenon, often through a personal commitment to a theory or assertion. On the whole, the prospective teacher’s prior knowledge and beliefs make it difficult to have teachers learn some of the newer teaching techniques such as dialectic, discovery, invention, cooperative learning, and collaboration, because the prior techniques are often the opposite of the newer strategies. They may, for example, require the prospective teacher to refrain entirely from showing or telling. They are also at variance with the Astington and Pelletier (1996) prior tenets because developmental pathways, for example, are rarely linear, but often show fits and starts, oscillations, and even reversals, particularly when performance is at an optimal level or when a new skill is being developed (Fischer and Bidell, 1998). The teacher education program, particularly the foundations disciplines, are meant to shore up the mental life of the teacher, especially their states of mind when they explain to themselves their student’s behavior, when they insist on certain classroom practices, and establish schoolwork requirements. It gives them a basis for deciding, for example, whether to prohibit handheld calculators in arithmetic lessons, to group students by ability, to require memorization of certain facts and not others, to socially promote some students to the next grade, to allow some students to skip a grade level, or to adopt new teaching methods. In other words, the knowledge base of the educational foundation disciplines refers to that body of opinion, information, and knowledge that the professional teacher relies on to justify her professional decisions. This knowledge is important if only because teachers attempt only what they believe is possible. The judgment that an aspect of education is impossible, or impossibly difficult, usually flows from the prior misconceptions held by prospective teachers because they tend to be firm and
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absolute tenets. The core knowledge of educational foundations typically promotes more flexible forms of pupil accomplishment that go beyond what can be simply given to the pupil by showing and telling. Having said that, it is important to note the limitations of what can be had from the educational foundations disciplines. On logical grounds alone, sound practices can be derived from both true and false theoretical propositions. The soundness of an educational practice is simply not guaranteed by whether it fits with what is taught in teacher education courses, even when the builders of the theory, who have created the educational technique, think it stems from their theories. Although a proven effective teaching technique, programmed instruction does not tend to lose that effectiveness when the various theoretical requirements Skinner (its inventor) placed on it are violated (e.g., programs that scramble frames randomly, delay or omit reinforcement, and require only covert responding are as effective as their theoretically sanctioned opposites). While the Montessori practices are compatible with Piaget’s theory, they were developed independent of it and succeeded quite distinctly from the truth or falsity of Piaget’s propositions. Both Piaget and Skinner, for example, have different but adequate explanations for Montessori teaching. This should not be surprising because there are many instances in science and other disciplines where different theoretical positions yield the same practical recommendations. For example, both the Ptolemaic view in astronomy, which holds that the Earth is at the center of the Universe, and the Copernican view of astronomy, which holds that the sun is at the center, yield the same navigational practices for traveling on Earth. There is still another problem for teacher educators when they try to connect propositions in their educational foundations courses with practices in the schools. What teachers are able to do and what they actually do are often quite different. Even if they have a competence that would be sufficient to accomplish a teaching task, they may accomplish the task in a way that bypasses the competence altogether as can been seen in the following example. Virtually all adults, and most preschoolers, can give the plural of the following nonsense nouns – wug, wot, and gutch ; in fact, they could even give the past tense if these same words were presented to them as verbs (e.g., Today A is wugging B, but yesterday A wugged B, and so on). Yet, almost no one knows the linguistic rule for the assignment of the plural (/z/, /s/, /ez/) or past tense (/d/, /ed/, /t/) allomorphs (wugs, wots, gutches), but everyone acts as if they knew the rule for the pluralizing these nonsense words even though it is obvious that they do not. They base their flawless plural and past tense performance on some factors of language competence apart from their formal knowledge of linguistics even though their formal knowledge of linguistics, if they had it, would have been sufficient for them
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to pluralize the nonsense nouns and form the past tense of the nonsense verbs. Thus, even when teacher educators succeed and the prospective teacher learns the content of the teacher education curriculum, there is still no guarantee that the teacher based his or her teaching practice on some knowledge of educational psychology, history, philosophy, or some body of research literature acquired in the teacher education program and its foundations courses. The fact that they could have, might have, or even should have, is no evidence that they did, or would ever, base their practice on the knowledge they acquired in their teacher education program. Consequently, any effort to enhance the teacher’s knowledge of the educational foundations could ultimately be pointless because the expert teacher, like the fluent speaker, could very well have based his or her performance on some other area of competence (Peterson, 1946). Even if prospective teachers have acquired a competence based on their study of the educational foundations, there is still the question of whether they would be disposed to use that competence in the classroom (Murray, 2007). Having said this, however, we know that how the teacher does theorize or speculate about school events is a powerful determiner of the events. Prospective teachers, and unfortunately some experienced teachers, make a number of teaching errors that one day may be viewed as malpractice. These seem to stem from a naı¨ve representation of teaching and schooling (Brophy and Good, 1986; Evertson et al., 1985). For example, novices, especially those with the best and most decent intentions, blunder when they teach pupils who are very different from themselves. They treat pupils from whom they have low expectations in the following ways: they seat them outside the zone of frequent interaction; they treat them as a group rather than as individuals; and they look at them and call on them less often. When they do call on them, they ask them lower-level questions and give them less time to respond and fewer hints than they give their more able pupils. They give them less praise, even when they are correct, and more blame when they are wrong than they give pupils from whom they have higher expectations. They may do all this not only out of a mistaken sense of kindness, but also an impoverished view of the nature of teaching and the factors that figure in it (Hawley and Rosenholtz, 1984; Murray, 1996). There is hardly a better example of how the teacher’s prior beliefs and implicit theory of classroom events influences practices than this example of how teaching practices flow from the teacher’s expectations and predictions about his or her pupils’ ability and effort. Even if the teacher had acquired the information about the diverse groups of pupils in the classroom from the teacher education program, and was disposed to act in
