science teaching as knowledgability: a case study of knowing and learning during coteaching

SCE (WILEJ) RIGHT BATCH

shortstandardlong

q 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0036-8326/98/030357-21

SCIENCE TEACHEREDUCATION

Thomas Dana and Julie Gess-Newsome, Section Editors

Science Teaching asKnowledgability: A Case Studyof Knowing and Learning DuringCoteaching

WOLFF-MICHAEL ROTHFaculty of Education, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC V8W 3N4, Canada; e-mail:[email protected]

Received 5 June 1996; revised 16 July 1997; accepted 17 July 1997

ABSTRACT: It is a common lore among teachers that teaching (as it happens in their classrooms)and talk about teaching (as it happens in universities) are incommensurable. This study was designedto learn about teaching as practice by investigating what two teachers learned from each other asthey engaged, over a period of 3 months in coteaching an engineering curriculum to a grade 4–5class. The data sources for this interpretive study included ethnographic and videotaped records oflessons, planning and debriefing meetings, and staff development efforts. This study provides directand indirect evidence for teachers’ knowledgability; that is, their knowing and learning in and aboutpractice, including tacit and explicit aspects of teaching practice. Coteaching afforded experiencesthat have been shown to arise from coparticipation in other domains: learning as changing partici-pation in a changing practice. There is evidence that science content and content pedagogical knowl-edge fully unfolded only when embedded in and supported by appropriate practical pedagogicalknowledge (which often resisted teachers’ own efforts in formalizing it). q 1998 John Wiley & Sons,Inc. Sci Ed 82: 357–377, 1998.

Serious collaboration, by which teachers engage in the rigorous mutual examination of teaching andlearning turns out to be rare. (Little, 1990, p. 187)

Correspondence to: W.-M. RothContract grant sponsor: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; contract grant number:

410-93-1127Contract grant sponsor: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada/Northern Telecom; contract

grant number: 812-93-0006

358 ROTH

SCE (WILEJ) LEFT BATCH

shortstandardlong

We know relatively little about the specific mechanisms by which collegial relations among teachersoperate to the benefit of students. (Little, 1990, p. 168)

T: I just improved so much in [teaching kids to think for themselves by asking productive questions].I don’t think three university courses could have given me what [coteaching] gave me in these 2months.

G: It was the same thing for my learning. Even for someone who knows the unit theoretically; it isanother think to read it, but it is a whole different thing to do it with you. . . . This [coteaching]experience has changed my thinking about this unit [although] I wrote it, tested it, and had doneworkshops with teachers on it for the past 3 years. . . . I am just dying to rewrite that manual now,to me it is looking so amateurish now.

In this excerpt, Tammy and Gitte (pseudonyms) talked about their experience of coteaching ascience unit and express some of the fundamental dilemmas that divide the theory and practice ofteaching. There are fundamental but not sufficiently recognized differences between learning toteach and learning about teaching. Tammy felt that she had learned more during 2 months ofcoteaching than she could have learned in “three university courses. In this, her comments reflecta common complaint of preservice and in-service teachers about the limited relevance of universityscience methods and science content courses to their everyday practice. Tammy credited Gitte formuch of her learning. Gitte also learned and became a better teacher and curriculum developer.Gitte experienced in person the discrepancy between the curriculum as a set of instructional ma-terials and the actual teaching experience in classrooms. She credited Tammy for much of herlearning. Based on these and similar experiences, I began to ask a series of research questionsincluding: What is the relationship between practice and explicit rule-based knowledge used toexplain practice? How does learning accrue from coteaching? What to teachers learn in practicethat they cannot learn at university or from books? How do teachers act when two practices ap-pear to conflict? The present study was designed to seek answers to these questions. In its pre-dominant focus on pedagogical practices, the present study complements and contextualizes thestudy of Gitte’s science content and content pedagogical knowledge reported elsewhere (Roth,1996).

INTRODUCTION

In the attempt to find answers to questions, this study of science teaching was situated withinpragmatic conceptions of practice acknowledging the primacy of lived experience and the possibilitythat much of practitioners’ knowledge is tacit, socially and physically distributed, and irremediablysituated and embodied in specific contexts. To understand teaching and teachers’ knowing andlearning, their knowledgeability, teaching has to be studied in and as everyday practice (Roth, 1996).As such, the present study has both practical and theoretical concerns by blurring the distinctionsmade by the theory–practice dichotomy (Richardson, 1994). The present investigation contraststhose studies that are based on technical rationality and isolated bits of knowledge exclusivelylocated in individuals’ heads (e.g., Clermont, Borko, & Krajcik, 1994) or that study talk aboutpractice rather than practice (e.g., Copeland, Birmingham, DeMeulle, D’Emidio-Caston, & Natal,1994).

It has been suggested that an understanding of learning in the social context of the workplace ingeneral can provide valuable information for the training of teachers (Joyce & Clift, 1984; VerVelde,

SCIENCE TEACHING AS KNOWLEDGABILITY 359


shortstandardlong

Horn, & Steinshouer, 1991).1 The present study breaks new ground in providing thorough ethno-graphic data to (a) sustain a theory of teacher knowledge and (b) situate science teaching withrespect to craft knowledge in other domains. My intention is to construct theory-in-practice; thatis, to build conceptual knowledge through engagement in practice, by working at the school site(Lieberman, 1992). Such knowledge, constructed by university researchers highly sensitive to andrigorously curious about teachers’ knowledge, is “second order abstraction” (Grimmett & Mac-Kinnon, 1992, p. 396) as distinguished from teacher-generated first order abstractions.

Current forms of teacher education make few provisions for newcomers to appropriate masterfulpractice (Joyce & Clift, 1984). The reflective practicum (Schon, 1987) is an alternative to currentpractices in professional education which shares many features with traditional craft apprenticeship,athletics coaching, master classes in conservatories, and studios in architectural design. In all ofthese sites, newcomers to a practice learn by participating with “old-timers” in tasks that exhibitmany characteristics of actual practice; that is, these tasks are authentic, but performed in a protectedand safe studio-type learning environment. These issues chime with those of teachers educatorswho call for: (a) an ethos of learning in the workplace (VerVelde, Horn, & Steinshouer, 1991); (b)the development of professional practice schools that provide teacher-development activities aroundthe notions of colleagueship, openness, and trust (Lieberman & Miller, 1990); and (c) the creationof school-based knowledge-building communities that include students, teachers, and teacher ed-ucators (Lieberman, 1992).

RESEARCH DESIGN

Setting

The site of this study was a suburban elementary school in Western Canada. Teachers regard theschool as a positive workplace, where good peer relations and a supportive parent communityencourage teachers to remain for many years. When I arrived at the school, the teachers had alreadydecided to make science teaching the focus of a 3-year schoolwide improvement effort. They hadsurveyed grades 4–7 and found that students desired more hands-on experience. As part of theoverall effort, and in exchange for participating in investigations of student and teacher cognition,my research team participated in teacher development efforts. When requested, my team facilitatedteacher-organized professional development days, assisted teachers in planning their science cur-riculum, and coparticipated in teaching entire science units. In this way, we2 blurred the distinctionbetween formal research, teacher research, and teacher development to be able to construct knowl-edge with local and more global relevance. This allowed the development of theory-in-practicethrough engagement in practice (Lieberman, 1992; Richardson, 1994).

The invitation of the research team to participate in the school’s activities did not go withouttrepidations. There were initial ambiguities about the researchers’ roles and initial anxieties abouthaving a camera in the classroom that had been observed in other university–school efforts (e.g.,Clark et al., 1996; Clift, Johnson, Holland, & Veal, 1992). However, several teachers, includingTammy, took the lead and invited me to their classrooms to participate in science teaching andsubsequently invited me and my team to work with them and their classes. Research team and

1 However, it is acknowledged that on-the-job-guidance by experienced mentor teachers does not guarantee better in-struction on the part of novice teachers (Kennedy, 1991).

2 Wherever I use the pronoun “we,” it is to acknowledge the work of members on my research team, or other individualspresent during research-related conversations.

