What I’m learning, what I’m teaching, and what I’m learning about teaching
Resolving Teachers’ Suspicion of Educational Research and Outside Expertise
What follows is something I wrote a few months ago. It started as an analytic memo that I wrote during my Ed.D. Capstone research, but it ended up as a bit of a side-trail from my research focus. Those who are a little familiar with my recent research interests will recognize the familiar topic of Pedagogical Content Knowledge, or PCK. Those who read my recent article in the TIE Newsletter will also recognize the description of the Refined Consensus Model of PCK as a model of teacher professional knowledge and professional learning. While in previous writing, I’ve focused on the “bottom-up” knowledge construction about teaching by teachers, in this post I note that teacher professional knowledge develops in both directions, from the “inside-out,” but also from the “outside-in.”
“Metaphor”: An apt metaphor for teaching
I’ve recently been conducting case study research with a few secondary-level English and social studies teachers. A component of my research involves lesson observations and interviews with these teachers, in which I prompt them to share their thinking about their pedagogical decisions. I’m trying to better understand their pedagogical reasoning in planning and implementing their lessons. One of these teachers is a high school English teacher; let’s call her Ms. Bhatti. Ms. Bhatti uses the concept of metaphor as an organizing big idea for teaching her high school English class. Like a good English teacher, for Ms. Bhatti, metaphor is a figure of speech, but metaphors are also a broader literary device.
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