sympathy with it, the teacher, even an experienced teacher, might still fail to act on the information in an appropriate manner (Murray, 2007). Cohen (1990), for example, reports a case of one enthusiastic teacher, Mrs. O, who believed she had adopted an innovative teaching approach only to have it shown that her innovative teaching was stubbornly hobbled with traditional and natural techniques which undermined her good intentions. Given that so much rests upon teachers’ expectations, predictions, and the way they think about schooling, the role of the foundations courses is to insure that teachers can evaluate evidence, can spot a fad or an unsound proposal for innovation, have an educated view of how the pupil’s mind develops, have a reasoned and informed position on the major public policy issues that affect schooling, and the intellectual resources to face novel and unexpected classroom problems and opportunities. Amateurs often make bad guesses and predictions and they have few defenses against destructive educational fads because common sense and folk wisdom are often inadequate for the analysis of genuinely new and novel events. Had the US and the UK teachers and administrators in the 1960–70s known more educational history, for example, they might not have required, as they did, one-quarter of USA and nearly all the UK pupils to learn to read in a special alphabet (ita, the initial teaching alphabet) that had a separate letter or symbol for each of the 45 sounds (phonemes) of English (e.g., wuns in ita would be once in traditional orthography). Had they known the history of spelling-reform efforts, they would have known that ita was but a version of phonataby, another alphabet used to the same end in the 1860s and the reasons why it was discarded. Had they known more educational psychology (in particular, the Osgood learning transfer surface), they could have predicted that the shift from ita to the regular alphabet would harm the pupil’s spelling (negative transfer) even though it would actually help reading (positive transfer). Had they known more about educational research, they would have evaluated the claims for the benefits of ita more carefully than they did, quite differently from their knowledge of the history of spelling reforms or positive and negative transfer in learning psychology. The study of the foundations disciplines seeks to give teachers a representation of schooling that allows them to ask for and search out the information that would be needed to evaluate the claims of any innovator. While they may have no information about phonataby, per se, they would know what kind of information they should have before implementing the innovation. Prospective, novice, and experienced teachers are constantly presented with educational happenings or phenomena (girls on the whole do better on language problems, boys do better on spatial relations problems; the words in the middle of any list take longer to learn than the words at the beginning or end; pupils can recognize more words than
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they can produce; some pupils learn their lessons faster than other pupils; some pupils conform to the rules of the classroom and some resist them; and so on). Teachers will inevitably speculate on the reasons for these and other phenomena they find in their classrooms. The complete account of an educational phenomenon entails the search for answers to a number of questions about a phenomenon that are informed by the foundations disciplines: what kind of phenomenon is it (was it a learning issue, motivational, social class, or genetic?); how did it get that way (was it always that way, only recently, only that way for certain groups, or does it come and go?); how does it work (was it produced through learning, maturation, or culture?); and how can it work better, and what is the point of it (fitting pupils for the economy, increased social justice, self-actualization)? The preponderance of recent scholarship in education has centered on the question, ‘‘How does it work,’’ that is, the mechanisms that make schooling work. However, at least four aspects of any educational event – whether at the pupil or school system level – also need to be specified before it can be said that the event is completely intelligible, understood, or explained. The complete account treats: 1. the substance of the event: the relevant biology of the behavior in the case of the pupil or in the case of a classroom, school, or system, the various tangible agents, laws, policies, and structures that make it up. 2. the antecedent conditions that are necessary and sufficient for the event: those which elicit, trigger, and maintain the event. These are the causes of the event, in the usual sense of the term cause. In the case of pupil accomplishment, it is thought to have something to do with what the teacher did and knew. 3. the form or structure of the event or that which makes the event one phenomenon rather than another. If a child finally comes to say 2 þ 2 always equals 4 and never any other number, is this a change in language, logic, learning, teaching effectiveness, personality, memory, or what? What is the change a change of and how could we know? If a school begins to group pupils according to their standardized test scores, what kind of change has occurred in the school and community? When can historical events be said to coalesce as one historical period or era rather than another? 4. the purpose or point of the event, what it leads to, how it fits in with everything else, and how other events in the pupil’s life, for example, makes the event intelligible and vice versa. Does the event mean anything? What is the point, significance, or meaning of the event? Consider the curious fact that some young pupils, even those who know how to count correctly, think that spreading out a row of five marbles makes the row have more than five marbles while other pupils know that the number in the row is still five. How could the teacher
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figure out how is it that some children know that the number of objects is independent of their spatial array while other children act as if the array also changed the number of objects (concepts of this sort are found at all levels of the curriculum)? Some teachers see the issue as a matter of a logical deduction, the child’s ability to deduce the correct answer, and others see it merely as a matter of memory – being able to recognize and give the right answer. We will return to this example later. Many issues in education are really debates about whether the explanation for a phenomenon is to be found solely in the antecedent conditions for it or in its form or structure as well. The debate is not so much about the student’s accomplishment, but about what it means. For example, in one view there is alarm when a pupil who had used mice as the plural for mouse begins to say mouses, while in the other view, the reintroduction of mouses, wrong as it is, is a sign of linguistic progress because it shows a newly found sensitivity to a new class of linguistic rule. Along similar lines, in one view the pupil who argues that Churchill was right to firebomb Dresden gives exactly the opposite answer from the pupil who argues Churchill’s act was wrong. Yet, the two arguments, while contradictory on the surface, may be structurally identical and signify that the two pupils have achieved precisely the same level of moral and logical development. On a larger scale, some see the function of the schools as the liberating transmission of the culture from one generation to the next, while others see the very same events as the imposition of a class structure that represses individual freedom and reduces opportunities. The attempt to explain educational change totally in terms of antecedent events, the necessary and sufficient conditions, carries with it a determinism that many think precludes the possibility of spontaneous events, of emergent events, of discontinuities, of stages in the pupil’s grasp of a subject matter insofar as spontaneity can exist only when events cannot be reduced to, or linked strictly and solely to, those events that come before them. Thus, it could be said that theories that allow for educational changes that are inherently unpredictable from their antecedents introduce a more sophisticated or advanced view of education. If all there is to know about an earlier educational period is known, it still may not allow the teacher to predict the nature of the pupil’s subsequent educational accomplishments. The point here is that so much depends upon the teacher’s view of the issue and the way in which he or she thinks about whether the pupil’s behavior is determined or open-ended and whether the object of instruction is the correct response or the underlying structure of the response, and so on. Consequently, because teachers, like every reflective person, invent theories and explanations, teacher educators need some criteria for evaluating the available