360 ROTH


shortstandardlong

cameras became an integral part of the classroom and data collection disappeared into the back-ground.

Participants

Tammy had 12 years of experience teaching at the elementary level, 6 of which were part-timeand in the same setting. Tammy had taught part of the unit once before and attended with me the3-hour workshop the curriculum developers offered with the purchase of the unit. During my firstvisits to the school, Tammy immediately agreed to work with me on implementing a hands-onscience curriculum and studying teaching and learning in the process. Gitte was a graduate studentwho worked part-time as a curriculum developer. She had 4 years of classroom experience inelementary schools (at the same grade level) during which she had conceived and pilot-tested aunit on civil engineering. For the 3 years prior to the study, she had fully developed the curriculumand presented teacher workshops. Tammy and Gitte cotaught between 3.0 and 4.5 hours per weekover a 13-week period. Gitte largely considered herself a teacher rather than a researcher. She wasmore interested in making the engineering unit work than in research issues and became part of theschool culture much as any substitute teacher would have.

Gitte and Tammy planned the activities together to adapt them to the specific needs of the setting.When requested, the research team provided support by supplying videotapes for individual orgroup viewing, serving as a sounding board for reflection after the lessons. More crucially, bothteachers shared stories of their own learning with the children so that the classroom became a“learning community” (Roth, 1997a). Visits by other teachers, which were explained to studentsas occasions for the visitors to learn about teaching and learning, heightened the general sense ofthe classroom as a learning community. In this environment, both Tammy and Gitte felt that theirrelationship with respect to the curriculum and the class was very symmetric and that they hadlearned tremendously from one another.

The investigation was conducted in a mixed-grade classroom with 23 grade 4 (10 boys, 13 girls)and 5 grade 5 students (3 boys, 2 girls). According to Tammy, all students exceeded her expectationswith respect to problem solving, levels of interest and task engagement, and collaborating with theirpeers. Some of the students who normally did not achieve well did so in this unit. Provincialregulations at the time prescribed anecdotal evaluation and the accumulation of portfolios ratherthan grades. At the end of the unit, Tammy evaluated students in terms of her observations ofemotional growth, engagement in the tasks, and children’s engineering log books. These log booksserved as portfolios and contained photographs of the children’s artifacts, designs for the structuresthey built, a glossary with children’s definitions of engineering-related terms of their own choice,and children’s self-evaluations.

“Engineering for Children” Curriculum

The context of Tammy and Gitte’s coparticipation was the “Engineering for Children: Structures”curriculum designed to allow elementary school children to find out about and have a positive firstexperience with engineering. At its core were three major open-ended challenges: designing andbuilding (a) a tower to serve student-determined purposes; (b) a bridge spanning at least 30 centi-meters and holding as much weight as possible; and (c) a megastructure from newspaper that couldhouse four or more students. Such open-ended learning environments have been problematic forscience teachers at all levels and promised to be a productive site for learning about teachers’practices.

In my assessment (supported by several visiting engineers and elementary teachers), studentsdeveloped very competent discursive and material practices (Roth, 1997a). These practices allowed



shortstandardlong

them to articulate their experiences, problems, and associated solutions. Gitte’s questioning was thecentral aspect that allowed students to develop their discursive and practical competencies. A de-tailed discourse analysis of Gitte’s questioning showed that she: (a) focused on engineering proc-ess knowledge rather than facts; (b) covered the domain-specific knowledge types identified bysocial studies of engineering; and (c) employed open-ended questions (to which she did notknow the answer) rather than the devised format questions typical for most science classrooms(Roth, 1996).

In a typical lesson, Tammy and Gitte went from group to group to talk with the students at lengthabout engineering issues, technical problems arising from the children’s work, how to work ingroups, and how to deal with frustrations. Each lesson also included time for teachers to talk withthe whole class about members’ work. During this time, one or both teachers pointed out featuresin children’s engineering techniques; they questioned children about their knowledge, problemsthey faced during their activities, and solution strategies to solve them; or children presented theirwork and then responded to questions and comments from the audience, peers and teachers alike.

Data Construction and Analysis

Data Sources. The data of this study were constituted by documents of various types and den-sities. I began to participate regularly (one, sometimes two afternoons per week) in classroomactivities 4 months prior to the engineering unit to become part of the school culture and, morespecifically, part of Tammy’s classroom. I was not simply an observer but an active coparticipantin mathematics, drama, and storytelling activities and became very familiar with Tammy’s ways ofinteracting with students, planning lessons, enacting curriculum, and coordinating her activitieswith other coparticipants. My field notes constituted the data sources for this period. I also collecteddescriptions of teacher development activities (including full-day professional development activ-ities, staff meetings, curriculum planning sessions) and classroom activities during these 4 months,and throughout the entire 2.5-year period that I spent at the school.

During the engineering unit (24 90-minute lessons), between two and four observers simulta-neously collected field notes. My team used two cameras to videotape all classroom activities(during whole-class activities, the second camera provided complementary data, which we used toproduce improved transcriptions). In addition, we videotaped meetings involving one or both teach-ers designed to: (a) plan the curriculum; (b) debrief teaching activities immediately following alesson; or (c) reflect on teaching and learning by using videotaped lessons to stimulate teacher talkabout their practices (approximately 10 hours). The video-based records also include conversationsbetween Tammy and Gitte that had arisen spontaneously at the end of lessons and in the classroom.Here, the topics of conversation (student-produced artifacts or students themselves) were stillpresent and thus available to be referenced directly in their conversation which gives rise to datathat allow a better assessment of teacher performance (Delandshere & Petrosky, 1994). Finally,Gitte kept a reflective journal that was also available for analysis. All videotapes were transcribedwithin days of being shot.

Data Analysis. In daily meetings (which always included Gitte, but less frequently Tammy), Igenerated assertions that were tested in the body of the data sources, or by directing data collectionefforts during the next field day. On the basis of this new information, working hypotheses werediscarded, modified, or retained. For example, during the second week of the unit, Gitte indicatedthat she had difficulties with knowing exactly when to ask the children questions that would scaffoldtheir appropriation of a new science or engineering concept. Tammy however felt that, althoughexcellent in terms of their content pedagogical knowledge, Gitte’s questions were often poorly

362 ROTH


shortstandardlong

timed in the sense that they were inappropriate for a particular child at a particular moment.3 Thatis, she felt that Gitte’s lacking pedagogical knowledge, which embeds the other two forms ofknowledge, decreased the impact of her questioning. To find out more about Gitte’s timing ofquestions, I specifically recorded her interactions with children in the course of the unit and thereforecollected the evidence that supported her improvement of this aspect of questioning.

Early on in the study I had a hunch that these teachers knew a lot without necessarily being ableto make this knowledge explicit. My field notes provide glimpses on the development of twofindings reported in this article:

A lot of what Gitte knows is not in the manual, but embodied in her knowledge-in-action, developedthrough working with teachers, workshops, working with kids, and now in the actual classroom.[1021]

Tammy addressed the difference between learning about the curriculum from the curriculum guide,from the workshop which she took herself, and how much more she learns by sitting down with us,talking about implementation, working side-by-side with someone else who has experience with thecurriculum content. [1028]

Throughout the study, I collected more field notes, classroom footage, and videotapes from con-versations with both teachers that confirmed these leads.

There were other tentative assertions which I had to drop in the course of the inquiry. Early on,I had suggested that the notions of curriculum expert and teaching expert could be used to con-ceptualize Gitte and Tammy’s roles. However, in conversations with the two teachers it becameclear that, although they recognized the distributed nature of their competencies, they did notexperience themselves and each other as “curriculum expert” and “teaching expert” would suggest.Both teachers rejected that these notions described their respective roles, or captured how theythemselves viewed their distributed expertise. On the basis of our discussions, and recognizing thatthe concepts were poor representations of Tammy and Gitte’s experiences, I discarded these con-cepts.

