Mary Kennedy (2016) identifies four kinds of professional development:
- Prescription: sharing universal ways to address particular teaching problems
- Strategy: presenting practices (as in prescription) and a rationale for when and why to use them
- Insight: helping teachers see familiar events differently, creating “self-generated ‘aha!’ moments”
- Bodies of knowledge: presenting “a coherent body of interrelated concepts and principles” which is “inherently passive”: it does not suggest any particular action
Kennedy’s review suggests that prescription and bodies of knowledge do not help teachers increase student learning; strategy and insight do. ‘Strategy’ resembles practice-based training closely: share a goal and models, identify the principles, help teachers personalise them, practise (more here). But how can we promote insight in teacher education?
What is an insight?
Sometimes lightbulb moments revolutionise how students see a subject. Students realise, for example, that:
- History is a narrative
- Texts are constructed by an author
- Models represent reality
- Letters make words
These are threshold concepts (Meyer and Land, 2003). They are:
- Troublesome: counter-intuitive and alien – shouldn’t history just be true?
- Transformative: they change how we see the world – like a Marxist or feminist perspective
- Irreversible: they cannot be unlearned – we can never return to seeing isolated letters once we can read
- Integrative: they expose how key ideas are related – language features and characterisation are both explained by authors constructing texts
- Bounded: they explain a lot, until we meet the next threshold concept
What threshold concepts might teachers encounter? Some might be personal: ‘I get angry too easily’, for example. But many threshold concepts are likely to be experienced by most teachers – here are a few suggested by teacher educators:
- As a teacher, I have significant influence over my students’ behaviour
- What students learn is more important than what I teach
- Plan backwards
- Student learning is opaque
- Memory is the residue of thought
For example, concluding that I have significant influence over students’ behaviour is troublesome (isn’t it up to students?), transformative (I have a much bigger role in the classroom than I thought), irreversible (I would struggle to renounce this belief), integrative (of my planning, professional duty and approach to classroom management) and bounded (I have more responsibility, but it’s not all about me).
A teacher can tell students that ‘History is a narrative’; a teacher educator can tell teachers to ‘plan backwards’, but in both cases the learner may accept the words without appreciating their meaning. I was told to plan backwards many times, but it took me years to understand why this mattered and internalise the approach. As teacher educators, we don’t want to rely on chance and time alone: how can we help teachers gain insights?
Promoting insight in teacher education
[Professional development] programs that rely on insights recognize the importance of teachers’ in-the-moment decisions and hope to alter those decisions by changing the way teachers interpret classroom situations in the moment and thus, how they respond to them (Kennedy, 2016).”
Kennedy suggests that training promoting insight is “less explicit” than strategy: insights “tend to be ‘discovered’ through study groups and discussions.” She notes that “programs can foster new insights by raising provocative questions that force teachers to reexamine familiar events and come to see them differently.” She offers two examples of programmes which promoted insight successfully:
- The Research Study Group introduced teachers to research-based reading strategies using study groups: teachers examined research collectively and planned future lessons in the light of its findings
- Linking Feedback added observation feedback to an existing data review process: teachers received factual information about their teaching without suggestions about how to use it
Often, the success of such programmes seems to lie in the way teachers are exposed and reexposed to key ideas: the powerful experience is less the introduction of new ideas than reviewing old ideas in a new light – having had time to act upon them and think about them. (This is a crucial element of teacher learning communities.)
Equally, we might plan to encourage specific insights in any training session. Chip and Dan Heath argue that we can help people “trip over the truth”, with a:
- Clear point
- Compressed time
- Self-discovery
- Stretching learners’ thinking
Alex Douglas offered a lovely example of stretching questions prompting personal insight rapidly, with a clear point: the importance of students’ thinking hard about meaning. First, he asked teachers which way the queen’s head faces on a pound coin – despite having handled many pound coins, many teachers could not answer correctly. Then he asked how many table tennis tables were in the school yard. No one answered correctly, despite walking past them every day. The penny dropped for teachers: awareness and exposure is insufficient for learning; students need to think hard about what is to be learned. While insights may be moments of self-discovery, and may come in their own time, we can plan plan experiences to promote them.
Conclusion
Lightbulb moments can have a powerful effect on teachers’ actions. Kennedy argues that, by helping teachers “‘see’ situations differently” they influence the decisions they make. This can be powerful, but I worry that designing teacher education programmes around insight is problematic, for three reasons:
- We attain insight at our own pace: a stray comment may transform one teacher’s understanding, leave another unmoved, and seem obvious to a third.
- I’m not sure we can assess whether training promoting insight has been effective: how do we know what teachers truly believe?
- If a teacher has had an insight, what are they going to do about it? They might view their teaching differently, but they are likely to need some kind of practice-based training too, offering ways to put their insight into practice.
So I’m not sure I’d design teacher education around insight alone: I still believe we should focus on practice (why, how). But Kennedy’s review did persuade me to change my approach. Now, in designing teacher education, I ask myself:
- What threshold concepts might teachers experience?
- How can I help teachers “trip over the truth”?
- How can I encourage teachers to reexamine key ideas through fresh eyes?
In a previous post, I addressed the limits of deliberate practice in teacher education and promised to describe how deliberate practice can promote judgement and insight. As I wrote, this post, defining and exploring insight, seemed like a necessary intermediary step. I’ll return to the limits and strengths of deliberate practice in a future post.
If you found this interesting, you may like:
These posts about practice in teacher education:
- All teacher education should be practice-based
- Planning a practice-based training session
- A framework for designing practice
I was first introduced to threshold concepts by Alex Quigley’s excellent post, here.
True education is needed “to train the youth to be thinkers, and not mere reflectors of other men’s thought.” Education is an instrument in helping our country become progressive.