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theories in the educational foundations before including them in the teacher education curriculum. There simply are differences in the power and adequacy of various educational theories that must be acknowledged and respected. What must we have from a good theory? What questions must it answer about the classroom phenomena it attempts to explain? What problems must it resolve or eliminate? All educational phenomena have more or less the same basic form – there is some change, or difference, in the student (or teacher, class, school, district, etc.) that is found over a relatively long period of time (weeks, months, years) in the case of development, or in a relatively short time (seconds, minutes, hours, and days) in the case of learning. What must a good theory tell us about these changes and differences? What should prospective teachers be thinking about, or considering, to shift their theorizing from those of an amateur to those of a professional? Contemporary scholarship points to ten categories that a good theory should address and that the teacher should consider: 1. the form or pattern of the change – a way to identify, name, or define the phenomenon, a way to distinguish it from other phenomena. There be must a way to measure it and perhaps produce it. The act of naming or defining carries the risk that more may be thought to be known and understood than really is, but it is an essential part of any theory to name the phenomenon and the criteria for the naming. Thus, we call the child’s incorrect response to the spatial array of the number of marbles, nonconservation, and thereby mark it off from other phenomena and begin the act of knowing and making sense of it. 2. cause – the causes of the phenomenon, the necessary and sufficient conditions for it – the eliciting conditions. This is not to say that the specifications of the necessary and sufficient conditions constitute the whole account or explanation, but only that they are a part of the story, so to speak, and without their specification, a theory would not be satisfying. Thus, we want to know under what conditions the child will assert that there are as many marbles as there were before the row of marbles was spread out, and under what conditions the child will claim there are more or fewer marbles. 3. mechanisms – what cognitive device produces the phenomenon. How do these devices function, and how, over the time span during which the change takes place, do they actually produce the change? In the number of marbles in the row example, what roles do learning, social interaction, imitation, cognitive dissonance, mediation, maturation, perception, and so on play in the child’s exhibition of the
phenomenon? How do they lead the student who was wrong to be right? 4. the educational end point – the educational goal for the changes. Later events cannot cause earlier events, but they can help us make sense of the earlier events by showing what the earlier events lead to – nonconservation leads to conservation and not the other way around. The child’s error that the number of marbles changed as they were spread out would make more sense if we had a way to see it as an instance of the child’s newly acquired notion of logical necessity and not merely as an episodic peculiarity of the young child’s thought (Murray, 1990). It is helpful to know why the earlier periods fail to hold the developing mind at some point or stage for a longer time even without knowing the character of the next stage or period. Because of the open-ended character of education and the potential for inherently unpredictable outcomes of mental functioning and accomplishment, it may be inevitable that theorists will always understand more of where the mind has been, so to speak, than where it is going. Moreover the good theory may provide a way to think about better educational outcomes. Given that many educational outcomes are possible, and that just as many evolutionary solutions are possible for species development, the good theory could be asked to account for, identify, explain, and clarify the better of the available outcomes – outcomes that maximize what it means to be human. We ask that the good theory critically examines the educational outcomes that appear to be necessary and unalterable to determine whether they are really just one of a range of possible educational outcomes. 5. the meaning of the phenomenon – the attribute of intentionality and the question of what the student meant or intended when he/she said the row now had more than five marbles. The question of the meaning or significance of the phenomenon is a micro-version of the question of the goal of education. It is an inquiry into the purpose and significance of some aspect of mental life. Just as there is no single interpretation of a text, apart from a framework of interpretation, one would not expect that there could be a single meaning of a behavioral phenomenon that was unrelated to a theory or an interpretative framework that could give meaning to the event. 6. unity of knowledge – the good theory must have the potential for coherence with the other disciplines. Thus, we would expect not to be surprised that the onset of conservation (knowing the number of marbles remained the same), for example, is linked to increases in brain lateralization, brain surface, the completion of myelination, increases in EEG alpha activity, and increases in working memory.
Teacher Education and the Educational Foundations Knowledge Base
7. deductive formalism – while the logic of discovery and the logic of justification are different, the good theory should eventually have a form such that phenomena are explained by virtue of their being implications of general propositions of a theory. The appeal for a deductive formalism in the good theory does not mean that theory building needs to proceed by that route, but only that eventually there would be a version of the theory that can be expressed in the fashion of the hypotheticaldeductive system (e.g., conservation makes sense within a developmental theory that explains many other phenomena like conservation and some others that are very different like seriation, transitivity, class inclusion, and egocentrism, but all derivable from a hypothetical device – concrete operational thought). 8. cohort specification – it is now understood that generational and historical effects compromise the generality of many findings, like the shape of the growth of intelligence function (Baltes et al. 1977). Such effects should now be seen as an integral part of the phenomenon. Of course, cohort, or time of the subject’s birth, is merely a proxy for some yet-to-be-discovered historical and cultural factors that operated during a particular period, and that these factors would significantly alter research findings that are reported in research paradigms that were not sensitive to generational factors. 9. cultural and social determinants – the identification of factors and mechanisms that operate uniquely in particular historical periods, and not in other periods, has led researchers to consider wider ranges of these contextual and interactive factors (Rogoff and Lave, 1984). Native Americans in the southwest, are not fooled as much by conservation problems about the clay ball’s weight as other children appear to be, and Bedouin children are not fooled as much as others about conservation of liquid amount (see Murray, 1981). In virtually every domain of psychology, substantial effects can be attributed to factors that appear to be features of a particular context, social or cultural group, geographic location, historical time period, and so on. Obviously the successful theory will find a way to make sense of this – at the moment – bewildering array of context-specific influential factors. 10. the theorist – the interdependence of fact and theory or text and interpretation leads to an examination of the theorist as a person and thinker. The interpretive framework that allows events to be facts in a science is shaped presumably by personal features of the theorist that heretofore were considered irrelevant when science was viewed exclusively as objective and self-correcting. At the moment we can only
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speculate how Piaget’s account of moral development would differ had it been formulated outside Protestant Geneva, or how Skinner’s account of learning would differ had it not been formulated by an American and so forth. However, as theories are invariably written and otherwise promulgated, their meaning is also subject to all the hermeneutic issues implicated in the attempt to specify the meaning and significance of an educational change in mental functioning in the first place. In summary, a good theory of schooling is what will eventually be found in the educational foundations disciplines of the teacher education curriculum, and it will be a key ingredient in what the teacher relies upon in professional decision making.