While I made constant comparisons within the growing data set, traditional procedures designedto assure the quality of the constructions in interpretive studies—that is, constant comparison,triangulation, and negative case analysis (Lincoln & Guba, 1985)—had to be modified here. Theseprocedures built on the assumption that beliefs, practices, knowledge, and meanings are unitaryand constant across time and context. Analysts then may evaluate them as different, inconsistent,incompatible, or illogical across contexts because they bring together theoretically, in a synopticview, what practically is never brought face to face. Such an assumption is not useful for assessingteacher knowledge, competencies, and performance (Delandshere & Petrosky, 1994) or, for thismatter, neither useful nor tenable for studying any practice (Bourdieu, 1990). I therefore assumedthat it is more useful to think of beliefs, practices, knowledge, and meanings as contingent con-structions.

There is an important difference between my data and those of researchers who have examinedthe nature of practice in other domains. This difference pertains to the nature of the discourse.Coworkers communicate their situation definitions and meanings in and over their collective taskwhich allows them to negotiate differences as part of the ongoing practice (e.g., Suchman, 1987).Tammy and Gitte, because of the nature of teaching, could share their understandings with eachother only after the completion of a lesson. Because of the time lapse between a classroom event

3 In the past, science educators only focused on science content and content pedagogical knowlege with respect to thequestions teachers ask independent of questions such as those of timing (e.g., Carlen, 1991; Tobin, 1984).



shortstandardlong

and the teachers’ accounts of that event, I had to assume that its meanings could have alreadychanged in the light of later events. Furthermore, the nature of its tacit aspects, practical knowledgeexcluded, by definition, direct access until the moment that it was verbalized, at which point it wasno longer tacit. However, I attempted to identify Tammy and Gitte’s knowing-in-practice andlearning-in-practice by contrasting various representations of an event; that is, observer descriptions,both practitioners’ accounts, and the videotapes and transcripts. Instances during which it becameapparent that Tammy and Gitte’s situation definitions were different were particularly fruitful forinvestigating the nature of practice because they encouraged both to question what they were doingand why. Much as in “breaching experiments” (Garfinkel, 1967), the unexpectedness of an eventor situation disclosed teachers’ methods for making sense in practice.

Influence of Research on Teaching Practice. Because I did not conceal information and hy-potheses, there were situations in which the teachers changed their classroom behavior. This cycleof data collection, interpretation, revision, and influence on the class is represented in the followingvignette.

I knew from the time before the collaborative teaching started that both teachers wanted to teachmath and science in a gender-sensitive way. However, during the first week of data collection, thereappeared to be an imbalance in the frequencies with which boys and girls were addressed duringteacher questioning. This working hypothesis was confirmed by a simple frequency count of theexisting videotapes, and the interactions during the next class (4 boys to 1 girl). The teachers thenmake a conscious effort to shift this ratio to 1 : 1. The boys reacted by asking, “Why are there somany questions directed towards girls?”

My feedback to Gitte and Tammy about the frequencies with which boys and girls got to answerquestions in whole-class conversations ultimately led them to make special arrangements for talkingwith girls in small groups consisting entirely of girls.

RESEARCH FINDINGS

In this study, three kinds of teacher learning became apparent: learning-in-practice; learning totalk about (or theorize) practice; and learning by attempting to put theory (propositional knowledge)into practice. First, Tammy and Gitte learned from each other, in practice, where they did not havethe time for reflecting. Coparticipation in ongoing activity, understanding, and learning were intri-cately bound up with each other. Learning-in-practice was constituted by understanding, a partialand open-ended process, and participation in ongoing activity. Second, when Tammy and Gittewatched videotapes, debriefed their lessons with observers, or talked among themselves aboutteaching episodes, they began to articulate practices and to link their practices to propositionalknowledge that they had heard about previously, but that had not affected their practice. Finally, Iobserved instances during which Tammy and Gitte attempted to implement theoretically derivedprecepts, such as achieving equal learning opportunities for boys and girls. Here, they found them-selves bound up in trying to find a balance of apparently competing precepts; they had to learnabout the practical adequacy of generalizations to their own teaching practices. These three typesof learning situations are presented, respectively, under the headings “From Practice to Practice,”“From Practice to Theory,” and “From Theory to Practice.”

364 ROTH


shortstandardlong

From Practice to Practice

As Tammy and Gitte enacted the curriculum, it became clear to both that much of what it tookto be successful was not communicated in the teachers’ guide; much of what made the unit a successin this classroom was due to Gitte’s implicit knowing. As the following quote illustrates, Gitte wasnot aware of this knowledge that appeared in practice but was not articulated:

I don’t know if I know [a practice]. It is only through interacting with Tammy and the kids that thatis coming to the surface, that experience that I have had in the past. “Oh yeah, that fits here and thatfits there.” I don’t know that that would happen in any other way.

In this way, Gitte took awareness that much of her knowledge about questioning was tacit. Shereceived feedback, primarily through Tammy, that a question was productive and “that noteveryone might have asked it.” Gitte recognized the difficulty in communicating what she knewabout science and engineering by means of photographs, instructions, and even stories that wouldmake her revised version of the teachers’ guide too bulky, discouraging teachers from reading itentirely. In a similar way, there were important aspects of Tammy’s practice which also contributedto the successful implementation of the unit, but which had not been part of Gitte’s discursiverepertoire.

As they worked together, Tammy and Gitte began to resemble each other in striking ways. Ourfield notes and annotations of the transcripts reflected this sense in remarks such as “Tammy isasking a question, but I hear Gitte,” or “Gitte is doing what Tammy would have done.” More so,they resembled each other in their mannerisms, a supportive stance toward some students and amore overbearing stance towards others; an individual, pensive movement of a hand to the chinfollowed the same motion of the hand by the other; a turn of the head or the whole body of one,reflected in the movements of the other. After about 2 months, the two were so attuned in theirpractices that they could conduct a class without previously orchestrating their roles. Gitte andTammy performed their questioning because they “just knew to alternate like that without havingspoken about it.” This accord, the often tacit understanding of the coparticipant, attested to the factthat they had learned more from each other than they could state in just so many words. Two (emic)dimensions of questioning practices illustrate the emergence of such knowledgeability: “Knowingwhen to stop and draw the line” and “learning to ask productive questions.”

Knowing when to Stop and Draw the Line. Classroom situations change continuously such thata practice which is appropriate in one instance is no longer so in another. Knowing “when to stop”and “where to draw the line,” that is, “getting a feel” for indicators which call for a different practice,is an important aspect of a science teacher’s practical knowledge—because it mediates the impactof their science content and content pedagogical knowledge. Gitte often talked about the differencesshe perceived in Tammy’s and her practical knowledge about when to stop questioning. Althoughshe had 4 years of teaching experience, Gitte recognized that Tammy knew better when to stop aline of questioning, that she had a sense for drawing the line between productive questioning anddiscouraging a child because their previous efforts appeared insufficient. However, neither Tammynor Gitte could express (make explicit) just what it took to get the “timing” of questions right otherthan by talking about specific classroom events where it had or had not been right. Yet it was thisaspect of questioning that Gitte learned by working with Tammy.

There were several instances in which the contrast between their knowing-in-action becameapparent, and which ultimately contributed to Gitte’s increased sense for stopping at the rightmoments. In these situations, Tammy more or less drastically took over a whole-class session or a



shortstandardlong

teacher–student interaction to permit students a beneficial learning experience. In one particularinstance, Gitte attempted to encourage Damian—a learning-disabled student who had completedbuilding his bridge in 15 minutes, an activity which was planned to extend over three periods (4.5hours)—to “extend his thinking” about the forces acting in his bridge and add to his constructionalthough he had already applied some conceptually very difficult engineering techniques (e.g.,increased material strength by means of lamination). When Tammy noticed this event, she inter-rupted Gitte and negotiated with Damian that he would do another bridge rather than modifyingthe present one, which they celebrated as a successful solution to the required task. Here, Tammy’spractical knowledge was the basis of doing the “right thing,” stopping and drawing the fine line.This knowledge resembles less the traditional conceptions of propositional knowledge and more asituated “sense” of what is right in this situation. Without deliberation, Tammy had known thatGitte’s questioning about forces, braces, and shearing “just needed to stop.” However, the fact thatshe did not need to deliberate indicated to us that the propositional knowledge, which she later usedto rationalize her actions, operated as a tacit and unexplicated background or common-sense un-derstanding of this setting.