Bibliography Astington, J. W. and Pelletier, J. (1996). The language of mind. In Olson, D. R. and Torrance, N. (eds.) The Handbook of Education and Human Development, pp 591–619. Oxford: Blackwell. Ashley, J. and Tomasello, M. (1998). Cooperative problem solving and teaching in preschoolers. Social Development 7, 143–163. Baldwin, A. (1980). Theories of Child Development, 2nd edn. New York: John Wiley. Baltes, P., Reese, H., and Nesselroade, J. (1977). Life-Span Developmental Psychology: Introduction to Research Methods. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. Berliner, D. (1988). Implications of studies of expertise in pedagogy for teacher education and evaluation. New Directions for Teacher Assessment Proceedings of the 1988 ETS Invitational Conference, pp 39–68. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service. Brophy, J. and Good, T. (1986). Teacher behavior and student achievement. In Wittrock, M. (ed.) Handbook of Research on Teaching, 3rd edn, pp 328–375. New York: Macmillan. Cohen, D. (1990). A revolution in one classroom: The case of Mrs. Oublier Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 12, 311–330. Evertson, C., Hawley, W., and Zlotnick, M. (1985). Making a difference in educational quality through teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education 36(3), 2–12. Fischer, K. and Bidell, T. (1998). Dynamic development of psychological structures in action and thought. In Damon, W. (ed.) and Lerner, R. (vol. ed.) Handbook of Child Psychology, vol. I, pp 467–561. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Gilbert, S. F. and Borish, S. (1997). How cells learn, how cells teach: Education in the body. In Amsel, E. and Renniger, A. K. (eds.) Change and Development: Issues in Method, and Application, pp 61–76. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hawley, W. and Rosenholtz, S. (1984). Good schools: What research says about improving student achievement. Peabody Journal of Education 61(4). Heider, F. (1958). The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: Wiley. Kuhn, D. (1991). The Skills of Argument. New York: Cambridge University Press. Maynard, A. (2004). Cultures of teaching in childhood: Formal schooling and Maya sibling teaching at home. Cognitive Development 19, 517–535. Murray, F. (1981). The conservation paradigm: Conservation of conservation research. In Sigel, I., Brodzinsky, D., and Golinkoff, R. (eds.) New Directions and Applications of Piaget’s Theory, pp 143– 175. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Murray, F. (1990). The conversion of truth into necessity. In Overton, W. (ed.) Reasoning, Necessity, and Logic: Developmental Perspectives, pp 183–203. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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Murray, F. (1991). Questions a satisfying developmental would answer: The scope of a complete explanation of developmental phenomena. In Reese, H. (ed.) Advances in Child Development and Behavior, vol. 23, pp 39–47. New York: Academic Press, Inc. Murray, F. (1996). Beyond natural teaching: The case for professional education. In Murray, F. B. (ed.) The Teacher Educator’s Handbook, pp 3–13. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Murray, F. (2007). Disposition: A superfluous construct in teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education 58, 381–387. Olson, D. and Bruner, J. (1996). Folk psychology and folk pedagogy. In Olson, D. R. and Torrance, N. (eds.) The Handbook of Education and Human Development, pp 9–27. Oxford: Blackwell. Peterson, H. (ed.) (1946). Great Teachers Portrayed by Those Who Studied under Them. New York: Vintage Books. Premack, D. and Premack, A. J. (1996). Why animals lack pedagogy and some cultures have more of it than others. In Olson, D. R. and Torrance, N. (eds.) The Handbook of Education and Human Development, pp 302–323. Oxford: Blackwell. Rogoff, B. and Lave, J. (eds.) (1984). Everyday Cognition: Its Development in Social Context. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Strauss, S. and Silhoney, T. (1994). Teachers’ models of children’s mind and learning: Implications for teacher education. In Hirschfeld, L. A. and Gelman, S. A. (eds.) Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, pp 455–473. New York: Cambridge University Press. Strauss, S., Ziv, M., and Stein, A. (2002). Teaching as a natural cognition and its relation to preschoolers’ developing theory of mind. Child Development 17, 1473–1487. Strauss, S. and Ziv, M. (2004). Teaching: Ontogenesis, culture, and education. Cognitive Development 19, 451–456. Visalberghi, E. and Fragaszy, D. M. (1976). Pedagogy and imitation in monkeys. In Olson, D. R. and Torrance, N. (eds.) The Handbook of Education and Human Development, pp 277–301. Oxford: Blackwell.
Further Reading Cochran-Smith, M. and Zeichner, K. (eds.) (2007). Studying Teacher Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates. Cochran-Smith, M., Nemser, S. F., and McIntyre, J. (eds.) (2008). Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Issues in Changing Contexts, 3rd edn. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group and the Association of Teacher Educators. Draper, P. (1976). Docail and economic constraints on child life among the !Kung. In Lee, B. and Devore, I. (eds.) Kahlahari Hunter-Gatherers, pp 199–217. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Floden, R. E. and Meniketti, M. (2005). Research on the effects of coursework in the arts and sciences in the foundations of education. In Cochran-Smith, M. and Zeichner, K. (eds.) Studying Teacher Education, pp 251–308. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates. Konner, M. (1976). Maternal care, infant behavior and development among the !Kung. In Lee, B. and Devore, I. (eds.) Kahlahari Hunter-Gatherers, pp 218–245. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wilson, S. M., Floden, R. E., and Ferrini-Mundy, J. (2001). Teacher Preparation Research: Current Knowledge, Gaps, and Recommendations. University of Washington: Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy.
Teacher educators are doubly interested in teaching as it is both their subject matter and their method. Like all teachers, it is important for them to know how much of the subject matter their students have already mastered so that they can build on their students’ prior knowledge of the field. Long before there were teacher educators and teacher education programs, there was effective teaching because we are after all a teaching species, a species whose young cannot, and do not, survive unless they are taught, invariably and historically, by persons with no formal schooling in teaching, let alone in the disciplines of the foundations of education (psychology, philosophy, history, and sociology). Some have argued (e.g., Gilbert and Borish, 1997) that teaching is so basic to life that it can be found at the cellular level, but most researchers find that teaching requires (1) an intention to teach, (2) a belief that the pupil does not know something, and (3) the teacher’s implicit understanding of the pupil’s mind (Strauss and Ziv, 2004; Premack and Premack, 1996). Even if teaching was as simple as requiring the presence of a teacher when an activity was performed repeatedly, there are few documented cases of new learning in nonhumans in these instances (Visalberghi and Fragaszy, 1996, p. 286). Children as young as 3 years have been shown to teach (Ashley and Tomasello, 1998) and Strauss et al. (2002) found that children’s style of teaching a new board game (or building something) changed from demonstration and modeling at 3–4 years to predominately verbal explaining at 5 and 6 years (i.e., from show to tell). Seven-year-olds can adapt their teaching on occasion to their perception of what their pupils already know and can do. They sometimes ask their pupils if they have understood and tailor their teaching to the learners’ mistakes. The way children teach is also influenced by schooling itself. Maynard (2004) found that older Mayan children (6–11 years) who had been to school were also able to adopt schoollike teaching with their younger siblings (didactic teaching at a distance) in place of indigenous teaching practices used in families for cooking and weaving (close-up interactive demonstrations). Teacher education students come to attend teacher education programs, as Olson and Bruner (1996) also argued in their account of folk pedagogy, with two natural strategies already in place – showing and telling. Before they begin their teacher education programs, teacher
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education students have also acquired a naı¨ve, but serviceable, theory of the human mind (see Heider, 1958; Baldwin, 1980 on naı¨ve psychology). In this naive or common sense psychology, they see the pupil’s school achievement as tied to only four factors – the pupil’s ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck. With these four factors, they think they can explain completely the pupil’s success or failure by attributing the level of the pupil’s work to his/her ability, effort, to the difficulty of the school task, or to plain luck. The problem with this naı¨ve account is that it is unduly limiting insofar as ability is concerned, to take only one example, which is not fixed or stable but varies from moment to moment interactively with many other mental factors, not just the few in the naive theory (Baldwin, 1980; Murray, 1991). Regrettably, even after the completion of a teacher education program, many experienced teachers’ reasoning about teaching is still fairly limited and constrained by views of teaching that the prospective teacher had before beginning a teacher education program. Strauss and Shilony (1994) interviewed both experienced and novice science and humanities’ teachers about how they would teach a topic of their choice to children of various ages (7–17 years). Both novice and experienced teachers in both disciplines conceptualized teaching only as the flow of information from their heads to their pupils’ heads, acknowledging that their own role was only to devise manageable and interesting ways of entry into the students’ mind so that the information could be stored and anchored appropriately. The student is passive, a receptacle waiting to be filled, and if the information fails to flow to its destination, the receptacle was taken to be too small and/ or the student was inattentive. The novices and experienced teachers were indistinguishable in their responses and therefore, Strauss and Shilony attributed their responses to their preteacher education training and preexisting common sense naı¨ve views of teaching. There is also some clear evidence that experienced teachers perform differently from novices (Berliner, 1988). They are able, for example, to read highly contextualized cues in the classroom that allow them to spot trouble and also contribute to the smooth functioning of the class. These skills, however, were seemingly learned on the job and not in their teacher education program. Astington and Pelletier (1996) cataloged the following tenets of prospective teachers’ beliefs about teaching:
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(1) children are born with abilities and capacities that unfold linearly in time, (2) instructional sequences should match developmental sequences, (3) learning occurs sequentially within a hierarchy of skills, and (4) student errors are attributable to incomplete learning or inattention. When the pupil is to learn to do something, the teacher need only demonstrate or model it, and when the pupil is to know something, the teacher need only tell the pupils what they need to know. Teachers’ reasoning about their pupil’s accomplishments, in fact, proves to be surprisingly indistinguishable from the layperson’s explanations. Kuhn (1991) found, for example, when she asked teachers, ‘‘What causes children to fail in school?’’ the teachers’ reasoning was that the pupil ‘‘shows no superiority over reasoning regarding the other topics. . .performance for the school topic is in fact somewhat inferior to their performance for the other topics. . .’’ (p. 249). Their reasoning, like about half the other subjects in her study, tends to be absolutist, that is, they believe it is possible with sufficient study to know with certainty the causes of a phenomenon, often through a personal commitment to a theory or assertion. On the whole, the prospective teacher’s prior knowledge and beliefs make it difficult to have teachers learn some of the newer teaching techniques such as dialectic, discovery, invention, cooperative learning, and collaboration, because the prior techniques are often the opposite of the newer strategies. They may, for example, require the prospective teacher to refrain entirely from showing or telling. They are also at variance with the Astington and Pelletier (1996) prior tenets because developmental pathways, for example, are rarely linear, but often show fits and starts, oscillations, and even reversals, particularly when performance is at an optimal level or when a new skill is being developed (Fischer and Bidell, 1998). The teacher education program, particularly the foundations disciplines, are meant to shore up the mental life of the teacher, especially their states of mind when they explain to themselves their student’s behavior, when they insist on certain classroom practices, and establish schoolwork requirements. It gives them a basis for deciding, for example, whether to prohibit handheld calculators in arithmetic lessons, to group students by ability, to require memorization of certain facts and not others, to socially promote some students to the next grade, to allow some students to skip a grade level, or to adopt new teaching methods. In other words, the knowledge base of the educational foundation disciplines refers to that body of opinion, information, and knowledge that the professional teacher relies on to justify her professional decisions. This knowledge is important if only because teachers attempt only what they believe is possible. The judgment that an aspect of education is impossible, or impossibly difficult, usually flows from the prior misconceptions held by prospective teachers because they tend to be firm and
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absolute tenets. The core knowledge of educational foundations typically promotes more flexible forms of pupil accomplishment that go beyond what can be simply given to the pupil by showing and telling. Having said that, it is important to note the limitations of what can be had from the educational foundations disciplines. On logical grounds alone, sound practices can be derived from both true and false theoretical propositions. The soundness of an educational practice is simply not guaranteed by whether it fits with what is taught in teacher education courses, even when the builders of the theory, who have created the educational technique, think it stems from their theories. Although a proven effective teaching technique, programmed instruction does not tend to lose that effectiveness when the various theoretical requirements Skinner (its inventor) placed on it are violated (e.g., programs that scramble frames randomly, delay or omit reinforcement, and require only covert responding are as effective as their theoretically sanctioned opposites). While the Montessori practices are compatible with Piaget’s theory, they were developed independent of it and succeeded quite distinctly from the truth or falsity of Piaget’s propositions. Both Piaget and Skinner, for example, have different but adequate explanations for Montessori teaching. This should not be surprising because there are many instances in science and other disciplines where different theoretical positions yield the same practical recommendations. For example, both the Ptolemaic view in astronomy, which holds that the Earth is at the center of the Universe, and the Copernican view of astronomy, which holds that the sun is at the center, yield the same navigational practices for traveling on Earth. There is still another problem for teacher educators when they try to connect propositions in their educational foundations courses with practices in the schools. What teachers are able to do and what they actually do are often quite different. Even if they have a competence that would be sufficient to accomplish a teaching task, they may accomplish the task in a way that bypasses the competence altogether as can been seen in the following example. Virtually all adults, and most preschoolers, can give the plural of the following nonsense nouns – wug, wot, and gutch ; in fact, they could even give the past tense if these same words were presented to them as verbs (e.g., Today A is wugging B, but yesterday A wugged B, and so on). Yet, almost no one knows the linguistic rule for the assignment of the plural (/z/, /s/, /ez/) or past tense (/d/, /ed/, /t/) allomorphs (wugs, wots, gutches), but everyone acts as if they knew the rule for the pluralizing these nonsense words even though it is obvious that they do not. They base their flawless plural and past tense performance on some factors of language competence apart from their formal knowledge of linguistics even though their formal knowledge of linguistics, if they had it, would have been sufficient for them
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to pluralize the nonsense nouns and form the past tense of the nonsense verbs. Thus, even when teacher educators succeed and the prospective teacher learns the content of the teacher education curriculum, there is still no guarantee that the teacher based his or her teaching practice on some knowledge of educational psychology, history, philosophy, or some body of research literature acquired in the teacher education program and its foundations courses. The fact that they could have, might have, or even should have, is no evidence that they did, or would ever, base their practice on the knowledge they acquired in their teacher education program. Consequently, any effort to enhance the teacher’s knowledge of the educational foundations could ultimately be pointless because the expert teacher, like the fluent speaker, could very well have based his or her performance on some other area of competence (Peterson, 1946). Even if prospective teachers have acquired a competence based on their study of the educational foundations, there is still the question of whether they would be disposed to use that competence in the classroom (Murray, 2007). Having said this, however, we know that how the teacher does theorize or speculate about school events is a powerful determiner of the events. Prospective teachers, and unfortunately some experienced teachers, make a number of teaching errors that one day may be viewed as malpractice. These seem to stem from a naı¨ve representation of teaching and schooling (Brophy and Good, 1986; Evertson et al., 1985). For example, novices, especially those with the best and most decent intentions, blunder when they teach pupils who are very different from themselves. They treat pupils from whom they have low expectations in the following ways: they seat them outside the zone of frequent interaction; they treat them as a group rather than as individuals; and they look at them and call on them less often. When they do call on them, they ask them lower-level questions and give them less time to respond and fewer hints than they give their more able pupils. They give them less praise, even when they are correct, and more blame when they are wrong than they give pupils from whom they have higher expectations. They may do all this not only out of a mistaken sense of kindness, but also an impoverished view of the nature of teaching and the factors that figure in it (Hawley and Rosenholtz, 1984; Murray, 1996). There is hardly a better example of how the teacher’s prior beliefs and implicit theory of classroom events influences practices than this example of how teaching practices flow from the teacher’s expectations and predictions about his or her pupils’ ability and effort. Even if the teacher had acquired the information about the diverse groups of pupils in the classroom from the teacher education program, and was disposed to act in