For Gitte, the timing issue became a crucial one about which she learned a lot from Tammy; thatis, getting a feel for situating her content pedagogical knowledge and asking the right question atthe right time. Although she had some rough guidelines for appropriate contexts—at the end of aconversation, an impending disaster to the structures, when children were in danger of hurtingthemselves with tools, when children thought they were finished—she had to work for severalmonths in the classroom before her timing became “right.” Even then, she could specify appropri-ateness only as much as one develops a “sense” for it, but she could not make explicit just howthis practical knowledge was constituted. (Thus, what she learned was more than explicit declarativeknowledge about individual students.) She had acquired much of this sense by working withTammy, although there were also moments when she learned on her own. This sense, and the wayin which she “picked it up” from Tammy resisted her efforts of description. Yet these were theaspects that had made Gitte’s questioning practices so much more effective by providing the ap-propriate context for her great science content and content pedagogical knowledge. This greatereffectiveness was notable on the videotapes. Here, Gitte could see for herself the changes herquestioning had undergone.

Learning to Ask Productive Questions. During my initial participation in the classroom and atthe beginning of the engineering unit, the classroom was characterized by devised-format questions(Roth, 1996) that required answers with factual information. The questions asked by students duringpresentation and discussion of student-produced artifacts also were of factual nature. After Gitteentered the classroom, the questions in the classroom began to change from the devised-formatquestions that had been characteristic of Tammy’s practice prior to the study to the content-orientedand open-ended ones characteristic of Gitte’s initial practice (Roth, 1996). Tammy and Gitte calledthem “productive questions” because they “extended children’s thinking” and led to much highercognitive achievements in this unit than Tammy had observed with a previous class. Over time,Tammy and Gitte’s questioning became increasingly similar. Even students began to ask moreopen-ended and reflective questions. The questioning practices of the classroom community weretransformed in the course of the coteaching.

Initially, productive questioning was not something Tammy attended to. As her classroom trans-formed, and as she observed the children’s artifacts and learning, Tammy began to notice differenceswith her earlier experience of teaching a unit on bridge building. She attributed much of the greaterlearning to the difference in questions that helped children to draw cognitive benefit from their

366 ROTH


shortstandardlong

experiences. It was through productive questioning that science content knowledge was emphasizedconcurrently with science process knowledge. The productive questions ultimately led to the successof the unit in her class.

A major change in Tammy’s questioning practices occurred about 4 weeks into the unit. At thebeginning of the lesson, in the course of her interaction with a group of three boys, all of Tammy’squestions asked for specific answers, or implicitly suggested what she wanted students to do, suchas enlarge the tower by adding a base or a top, or stabilize it by adding triangular braces. The boysanswered with “Yes,” “No,” or “We can do that. It’s very easy.” About 16 minutes later, Gitteinteracted with the same students as Tammy watched from a few meters away. In contrast to Tammy,Gitte’s questions were open-ended and encouraged the children to reflect on their constructive work.With her questions, Gitte asked students to identify weaknesses, strengths, or outstanding featuresof their designs, or to explain characteristic aspects of the current tower. It was evident that thestudents’ answers to Gitte’s questions (see Roth, 1996) were more elaborate than those to Tammy’squestions. Gitte had engaged in an interaction that was productive and had encouraged students toreflect on what they had done or wanted to do. In contrast, as Tammy later recognized herself, herinteraction was a failed pedagogical opportunity to help students reflect on their collective work orpractical and theoretical engineering concepts related to their construction.

Changes in her practice of capitalizing on or creating such opportunities became apparent laterin the lesson when she questioned a group of two boys. One could hear that Tammy had appro-priated some of Gitte’s questioning practices. Rather than asking a direct question about engineer-ing, she allowed students to develop the science content they saw relevant. From this moment, thefrequency of open-ended questions in Tammy’s interactions with students increased dramatically.When she later reflected on her own questioning during this lesson, Tammy recognized it as aturning point.

This is one of my first days when I started to think about, “What kind of questions am I asking?”and “What can I do to extent the kids’ thinking?”. . . I did not ask why it was a big challenge,but what it was . . . I asked the question, “Where is the tower going to break?” and Gitte askedthe question, “Why is it going to break?”

She considered Gitte’s interaction so much more productive. Commenting on the instance with thethree boys she emphasized the positive outcomes of Gitte’s questioning and contrasted them withher own questions that sounded, to her, very negative.

The data document changes in Tammy’s practices as she used an increasing number of productivequestions. Within a 3-hour period, she had included several productive questions into each inter-action. However, what our observations did not reveal was how this change of practice was broughtabout, that is, how Tammy had learned. While watching the videotapes of this lesson, Tammy hadbecome aware of the difference in her own and Gitte’s questioning. Her questioning was not pro-ductive, so that she “was going nowhere.” At the same time, she was impressed with the questionsGitte asked students. This suggests a conscious change process. On the other hand, she indicatedat the same time that she would not have used the questions had she read them in the teachers’manual. Although this manual specified science content and content pedagogical knowledge,Tammy found it difficult to appropriate these forms of knowledge through this medium. Experi-encing the question in the context of teaching the engineering unit “put it into her being” and “madeit become part of her. Tammy emphasized that participating with Gitte helped her to make thequestions part of herself, something she would not have been able to do had she read the samequestions in a resource book. Hearing questions in context helped her in the appropriation of thepractice which, in an unexplained manner, “goes in” and “makes it part of” her so that she can useit. It was because of these and similar instances that Gitte, as curriculum developer, decided that a



shortstandardlong

videotape featuring productive questioning would be significant enhancement of the curriculumpackage.

From Practice to Theory

Many teaching practices are unarticulated. They remain as such unless, for various reasons, theyare made conscious, that is, framed or articulated as practice. Their coparticipation provided Tammyand Gitte with many opportunities to make aspects of their teaching explicit. Once explicit, theseaspects contributed to a change in their professional discourse in which they made sense of theclassroom events; that is, the coparticipation allowed both to bring new elements into their discourseand, with it, to recognize new aspects of their practice.

Articulating a (Previously Unarticulated) Practice. In the course of their professional lives,teachers develop practices of which they are not aware, but that constitute effective means ofdealing with the complexities of classroom life. For Tammy and Gitte, their shared practice andthe videotaped classroom events became important settings for articulating aspects of theirpractice. In Tammy’s case, smiling at specific students while asking them to answer a questionconstituted one of her previously unarticulated practices. After watching a videotaped lesson,Tammy noticed for the first time that she smiled a lot, particularly at Jeff and several other boys.In the period between watching the videotape and talking about her observation, Tammy had alreadyconstructed an explanation of her practice. Accordingly, she smiled a lot at these boys to providea good start to the interaction. Her claim gained support by her description of Jeff that she hadprovided in a different context. She described, “[Jeff ] is extremely obstinate and reticent to dowhat he is told, loves to get into power struggles, and seeks to antagonize teachers.” Thus, aftershe made “smiling” a part of her professional discourse, she reconstructed a range of classroomevents and interactions.