sympathy with it, the teacher, even an experienced teacher, might still fail to act on the information in an appropriate manner (Murray, 2007). Cohen (1990), for example, reports a case of one enthusiastic teacher, Mrs. O, who believed she had adopted an innovative teaching approach only to have it shown that her innovative teaching was stubbornly hobbled with traditional and natural techniques which undermined her good intentions. Given that so much rests upon teachers’ expectations, predictions, and the way they think about schooling, the role of the foundations courses is to insure that teachers can evaluate evidence, can spot a fad or an unsound proposal for innovation, have an educated view of how the pupil’s mind develops, have a reasoned and informed position on the major public policy issues that affect schooling, and the intellectual resources to face novel and unexpected classroom problems and opportunities. Amateurs often make bad guesses and predictions and they have few defenses against destructive educational fads because common sense and folk wisdom are often inadequate for the analysis of genuinely new and novel events. Had the US and the UK teachers and administrators in the 1960–70s known more educational history, for example, they might not have required, as they did, one-quarter of USA and nearly all the UK pupils to learn to read in a special alphabet (ita, the initial teaching alphabet) that had a separate letter or symbol for each of the 45 sounds (phonemes) of English (e.g., wuns in ita would be once in traditional orthography). Had they known the history of spelling-reform efforts, they would have known that ita was but a version of phonataby, another alphabet used to the same end in the 1860s and the reasons why it was discarded. Had they known more educational psychology (in particular, the Osgood learning transfer surface), they could have predicted that the shift from ita to the regular alphabet would harm the pupil’s spelling (negative transfer) even though it would actually help reading (positive transfer). Had they known more about educational research, they would have evaluated the claims for the benefits of ita more carefully than they did, quite differently from their knowledge of the history of spelling reforms or positive and negative transfer in learning psychology. The study of the foundations disciplines seeks to give teachers a representation of schooling that allows them to ask for and search out the information that would be needed to evaluate the claims of any innovator. While they may have no information about phonataby, per se, they would know what kind of information they should have before implementing the innovation. Prospective, novice, and experienced teachers are constantly presented with educational happenings or phenomena (girls on the whole do better on language problems, boys do better on spatial relations problems; the words in the middle of any list take longer to learn than the words at the beginning or end; pupils can recognize more words than
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they can produce; some pupils learn their lessons faster than other pupils; some pupils conform to the rules of the classroom and some resist them; and so on). Teachers will inevitably speculate on the reasons for these and other phenomena they find in their classrooms. The complete account of an educational phenomenon entails the search for answers to a number of questions about a phenomenon that are informed by the foundations disciplines: what kind of phenomenon is it (was it a learning issue, motivational, social class, or genetic?); how did it get that way (was it always that way, only recently, only that way for certain groups, or does it come and go?); how does it work (was it produced through learning, maturation, or culture?); and how can it work better, and what is the point of it (fitting pupils for the economy, increased social justice, self-actualization)? The preponderance of recent scholarship in education has centered on the question, ‘‘How does it work,’’ that is, the mechanisms that make schooling work. However, at least four aspects of any educational event – whether at the pupil or school system level – also need to be specified before it can be said that the event is completely intelligible, understood, or explained. The complete account treats: 1. the substance of the event: the relevant biology of the behavior in the case of the pupil or in the case of a classroom, school, or system, the various tangible agents, laws, policies, and structures that make it up. 2. the antecedent conditions that are necessary and sufficient for the event: those which elicit, trigger, and maintain the event. These are the causes of the event, in the usual sense of the term cause. In the case of pupil accomplishment, it is thought to have something to do with what the teacher did and knew. 3. the form or structure of the event or that which makes the event one phenomenon rather than another. If a child finally comes to say 2 þ 2 always equals 4 and never any other number, is this a change in language, logic, learning, teaching effectiveness, personality, memory, or what? What is the change a change of and how could we know? If a school begins to group pupils according to their standardized test scores, what kind of change has occurred in the school and community? When can historical events be said to coalesce as one historical period or era rather than another? 4. the purpose or point of the event, what it leads to, how it fits in with everything else, and how other events in the pupil’s life, for example, makes the event intelligible and vice versa. Does the event mean anything? What is the point, significance, or meaning of the event? Consider the curious fact that some young pupils, even those who know how to count correctly, think that spreading out a row of five marbles makes the row have more than five marbles while other pupils know that the number in the row is still five. How could the teacher
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figure out how is it that some children know that the number of objects is independent of their spatial array while other children act as if the array also changed the number of objects (concepts of this sort are found at all levels of the curriculum)? Some teachers see the issue as a matter of a logical deduction, the child’s ability to deduce the correct answer, and others see it merely as a matter of memory – being able to recognize and give the right answer. We will return to this example later. Many issues in education are really debates about whether the explanation for a phenomenon is to be found solely in the antecedent conditions for it or in its form or structure as well. The debate is not so much about the student’s accomplishment, but about what it means. For example, in one view there is alarm when a pupil who had used mice as the plural for mouse begins to say mouses, while in the other view, the reintroduction of mouses, wrong as it is, is a sign of linguistic progress because it shows a newly found sensitivity to a new class of linguistic rule. Along similar lines, in one view the pupil who argues that Churchill was right to firebomb Dresden gives exactly the opposite answer from the pupil who argues Churchill’s act was wrong. Yet, the two arguments, while contradictory on the surface, may be structurally identical and signify that the two pupils have achieved precisely the same level of moral and logical development. On a larger scale, some see the function of the schools as the liberating transmission of the culture from one generation to the next, while others see the very same events as the imposition of a class structure that represses individual freedom and reduces opportunities. The attempt to explain educational change totally in terms of antecedent events, the necessary and sufficient conditions, carries with it a determinism that many think precludes the possibility of spontaneous events, of emergent events, of discontinuities, of stages in the pupil’s grasp of a subject matter insofar as spontaneity can exist only when events cannot be reduced to, or linked strictly and solely to, those events that come before them. Thus, it could be said that theories that allow for educational changes that are inherently unpredictable from their antecedents introduce a more sophisticated or advanced view of education. If all there is to know about an earlier educational period is known, it still may not allow the teacher to predict the nature of the pupil’s subsequent educational accomplishments. The point here is that so much depends upon the teacher’s view of the issue and the way in which he or she thinks about whether the pupil’s behavior is determined or open-ended and whether the object of instruction is the correct response or the underlying structure of the response, and so on. Consequently, because teachers, like every reflective person, invent theories and explanations, teacher educators need some criteria for evaluating the available
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theories in the educational foundations before including them in the teacher education curriculum. There simply are differences in the power and adequacy of various educational theories that must be acknowledged and respected. What must we have from a good theory? What questions must it answer about the classroom phenomena it attempts to explain? What problems must it resolve or eliminate? All educational phenomena have more or less the same basic form – there is some change, or difference, in the student (or teacher, class, school, district, etc.) that is found over a relatively long period of time (weeks, months, years) in the case of development, or in a relatively short time (seconds, minutes, hours, and days) in the case of learning. What must a good theory tell us about these changes and differences? What should prospective teachers be thinking about, or considering, to shift their theorizing from those of an amateur to those of a professional? Contemporary scholarship points to ten categories that a good theory should address and that the teacher should consider: 1. the form or pattern of the change – a way to identify, name, or define the phenomenon, a way to distinguish it from other phenomena. There be must a way to measure it and perhaps produce it. The act of naming or defining carries the risk that more may be thought to be known and understood than really is, but it is an essential part of any theory to name the phenomenon and the criteria for the naming. Thus, we call the child’s incorrect response to the spatial array of the number of marbles, nonconservation, and thereby mark it off from other phenomena and begin the act of knowing and making sense of it. 2. cause – the causes of the phenomenon, the necessary and sufficient conditions for it – the eliciting conditions. This is not to say that the specifications of the necessary and sufficient conditions constitute the whole account or explanation, but only that they are a part of the story, so to speak, and without their specification, a theory would not be satisfying. Thus, we want to know under what conditions the child will assert that there are as many marbles as there were before the row of marbles was spread out, and under what conditions the child will claim there are more or fewer marbles. 3. mechanisms – what cognitive device produces the phenomenon. How do these devices function, and how, over the time span during which the change takes place, do they actually produce the change? In the number of marbles in the row example, what roles do learning, social interaction, imitation, cognitive dissonance, mediation, maturation, perception, and so on play in the child’s exhibition of the
phenomenon? How do they lead the student who was wrong to be right? 4. the educational end point – the educational goal for the changes. Later events cannot cause earlier events, but they can help us make sense of the earlier events by showing what the earlier events lead to – nonconservation leads to conservation and not the other way around. The child’s error that the number of marbles changed as they were spread out would make more sense if we had a way to see it as an instance of the child’s newly acquired notion of logical necessity and not merely as an episodic peculiarity of the young child’s thought (Murray, 1990). It is helpful to know why the earlier periods fail to hold the developing mind at some point or stage for a longer time even without knowing the character of the next stage or period. Because of the open-ended character of education and the potential for inherently unpredictable outcomes of mental functioning and accomplishment, it may be inevitable that theorists will always understand more of where the mind has been, so to speak, than where it is going. Moreover the good theory may provide a way to think about better educational outcomes. Given that many educational outcomes are possible, and that just as many evolutionary solutions are possible for species development, the good theory could be asked to account for, identify, explain, and clarify the better of the available outcomes – outcomes that maximize what it means to be human. We ask that the good theory critically examines the educational outcomes that appear to be necessary and unalterable to determine whether they are really just one of a range of possible educational outcomes. 5. the meaning of the phenomenon – the attribute of intentionality and the question of what the student meant or intended when he/she said the row now had more than five marbles. The question of the meaning or significance of the phenomenon is a micro-version of the question of the goal of education. It is an inquiry into the purpose and significance of some aspect of mental life. Just as there is no single interpretation of a text, apart from a framework of interpretation, one would not expect that there could be a single meaning of a behavioral phenomenon that was unrelated to a theory or an interpretative framework that could give meaning to the event. 6. unity of knowledge – the good theory must have the potential for coherence with the other disciplines. Thus, we would expect not to be surprised that the onset of conservation (knowing the number of marbles remained the same), for example, is linked to increases in brain lateralization, brain surface, the completion of myelination, increases in EEG alpha activity, and increases in working memory.
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7. deductive formalism – while the logic of discovery and the logic of justification are different, the good theory should eventually have a form such that phenomena are explained by virtue of their being implications of general propositions of a theory. The appeal for a deductive formalism in the good theory does not mean that theory building needs to proceed by that route, but only that eventually there would be a version of the theory that can be expressed in the fashion of the hypotheticaldeductive system (e.g., conservation makes sense within a developmental theory that explains many other phenomena like conservation and some others that are very different like seriation, transitivity, class inclusion, and egocentrism, but all derivable from a hypothetical device – concrete operational thought). 8. cohort specification – it is now understood that generational and historical effects compromise the generality of many findings, like the shape of the growth of intelligence function (Baltes et al. 1977). Such effects should now be seen as an integral part of the phenomenon. Of course, cohort, or time of the subject’s birth, is merely a proxy for some yet-to-be-discovered historical and cultural factors that operated during a particular period, and that these factors would significantly alter research findings that are reported in research paradigms that were not sensitive to generational factors. 9. cultural and social determinants – the identification of factors and mechanisms that operate uniquely in particular historical periods, and not in other periods, has led researchers to consider wider ranges of these contextual and interactive factors (Rogoff and Lave, 1984). Native Americans in the southwest, are not fooled as much by conservation problems about the clay ball’s weight as other children appear to be, and Bedouin children are not fooled as much as others about conservation of liquid amount (see Murray, 1981). In virtually every domain of psychology, substantial effects can be attributed to factors that appear to be features of a particular context, social or cultural group, geographic location, historical time period, and so on. Obviously the successful theory will find a way to make sense of this – at the moment – bewildering array of context-specific influential factors. 10. the theorist – the interdependence of fact and theory or text and interpretation leads to an examination of the theorist as a person and thinker. The interpretive framework that allows events to be facts in a science is shaped presumably by personal features of the theorist that heretofore were considered irrelevant when science was viewed exclusively as objective and self-correcting. At the moment we can only
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speculate how Piaget’s account of moral development would differ had it been formulated outside Protestant Geneva, or how Skinner’s account of learning would differ had it not been formulated by an American and so forth. However, as theories are invariably written and otherwise promulgated, their meaning is also subject to all the hermeneutic issues implicated in the attempt to specify the meaning and significance of an educational change in mental functioning in the first place. In summary, a good theory of schooling is what will eventually be found in the educational foundations disciplines of the teacher education curriculum, and it will be a key ingredient in what the teacher relies upon in professional decision making.