Tammy and Gitte used the videotapes to analyze their teaching in specific terms, according tocategories that were of particular interest to them. This allowed them then to take a more “objective”look at their practices to monitor change. For example, after they had become aware of the genderissue in their class, Gitte took on the task of monitoring their progress in this domain. Besideswatching videotapes individually or together, Tammy and Gitte began to articulate their own andeach other’s practices when they approached the same classroom event in different ways. In oneinstance, Tammy had intervened in an interaction between Gitte and the class. Tammy’s unexpectedactions encouraged Gitte to articulate, “I thought it was interesting because I would not have thoughtof it.” Especially fruitful learning experiences arose when Tammy and Gitte could talk about theirpractices immediately after the lesson, while still in the classroom. Often, these conversationsdeveloped over and about student-produced artifacts or in the presence of the students concerned.This presence gave these conversations, the reconstruction of classroom events, and associatedconstruction of explanations an additional aspect of authenticity. Here, the immediacy of the ex-perience, the availability of relevant engineering artifacts, and the presence of another practitionerwho had shared the experience, allowed Tammy and Gitte to make conscious aspects of theirquestioning practices and to engage in a pedagogically useful reflection-on-action. After havingbrought a particular practice into their discourse, Tammy or Gitte could link a practice to a rule ortheory that they had previously learned at university, but which they had not adopted in practice.That is, they had “known” some proposition or theory but it had no significance in practice.

Stories about Practice. The two teachers’ talk about their practices was always tied to the de-scription of events and lacked the distance, detachment, abstraction, or reflexive stance that char-

368 ROTH


shortstandardlong

acterize the discourse of most researchers and analysts. When they talked about their knowing orlearning-in-action, Tammy and Gitte did not talk in universals, but provided accounts of specificevents. These accounts stood as self-sufficient wholes, and it was for the listeners to draw a lessonabout just what Tammy or Gitte had learned. When Tammy and Gitte talked to each other, theyoften needed only an indication to evoke an understanding how knowing-in-action had operated orhow learning-in-action had come about. When I wanted to know about it, I had to ask the two to“tell the whole story.” For example, when Gitte explained to a visitor what she had learned abouttiming, she referred to the event that had involved Damian. Tammy knew immediately to whatGitte referred. By that time, after 2 months of coparticipation, the two were so much in tune thatsuch a reference sufficed to confirm what the other meant. When asked, they coconstructed anaccount (story) of the event without being able to say what constituted the fine line between “ex-tending Damian’s thinking” and “putting him down,” which Tammy but not Gitte had recognized.All they could say was that, in that situation, Tammy had recognized it, and for Gitte it hadconstituted one aspect of her overall learning in regard to time-productive questions.

Over time, Gitte began to know the classroom in ways characteristic of Tammy. Together theybuilt a repertoire of shared stories growing out of their coparticipation. Both use these stories torespond to questions about their knowing-in-practice and learning-in-practice. While in their con-versations it was often sufficient to reference an event in some broad strokes to communicate whatthey had learned, their stories left unsaid just what helped Gitte to get her timing right. The importantaspect of the practice was implicit in the story and could be fully understood only if one hadexperienced the same situation. Even the enumeration of relevant background information, Dam-ian’s learning disability, his impending departure for a special program, the many engineeringtechniques in his bridge that exceeded those implemented by other, non– learning-disabled students,the extent of shared knowledge in the classroom community, and so on, could only hint at Tammy’ssense, still absent from Gitte’s practice.

In response to the problematic issues surrounding gender-sensitive instruction, Tammy and Gitteconstructed many stories of specific events that embedded practices. They constructed stories in-volving Patricia or Renata to illustrate that an increasing number of girls contributed to classdiscussions; they had a story about “keeners,” such as Jeff, Tim, and Tom, and related situationsin their own biographies to Carla, Kathy, and Renata to help us understand the conflicts they feltwhen asking girls to respond; or they shared the story of Tammy who had told Damian to “shutup” as part of her attempt to provide a safe environment for girls to engage in risky responses.Much of my own learning about practice arose from participating in classroom events such that Iknew what Tammy and Gitte’s stories left unsaid, and what constituted the background againstwhich all their sense-making happened.

From Theory to Practice

The trajectory from bringing a particular practice into the domain of discourse to bringing abouta desired change of practice is not straightforward. For example, our teachers experienced con-siderable conflicts when they attempted to change their practices to allow equal opportunitiesfor girls and boys to respond in whole-class conversations. These conflicts appeared to arise as aconsequence of the fact that the change in one practice entailed a necessary reweighting of manyother practices, forcing teachers to reestablish the practical adequacy of each of the rules of conductthey used to frame their practice. These conflicts arose although the desire to change was great and,in the case of making a gender-sensitive classroom, although Gitte had coparticipated in the de-velopment of workshops and activities intended to help teachers on gender issues. Their effort toenhance the science experience for girls became, for me, an opportunity to study practitioners who



shortstandardlong

consciously tried to change their practice, and consequently disrupted the spontaneity of their ac-tions.

Gender issues in science classrooms, one of the major themes in science education (e.g., Baker& Leary, 1995; Greenfield, 1996; Scantlebury & Kahle, 1993), were Gitte’s main interest. In herwork as a curriculum developer, she had developed and commercialized a workshop designed tosensitize science teachers to differences in teacher–student and student–student interactions alonggender lines. She quickly noted a gender imbalance on her first day in Tammy’s class; boys mo-nopolized the discourse and girls were quiet. Yet, whereas Gitte had wanted to provide equalopportunities for boys and girls, I was struck by her and Tammy’s interactions with the whole class.During the initial lessons, there was an imbalance such that about four times as many boys as girlswere called upon to answer questions. I made the teachers aware of this situation. Both then attendedconsciously to this issue. They tried to ask as many boys as girls, and to structure classroom activitiesin such a way that would allow girls to be more active in conversations and question–answersessions. They asked me to monitor the frequency of boys to girls called upon, and to provide themwith feedback. Despite feedback, Gitte and Tammy did not manage to change this ratio in anysignificant way for whole-class discussions, student-centered presentations, and question–commentsessions. In fact, when several outside observers (elementary teachers from another school) of aparticular lesson pointed out the gender imbalance, Tammy and Gitte were astonished, for theywere sure to have asked an equal number of girls and boys.4

Much of Tammy and Gitte’s struggle to provide equal opportunities for boys and girls in theirclassroom had to do with establishing the practical adequacy of their own rules and precepts.Whereas both acted spontaneously in most situations, their conscious effort to make the classroomgender-balanced caused them to stop and deliberate theoretical precepts such as: Never ask theperson who puts the hand up first; Ask as many boys as girls; and Ask boys and girls the same kindof questions.5 Thus, the new rule, Ask as many girls as boys, shifted the network of their previouspractices and reconfigured existing emphases. That is, while trying to introduce this new aspect,conflicts arose with other practices in which they had engaged “without thinking.” Much of thestruggle can therefore be understood as the work to reestablish the practical adequacy of eachprecept in the light of a (desired) new practice. The present analyses provide a view of this work.

When the two talked about their questioning during whole-class interactions, they framed themas a rule, Never ask the person who puts the hand up first—even after the 5-second lapse recom-mended by the wait time literature (e.g., Tobin, 1984). However, Gitte and Tammy knew that theydid not apply this rule universally. The videotapes of their questioning confirmed this assessment;there were times when both teachers broke this rule. Depending on the situation at hand, they waitedsometimes and not at other times. Just when to wait or not constituted much of the practicalknowledge that both teachers had difficulties in making explicit. This practical knowledge, theysuggested, is difficult to learn in decontextualized settings of university classrooms.

In many situations it did not appear to disturb either teacher that they had asked up to 10 or 12boys without directing a question to a girl. At other times, this imbalance appeared to be noted and,after 5 or 6 boys, a series of questions was directed to girls. Gitte talked about these situations; theawareness of a girl/boy imbalance during questioning led her to construct several conflicts. Her

4 The problem was alleviated by the fact that both pulled together groups of girls to allow them to contribute to thediscourse and by the fact that, for the entire unit, students selected only same-gender partners. We observed a gender-relatedimbalance in that both teachers attended more frequently and for longer periods of time to female groups. However, inwhole-class sessions, the gender imbalance favoring boys remained throughout the unit.

5 Rules of conduct are in italics. These are talk about practice rather than practice themselves and subject to the limitationsof all talk about practice (Bourdieu, 1990).

370 ROTH


shortstandardlong

rules in this respect were Ask as many boys as girls and Ask boys and girls the same kind ofquestions. She questioned, however, “Is it right to consciously ask girls when there are five boyswith their hands up, and they are real keeners?” or “Is it right to put girls on the spot in front ofthe class?” In this context, she constructed a second conflict involving her rule Always wait 5seconds before accepting an answer. With some of the eager children, such as Jeff, Tim, and Tom,she could implement the rule. But she felt uncomfortable waiting in the case of Renata and Carla,for she could “see their discomfort, sort of squirming.” In one instance, Renata was called upon.She uttered her first words, haltingly and with big sighs. Tammy immediately asked another studentto continue. She later noted that she had not waited to allow Renata to respond. While reflectingon the event, she considered two conflicting rules, Let a child respond fully and Keep a class going.The first rule helps children in their conceptual development, but its implementation may take timeand interrupt the flow of the class, and thus conflict with the other rule.

In the context of gender sensitivity, Gitte also had opportunities to further establish the adequacyof her rule, Do not ask devised-format questions. She had to establish the adequacy of this rule inthe context of two other rules, Do something for every learning style and Do not ask risky questions.To accommodate different learning styles, especially those of individuals who seek definite answersand clearly defined situations, she used tasks and questions that have only one correct solution.That is, her rule about devised-format questions were modified in the context of gender-relatedlearning styles. Then, and partially overlapping with the previous rule, both teachers asked designed-format questions to avoid situations in which girls might feel on the spot, uncomfortable, andembarrassed. Their devised-format question rule was further modified in the context of genderbalance so that they asked nonrisky questions.

DISCUSSION

Practice unfolds in time, irrevocably and irreversibly. It is oriented toward the immediate situa-tions, the here and now, and excludes all formal concerns. These aspects give practice its particularcharacter, which is destroyed by theoretical analysis that attempts to reconstruct it in a simultaneous,synoptic view. Several investigators have noted that excellence—that is, practical mastery in itsaccomplished form—ceases to exist once people extract “correct” rules of practice for the purposeof transmission (Bourdieu, 1990). Notwithstanding this dilemma, I have tried to describe the situ-ation in which two practitioners learned from each other in near effortless ways by engaging togetherin the practice of teaching science. I found that, during much of their work, teachers acted “withoutthinking about it.” As their lessons unfolded, the teachers did what was “right” despite the irre-versibility and continuity of unfolding practice. I showed that by participating in practice, oneteacher learned to ask productive questions and the other to get her timing right. Much of theirknowing-in-action and learning-in-action was shared through the construction of stories the fullextent of which could only be understood by the participants in the classroom. When the teachersprovided rules to describe their practices, these constituted a network of mutually conflicting ormoderating nodes. Just what was to be done in each particular situation had to be established foreach individual case. Important aspects of their knowing and learning were tacit.

This study illustrated a dimension of gender-sensitive science teaching that has been absent fromthe science education literature thus far (e.g., Greenfield, 1996). Gender equity is not a teachingstrategy that can be easily and unproblematically “implemented” as suggested elsewhere (Scantle-bury & Kahle, 1993). Rather, Gitte and Tammy experienced considerable tensions between theirexplicit desire to implement a gender-sensitive science curriculum and elements of their own bi-ographies. Both struggled considerably trying to provide equal opportunities for girls as they relived



shortstandardlong

memories of sitting in science classrooms and the embarrassment of being called upon.6 Theyexperienced these struggles, although they had identified the problem of gender equality themselvesand chosen to change their practices. As they attempted to change, some of their rules of practicewere no longer adequate. Initially, they just acted without thinking about it. Now, their sense ofthe “right thing to do” was lost so that they had to deliberate the practical adequacy of each rule.Their interactions with the class became stilted so that boys and girls noticed when the teachersdisregarded boys who wanted to answer and called on girls who did not. The conscious introductionof a new rule of conduct disrupted the teachers’ network of past practices and forced them toreconsider the adequacy of each rule in the new configuration.

Toward a Theory of Science Teaching as Practice

My study distinguishes itself from others that are based on the assumption that teachers’ practiceis largely determined by explicit knowledge. It is in agreement, however, with a considerablenumber of studies on practice in science laboratories, cognitive science and artificial intelligenceteamwork, architectural design studios, engineering, offices, supermarkets, and a few classrooms,which have pointed out that essential aspects of knowing and learning resist all description. Thistacit knowledge, often described as common-sense, readiness to hand, or know-how, is based onthe accumulation of experience in a vast number of cases. If we wish to know more about thisaspect of practitioners’ knowing, context-dependent knowledge has to be treated as the essence ofcreative cognition rather than as a residual artifact to be progressively eliminated by the discoveryof more rules. In this way, the present study supports the calls for school site-based in-servicetraining where teachers can learn by engaging in their daily practice of teaching together, and byproviding for a community characterized by an ethos of continuing professional learning and de-velopment (Lieberman & Miller, 1990).

However, there were also aspects of their practice which our two teachers brought into the domainof their discourse. This articulation permitted them to abstract knowledge from the classroom and,in some instances, link it to previously constructed, explicit knowledge. In this abstraction, theteachers’ descriptions of their practice became approximate as exemplified by “I do ‘X,’ but thereare instances where I don’t.” The knowledge of when not to do ‘X’ was exactly that which ourteachers could not make explicit, or merely approximated by iterative summation of backgroundknowledge necessary in the situation at hand. The learning-in-practice by Gitte was constituted byher increased timing when and how to question children. Articulation and abstraction increased thecoherence and utility of the teachers’ knowledge but also led to conflicts between aspects of theirpractice. However, coherence across practices may not and cannot be an important aspect to prac-titioners although it may be important for practice-removed theoreticians (Bourdieu, 1990). Thepresent case showed that the conscious attention to a practice disrupted its usual flow.

From this study, therefore, emerges a view of teacher knowledge that contrasts traditional viewsof science teachers’ cognition (e.g., Clermont, Borko, & Krajcik, 1994). From a traditional cognitiveperspective, the essence of practice lies in the formal knowledge of a domain, expressible in de-clarative and procedural knowledge (Grimmett & MacKinnon, 1992). Once apprehended, thisknowledge is applied in concrete, problematic situations in an applied science sense. Classicalteacher training programs built on this view provide future teachers with content and pedagogicalknowledge leading to teacher development models based on “the traditional shibboleths of ‘theory

6 In a sense, the two teachers put themselves into a situation which disrupted their practices and thereby disclosed their(ethno)methods of reasoning and acting.

372 ROTH


shortstandardlong

into practice’ or ‘application of knowledge’” (Lieberman, 1992, p. 718). It is assumed that allteachers have to do is apply this knowledge in unproblematic ways in their professional settings.This view is in sharp contrast with the view of practice outlined here. Accordingly, to learn theessence of a practice, newcomers have to participate in it. Increasing participation in competentpractice and practice-related discourse and communally shared understandings constitutive learning.Newcomers learn to structure their experience in community-specific ways; that is, to reflect-in-action as increasingly competent practitioners. Through this participation, newcomers also learn theformal aspects of knowing (rules) and become more competent in linking formal, explicit, andpractice-constitutive tacit knowledge that permits them to reflect on practice.

This framework allows us a view science teaching and learning to teach science from the sameperspective used to study scientific laboratory practices, mathematics in dairy factories, constructionof identities in alcoholics anonymous meeting halls, or midwifery in Mayan villages (Roth, 1997b).The upshot of such a perspective is that we need to reexamine critically the extent to which scienceteaching practices allow for the kind of learning on the job or during leisure time that other com-munities afford to their members. For example, the traditional delivery of science teacher in-servicethrough summer workshops (when it is not accompanied by coparticipation in teaching) is incom-patible with the model proposed here. A reexamination, therefore, needs to focus on coparticipationand its implications for preservice and in-service teacher development.

Acting and Reflecting

Practice does not have the luxury of reflection and consideration. The competent and masterfulpractitioner acts appropriately in the situation, “on the spot,” “in the twinkling of an eye, and “inthe heat of the moment.” Mastery and competence lie in the fact that action is appropriate althoughthere is no recourse to reflection (Bourdieu, 1990). Making the contextually appropriate pedagogicalmoves depends on teachers’ situation definitions. Classroom events, however, are different fromsports such as football or soccer where officials experimented with instant replay options to assistreferees in making “the right” decisions. The question is not whether or not a situation definitionis “correct,” but if it is contextually appropriate. This study provided evidence that Gitte was ableto learn a lot from Tammy about constructing appropriate situation definitions, without being ableto state—in just so many words—what it was that she had learned. Most human knowledge of“right” (discursive and material) action is taken for granted and embedded in a tacit background ofcommon-sense (Ricœur, 1992), for even the simplest cognitive action requires an infinite amountof knowledge. When newcomers participate in practice with an “old-timer,” they acquire suchknowledge much faster than if they have to reconstruct it on their own.

During their planning or debriefing, Gitte and Tammy had time to deliberate conflicting rules ofpractice or establish the adequacy of rules for a specific context. They could weigh the benefits andshortcomings of alternatives and negotiate a resolution on which both could agree. Teaching, how-ever, is different from planning and debriefing. The difficulty with theoretical precepts, plans, orlaws was that their practical adequacy had to be established in each and every case. This processof establishing the practical adequacy of a direction was not embedded as knowledge in the precepts,plans, or laws. This knowing could not be provided, for practical adequacy depended on the setting,and the practitioners “feel” for what was right, then and there. The work of establishing adequacywas a situated accomplishment. Such establishment of adequacy is not unlike that which can beobserved with the introduction of a new law into a legal system. Not only does a law’s own adequacyhave to be established as lawyers and judges attempt to apply it in practice, but other laws becomemore or less applicable because of the former’s introduction. The main difference between the legalexample and teaching practice lies in the fact that teachers do not have the luxury of time to



shortstandardlong

deliberate between alternate courses of action but have to act, irrevocably, in the here and now ofthe classroom. It is only after the fact that they know whether or not their actions were successful.

The establishment of the practical adequacy of rules is not self-evident but requires work (e.g.,Suchman, 1987). Practical adequacy requires lived work because all discourse, artifacts, and phe-nomena of the world are inherently ambiguous and interpretively flexible. By participating with anexperienced and competent practitioner, other practitioners and newcomers can see important prin-ciples in practical operation. They observe how a practitioner’s disposition or knowing-in-actionstructures the setting, reacts to unpredicted and unpredictable contingencies and in the face ofpractical choices. In this way, newcomers can learn essential aspects of the practice even when theycannot be made explicate and communicated other than by means of a silent pedagogy. Not co-participating with someone else in gender-sensitive practice, Tammy and Gitte struggled to(re)establish the practical adequacy of their theoretical precepts.

Coteaching

Through the study of a coteaching experience, I constructed not only a better understanding ofpractice but also learned about the benefits of coteaching. An extensive review of the literature oneducational change revealed that “the lack of opportunity for teachers to reflect, interact with eachother, share, learn, develop on the job makes it unlikely that significant changes will occur” (Fullan,1982, p. 118). The present setting of coteaching an engineering unit provided such opportunities;some of the teachers’ learning has been described here. By working together, they drew on thesame kind of affordances that characterize learning in other communities of practice. This includeslearning-in-practice, which goes beyond what practitioners can learn through reflection-on-action,because the latter operates only on aspects of practice that can be made explicit, but not those which,by their very nature, cannot be brought into discourse. Coteaching allowed teachers to constructstories by means of which they communicated much of that which constitutes mastery of theirpractice; and coparticipation provided an alternative to traditional modes of supervision which triedto implement changes in practice from the outside and by means of theorizing, because learning-in-practice was built-in by design. Thus, teacher learning in the present setting may well have arisenbecause of an “ethos of the worksite [that] can become extremely important to successful imple-mentation of training” (Joyce & Clift, 1984, p. 119), and because teachers were involved in theirown learning as adults, on their turf.

Coparticipating allowed Gitte to return to teaching without having to take the responsibility ofan entire class which she did not know; it afforded learning opportunities to both teachers, whileat the same time increasing instructional efficacy in the classroom. The simultaneous achievementof job performance and training is a constitutive feature of many domains where it is often linkedto the reproduction of the community itself by allowing new members to become full participants.Similar career paths are virtually absent in the community of teachers making the entry into teachingan abrupt, unmediated, and unstaged experience (Little, 1990). The training of new teachers maybe improved if the coparticipation with master teachers becomes an important part of their prepa-ration programs. Such a context can ease newcomers into a practice, allowing them to take overmore aspects of teaching with increasing competence (Ollman, 1992).

Stories of Learning-in-Practice

Much of Gitte and Tammy’s knowing- and learning-in-practice was shared by means of cocon-structed accounts of events (stories) which indexed their learning and individual and collectivepractice. However, the essence of these stories could only be understood by those who shared the

374 ROTH


shortstandardlong

common background, for they left unsaid “which goes without saying” and which cannot be com-municated other than by “sense” or “feel.” For example, Gitte’s timing of productive questioningimproved with her participation in Tammy’s practice. That is, her content knowledge and contentpedagogical knowledge of science initially was not effective because the appropriate embeddingpractical knowledge about the timing of questions was not there. Her accounts of good timing andher own learning of it were contained in specific stories of classroom events. Just what made timinggood in one instance and inappropriate in another, however, was never explicit. Both teachers couldonly indicate in which situation the timing was appropriate, and where it was not. Even theirelaboration of background information about the children involved, the current status of the curric-ulum, the extend of shared knowing and experience in the class, and so forth, could not communicateto visitors just what constituted the fine line between appropriate and inappropriate actions.

There was a mutually constitutive, reflexive relationship between experience and stories. Gitteand Tammy spent much time in constructing and elaborating stories; that is, their knowing andlearning was communicated and shared through the coconstructed stories of their lived experience;and experience was shared through the construction of stories. It has been noted that such cocon-struction of stories are analytical tools for understanding complex economic situations and for theexchange, modification, and appropriation of distributed knowledge in communities of learning;stories can capture the highly emotive and complex aspects of craft knowledge (e.g., Orr, 1990).The importance of stories as a critical medium by which practitioners make sense of their work hasalso been recognized in teaching (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Grimmett & MacKinnon, 1992). Itis through such stories that knowing is communicated in important ways without the need for directand declarative pedagogical discourse. This study suggest that participation in practice and theconcurrent construction and elaboration of shared narrative, which have traditionally been importantaspects in (cognitive) apprenticeship models, are an important outcome of coteaching, and may alsobe a fruitful alternative to current teacher preparation practices.

The shared articulation of experience and practice also allowed teachers to bring new phenomenain to the domain of their discourse; that is, it allowed them to construct new dimensions of theirenvironment. Thus, the articulation of experience and the recognition of new phenomena weremutually constitutive. Once the teachers had articulated an aspect of their practice, they sometimeslinked this to other propositional knowledge.

For Tammy and Gitte it was important that their learning and professional development wasdriven by their articulation, not by some other process or person who made them aware. Thisconfirms observations in other contexts where teachers who participated in skills improvementprograms responded most favorably when they worked with an “on-site” colleague as comparedwith receiving feedback from outsiders (Joyce & Clift, 1984; VerVelde et al., 1991). Both thoughtit was important that their learning was driven by their own articulation as a result of watching thevideotape or in the course of their practice. Then they could bring about change, immediately andon the spot. Both considered outside critique inappropriate, but sought our help in collecting gender-related data or to serve as sounding boards. They suggested that others could not know if theirpractices had successful histories and that outside critique was disempowering, encouraging themto react negatively to and reject it.

Coparticipation in practice allows teachers to bring into discourse many aspects of their practiceand therefore provides opportunities for professional development that does not rely on traditionaltop-down supervisory models (Richardson, 1994). Traditional models often “fail to appreciate thehighly personalized artistic nature of teaching, the endemic uncertainty of the linkage betweenteaching and learning in the absence of an established knowledge base, and the absence of goalspecificity” (Smyth, 1991, p. 84). Coparticipation in practice, by design, overcomes these short-comings because it allows practitioners to construct shared knowledge and experience. At the same



shortstandardlong

time, practical inquiry generally fails to appreciate the circumstances of being witnessed from theoutside. Future efforts in teacher development will have to wrestle with the tension in this seemingcontradiction.

Coda

Since the completion of the present study, I also cotaught a grade 7 unit on simple machines ina similar arrangement. Although a careful analysis of these data is yet to be done, they appear tosupport the present findings. If it can be shown that our experiences are transportable to othersettings, coteaching may be an interesting alternative for staff development.7 I envision one scienceteacher—with outstanding competency in terms of content, content pedagogical, and pedagogicalknowledge—to work with two or three teachers at a time. Over a period of 1 year, 10–15 teacherscould thus receive intensive assistance in their development efforts. A simple calculation showsthat such a situation would be far less costly than current modes of delivery, which are predomi-nantly administered through summer programs in science content and teaching methods. In addition,training on the job avoids the essential weakness of these traditional programs; that is, the gulfbetween theory and practice, ivory tower, and classroom, mentioned so often by many classroomteachers, including Tammy and Gitte.

An interesting step in this direction was done—although it did not involve the actual coteachingdescribed here—in the Pittsburgh public school district (Petrosky, 1986; Wallace, Young, Johnston,LeMahieu, Bickel, 1984). All secondary teachers spent an 8-week “mini-sabbatical” at a modelschool, Schenley High School, to work with the resident staff on improving their own teachingthrough observing, being observed, planning curriculum, and other collective activities. Within afew years, the entire population of secondary teachers had completed the program to the satisfactionof the district. The most important aspect of the Pittsburgh experience is that an entire district madeavailable the resources to promote change toward an ethos of coparticipation. Such changes haveto be systemic and involve many dimensions of support. These changes then allow the kind ofculture-building, inquiry into practice, teacher development and learning, and teaching as craftperspectives that are necessary aspects of staff development for restructuring of schools for tomor-row’s demands.

This study provided an understanding of practice and, coincidentally, of the benefits of coparti-cipation, the characteristic of many communities of practice. Although it permitted the constructionof answers to our initial questions, new questions emerged which await answers in future studies.For example, one important theme in science teacher development has been teachers’ change effortsfrom traditional modes of delivery to a learning environment commensurate with a constructivistepistemology. In such a context one might ask: Does coparticipation facilitate the change process?Is coparticipation productive if the individuals adhere to incompatible epistemologies? What re-source allocations does coteaching require to bring about sustainable teacher development?

My sincere thanks go to Sylvie Boutonne for the significant help during data collection, transcription of thevideotapes, and preparation of the manuscript, and to both teachers and the children for their participation. Ithank Allan McKinnon for his contributions to interviews with teachers. Earlier versions of this article werepresented at the 1995 annual meeting of the National Association of Research in Science Teaching (SanFrancisco, CA) and the 1996 annual meeting of the National Science Teachers’ Association (St. Louis, MO).

7 Such a staff development model for science education was seriously discussed as a joint venture between IndianaUniversity and the Indianapolis school system. Here, junior high school teachers were to take the roles of science specialistsand coach two elementary teachers in exchange for part of their regular teaching assignments.

376 ROTH


shortstandardlong

REFERENCES

Baker, D., & Leary, R. (1995). Letting girls speak out about science. Journal of Research in ScienceTeaching, 32, 3–27.

Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.Carlsen, W. S. (1991). Questioning in classrooms: A sociolinguistic perspective. Review of Educational

Research, 61, 157–178.Clark, C., Moss, P. A., Goering, S., Herter, R. J., Lamar, B., Leonard, D., Robbins, S., Russell, M., Templin,

M., & Wascha, K. (1996). Collaboration as dialogue: Teachers and researchers engaged in conversationand professional development. American Educational Research Journal, 33, 193–231.

Clermont, C. P., Borko, H., & Krajcik, J. S. (1994). Comparative study of the pedagogical content knowl-edge of experienced and novice chemical demonstrators. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 31,419–441.

Clift, R., Johnson, M., Holland, P., & Veal, M. L. (1992). Developing the potential for collaborative schoolleadership. American Educational Research Journal, 29, 877–908.

Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Re-searcher, 19(5), 2–24.

Copeland, W. D., Birmingham, C., DeMeulle, L., D’Emidio-Caston, M., & Natal, D. (1994). Makingmeaning in classrooms: An investigation of cognitive processes in aspiring teachers, experienced teach-ers, and their peers. American Educational Research Journal, 31, 166–196.

Delandshere, G., & Petrosky, A. R. (1994). Capturing teachers’ knowledge: Performance assessment a)and post-structuralist epistemology b) from a post-structuralist perspective c) and post-structuralism d)none of the above. Educational Researcher, 23(5), 11–18.

Fullan, M. (1982). The meaning of educational change. New York: Teachers College Press.Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Greenfield, T. A. (1996). Gender, ethnicity, science achievement, and attitudes. Journal of Research in

Science Teaching, 33, 901–933.Grimmett, P. P., & MacKinnon, A. M. (1992). Craft knowledge and the education of teachers. Review of

Research in Education, 18, 385–456.Joyce, B. R., & Clift, R. T. (1984). Teacher education and the social context of the workplace. Childhood

Education, 61, 115–119, 122–128.Kennedy, M. M. (1991). Some surprising findings on how teachers learn to teach. Educational Leadership,

49(3), 14–17.Lieberman, A. (1992). Commentary: Pushing up from below: Changing schools and universities. Teachers

College Record, 93, 717–724.Lieberman, A., & Miller, L. (1990). Teacher development in professional practice schools. Teachers Col-

lege Record, 92, 105–122.Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.Little, J. W. (1990). Teachers as colleagues. In A. Lieberman (Ed.), Schools as collaborative cultures:

Creating the future now (pp. 165–193). New York: Falmer Press.Ollman, H. E. (1992). Team teaching with a student teacher (open for suggestions). Journal of Reading,

35, 656–657.Orr, J. E. (1990). Sharing knowledge, celebrating identity: Community memory in a service culture. In D.

Middleton & D. Edwards (Eds.), Collective remembering (pp. 169–189). London: Sage.Petrosky, A. R. (1986). On the road to Shanghai: A three-year project with the public schools. In A. R.

Petrosky & D. Bartholomae (Eds.), The teaching of writing: Eighty-fifth yearbook of the National Societyfor the Study of Education, part II (pp. 188–196). Chicago, IL: The National Society for the Study ofEducation.

Richardson, V. (1994). Conducting research on practice. Educational Researcher, 23(5), 5–10.Ricœur, P. (1992). Oneself as another. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Roth, W.-M. (1996). Teacher questioning in an open-inquiry learning environment: Interactions of context,

content, and student responses. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 33, 709–736.Roth, W.-M. (1997b). Teaching and learning as everyday activity. In K. Tobin & B. Fraser (Eds.), Inter-

national handbook of science education. Dordrecht: Kluwer.



shortstandardlong

Roth, W.-M. (1997a). Designing communities. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Schon, D. A. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Santlebury, K., & Kahle, J. B. (1993). The implementation of equitable teaching strategies by high school

biology student teachers. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 30, 537–545.Smyth, J. (1991). Teachers as collaborative learners: Challenging dominant forms of supervision. Phila-

delphia: Open University Press.Suchman, L. A. (1987). Plans and situated actions: The problem of human–machine communication.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Tobin, K. (1984). Effects of extended wait time on discourse characteristics and achievement in middle

school grades. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 21, 779–791.VerVelde, P., Horn, P., & Steinshouer, E. (1991). Teacher education: On site, on target. Educational

Leadership, 49(3), 18–20.Wallace, R. C., Jr., Young, J., Johnston, J., LeMahieu, P., & Bickel, W. (1984). Secondary education

renewal in Pittsburgh. Educational Leadership, 41(6), 73–77.

SCE (WILEJ) BLANK

science teaching as knowledgability: a case study of knowing and learning during coteaching

Documents