Bibliography Astington, J. W. and Pelletier, J. (1996). The language of mind. In Olson, D. R. and Torrance, N. (eds.) The Handbook of Education and Human Development, pp 591–619. Oxford: Blackwell. Ashley, J. and Tomasello, M. (1998). Cooperative problem solving and teaching in preschoolers. Social Development 7, 143–163. Baldwin, A. (1980). Theories of Child Development, 2nd edn. New York: John Wiley. Baltes, P., Reese, H., and Nesselroade, J. (1977). Life-Span Developmental Psychology: Introduction to Research Methods. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. Berliner, D. (1988). Implications of studies of expertise in pedagogy for teacher education and evaluation. New Directions for Teacher Assessment Proceedings of the 1988 ETS Invitational Conference, pp 39–68. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service. Brophy, J. and Good, T. (1986). Teacher behavior and student achievement. In Wittrock, M. (ed.) Handbook of Research on Teaching, 3rd edn, pp 328–375. New York: Macmillan. Cohen, D. (1990). A revolution in one classroom: The case of Mrs. Oublier Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 12, 311–330. Evertson, C., Hawley, W., and Zlotnick, M. (1985). Making a difference in educational quality through teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education 36(3), 2–12. Fischer, K. and Bidell, T. (1998). Dynamic development of psychological structures in action and thought. In Damon, W. (ed.) and Lerner, R. (vol. ed.) Handbook of Child Psychology, vol. I, pp 467–561. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Gilbert, S. F. and Borish, S. (1997). How cells learn, how cells teach: Education in the body. In Amsel, E. and Renniger, A. K. (eds.) Change and Development: Issues in Method, and Application, pp 61–76. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hawley, W. and Rosenholtz, S. (1984). Good schools: What research says about improving student achievement. Peabody Journal of Education 61(4). Heider, F. (1958). The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: Wiley. Kuhn, D. (1991). The Skills of Argument. New York: Cambridge University Press. Maynard, A. (2004). Cultures of teaching in childhood: Formal schooling and Maya sibling teaching at home. Cognitive Development 19, 517–535. Murray, F. (1981). The conservation paradigm: Conservation of conservation research. In Sigel, I., Brodzinsky, D., and Golinkoff, R. (eds.) New Directions and Applications of Piaget’s Theory, pp 143– 175. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Murray, F. (1990). The conversion of truth into necessity. In Overton, W. (ed.) Reasoning, Necessity, and Logic: Developmental Perspectives, pp 183–203. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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Murray, F. (1991). Questions a satisfying developmental would answer: The scope of a complete explanation of developmental phenomena. In Reese, H. (ed.) Advances in Child Development and Behavior, vol. 23, pp 39–47. New York: Academic Press, Inc. Murray, F. (1996). Beyond natural teaching: The case for professional education. In Murray, F. B. (ed.) The Teacher Educator’s Handbook, pp 3–13. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Murray, F. (2007). Disposition: A superfluous construct in teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education 58, 381–387. Olson, D. and Bruner, J. (1996). Folk psychology and folk pedagogy. In Olson, D. R. and Torrance, N. (eds.) The Handbook of Education and Human Development, pp 9–27. Oxford: Blackwell. Peterson, H. (ed.) (1946). Great Teachers Portrayed by Those Who Studied under Them. New York: Vintage Books. Premack, D. and Premack, A. J. (1996). Why animals lack pedagogy and some cultures have more of it than others. In Olson, D. R. and Torrance, N. (eds.) The Handbook of Education and Human Development, pp 302–323. Oxford: Blackwell. Rogoff, B. and Lave, J. (eds.) (1984). Everyday Cognition: Its Development in Social Context. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Strauss, S. and Silhoney, T. (1994). Teachers’ models of children’s mind and learning: Implications for teacher education. In Hirschfeld, L. A. and Gelman, S. A. (eds.) Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, pp 455–473. New York: Cambridge University Press. Strauss, S., Ziv, M., and Stein, A. (2002). Teaching as a natural cognition and its relation to preschoolers’ developing theory of mind. Child Development 17, 1473–1487. Strauss, S. and Ziv, M. (2004). Teaching: Ontogenesis, culture, and education. Cognitive Development 19, 451–456. Visalberghi, E. and Fragaszy, D. M. (1976). Pedagogy and imitation in monkeys. In Olson, D. R. and Torrance, N. (eds.) The Handbook of Education and Human Development, pp 277–301. Oxford: Blackwell.
Further Reading Cochran-Smith, M. and Zeichner, K. (eds.) (2007). Studying Teacher Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates. Cochran-Smith, M., Nemser, S. F., and McIntyre, J. (eds.) (2008). Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Issues in Changing Contexts, 3rd edn. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group and the Association of Teacher Educators. Draper, P. (1976). Docail and economic constraints on child life among the !Kung. In Lee, B. and Devore, I. (eds.) Kahlahari Hunter-Gatherers, pp 199–217. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Floden, R. E. and Meniketti, M. (2005). Research on the effects of coursework in the arts and sciences in the foundations of education. In Cochran-Smith, M. and Zeichner, K. (eds.) Studying Teacher Education, pp 251–308. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates. Konner, M. (1976). Maternal care, infant behavior and development among the !Kung. In Lee, B. and Devore, I. (eds.) Kahlahari Hunter-Gatherers, pp 218–245. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wilson, S. M., Floden, R. E., and Ferrini-Mundy, J. (2001). Teacher Preparation Research: Current Knowledge, Gaps, and Recommendations. University of Washington: Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy.