3 What do teachers bring to the

teaching-learning process?

3.1 Introduction

In Chapter 2 we presented the four key elements of our model of the

teaching-learning process. The perspective we have taken is based on a
particular view of knowledge. This is one which sees knowledge as essen-
tially constructed by individuals rather than transmitted from one person to
another, but which recognises also that such constructions always occur
within specific contexts, mainly as a result of social interactions.
We see this not as a linear sequence of events but as a dynamic process
whereby those with more knowledge, known as mediators, influence and
are influenced by those with less knowledge, as occurs in parent-child or
teacher-learner relationships. This is often achieved by setting various tasks
and responding to the ways in which the learner attempts those tasks. In
addition, the environment within which this occurs will itself influence and
be influenced by the teaching-learning process and its outcomes.
Although we recognise the inherent contradiction in separating out each
of these elements and treating them as somehow distinct from each other,
we feel that such a separation, albeit artificial, is necessary in order to enable
readers to make their own sense of what each part contributes to the
dynamic whole. In the present chapter, therefore, we shall focus on what
individual teachers bring of themselves to the teaching-learning process.
This will be followed in Chapter 4 by a specific focus on the notion of
teacher-as-mediator.

3.2 Studies in effective teaching

In the first two chapters we examined a number of different ways in which

people have tried to explain how learning occurs. Similarly, there have
been
many different attempts to account for effective teaching. Once again,
some
of these fall within a positivist paradigm; that is, they are mainly
concerned
with measuring characteristics of teachers, with correlating
information,
and with drawing general conclusions from the results obtained.
These are

46
 3.2 Studies in effective teaching

sometimes referred to as process-product studies in that one of their major

concerns has been to identify what kind of action on the part of teachers is
most likely to bring about a desired result (e.g. good exam grades). We shall
first examine some of these studies of what makes a ‘good’ teacher, before
considering an alternative perspective.
In his book The Essence of Good Teaching (1984), Seymour Ericksen
describes a study in which the views of learners and administrators about
teachers were analysed. The conclusion reached was that ‘an outstanding
teacher should be an inspiring instructor who is concerned about students,
an active scholar who is respected by discipline peers, and an efficient
organised professional who is accessible to students and colleagues’
(Ericksen 1984:3).
This is just one of many studies in which various personal characteristics
of good teachers have been sought (see Brophy and Good 1986; Bennett
1987; Helmke et al. 1986). Such studies generally produce lists of charac-
teristics like those in the study cited by Ericksen, or describe desirable ways
of behaving, as in Merrett and Wheldall’s positive teaching mode (Merrett
and Wheldall 1990; Wheldall and Merrett 1984). Rosenshine (1971) and
Rosenshine and Furst (1973) review a number of ‘process-product’ studies,
in which various forms of teacher behaviour were connected with measur-
able learning outcomes such as test results. From this they identified nine key
factors contributing to effective teaching:

e clarity of presentation;
e teacher enthusiasm;
e variety of activities during lessons;
e achievement-oriented behaviour in classrooms;
© opportunity to learn criterion material;
e acknowledgement and stimulation of student ideas;
e (lack of) criticism;
e use of structuring comments at the beginning and during lessons;
e guiding of student answers.

Although some attempts have been made to translate these and similar
findings into guidelines for action (e.g. Perrott 1982), on the whole they
have proved surprisingly unhelpful to most teachers seeking to improve their
professional practice. This is partly because such factors are themselves open
to a variety of interpretations (e.g. What exactly is meant by ‘enthusiasm’?),
but also because in the real world good teachers come in all shapes and sizes,
with a wide range of different personalities, beliefs and ways of working.

47
 3 What do teachers bring to the teaching-learning process?

They also come from different backgrounds and belong to different cultures.
We would, therefore, expect them to work in different ways that suit their
own personalities and situations. In Bennett’s original (1976) study of
effective teachers, for example, one of the most highly rated teachers
demonstrated very few of the descriptors of how an effective teacher should
behave.
In another study of effective teaching, Brown and McIntyre (1992) report
a study of the opinions of seventy-five 12- to 13-year-olds in one city
comprehensive school in the UK as to what made a good teacher. Ten
categories were identified as representing elements of good teaching:

¢ creating a relaxed and enjoyable atmosphere in the classroom;

e retaining control in the classroom;
© presenting work in an interesting and motivating way;
¢ providing conditions so pupils understand the work;
e making clear what pupils are to do and achieve;
e judging what can be expected of a pupil;
e helping pupils with difficulties;
¢ encouraging pupils to raise their expectations of themselves;
¢ developing personal, mature relationships with pupils;
e demonstrating personal talents or knowledge.

At the conclusion of their study, however, these authors found themselves

faced with the dilemma that although they could identify such elements of
what they termed professional ‘craft’ knowledge amongst teachers, they
could draw no simple conclusions or generalisations about how this highly
complex knowledge could be transformed into guidelines for action.
If, therefore, it seems fruitless to attempt to shape oneself into the model
of a good language teacher, as indicated by research, what other routes
appear to be open? A radical alternative involves an inner exploration of
oneself rather than a search for the outward characteristics of the
perfect
teacher. Such an alternative is provided by a constructivist approa
ch to
teachers and teaching. We explained what is meant by a constru
ctivist
approach to learning in Chapter 2. We shall now discuss briefly
the broader
issue of what is meant by a constructivist view of education, before
moving
on to consider what light constructivism sheds on what
it means to bea
good teacher. We choose to introduce the notion of a constru
ctivist view
of education here for two reasons. First, as we shall sugge
st later in this
chapter, one of the many facets that teachers bring
to the teaching-
learning process is a view of what education is all about
, and this belief,

48
 3.3 A constructivist view of education

whether implicit or explicit, will influence their actions in the classroom.

Second, we wish to introduce at this early stage a number of the main issues
and themes that will be taken up later in this book, such as the distinction
between learning and education and the importance of learning to think and
solve problems.

3.3 A constructivist view of education

The generally acknowledged ‘father’ of constructivism, Ernst von Glasersfeld

argues that education is essentially a ‘political’ enterprise with two main
purposes — to empower learners to think for themselves, and to perpetuate
in the next generation ways of acting and thinking that are judged the best
by the present generation (von Glasersfeld 1995). He argues, moreover, that
all knowledge is instrumental, that is, it is used for particular purposes and
is meaningless in isolation. Because of this, learners need to know the
reasons why they are required to act in particular ways.

The first thing required, therefore, is that students be given the reasons
why particular ways of acting and thinking are considered desirable. This
entails explanations of the specific contexts in which the knowledge to be
acquired is believed to work.
(von Glasersfeld op. cit.:177)

In von Glasersfeld’s view, a constructivist approach to education is best

put into practice by presenting issues, concepts and tasks in the form of
problems to be explored in dialogue rather than as information to be
ingested and reproduced. This is best performed by what he terms the
teacher’s orienting function.

The teacher cannot tell students what concepts to construct or how to

construct them, but by judicious use of language they can be prevented
from constructing in directions which the teacher considers futile but
which, as he knows from experience, are likely to be tried.
(op. cit.:184)

This, of course, presents a dilemma in itself because by acting in such a

preventative way the teacher may restrict the very development of genuinely
creative critical reflection that brings about new insights and even scientific
breakthroughs.
From Socrates onwards, the problem-setting/solving approach to teaching
has had a number of powerful advocates, including John Dewey, Maria
Montessori and Paulo Friere, without ever coming to play the dominant role

49
3 What do teachers bring to the teaching-learning process?

in pedagogy that it would seem to warrant. In recent years, however, there

has been a resurgence of interest in this approach, as exemplified by
Harvard Project Zero (Kornhaber and Gardner 1991) in the US, Cognitive
Education through Science Education (CASE) in the UK (Adey and Shayer
1994), Matthew Lipman’s Philosophy for Children programme (Lipman
et al. 1980) and Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment (Feuerstein et al.
1980). Many examples of this kind of approach are provided in the pro-
ceedings of a conference organised by the Centre for Educational Research
and Innovation of the OECD in Paris in 1989 (Maclure and Davies
1991).
There has, however, been a considerable amount of interest in the use of
problem-solving tasks in teaching a foreign language for a number of years
(e.g. Nunan 1989; Prabhu 1987). This is a theme that we shall develop
in Chapter 8 where we discuss how task-based approaches to language
teaching could involve tasks which foster thinking and problem-solving.
As we shall suggest in Chapter 6, moreover, a central component in
motivation to learn is the individual learner’s feelings of competence and
self-efficacy, which can best be gained by working out one’s own solutions
to problems.
In this respect, for von Glasersfeld nothing succeeds like success:

The motivation to master new problems is most likely to spring from

having enjoyed the satisfaction of finding solutions to problems in the
past ... The insight why a result is right, understanding the logic in the
way it was produced, gives the student a feeling of ability and competence
that is far more empowering than any external reinforcement . . . If
students do not think their own way through problems and acquire the
confidence that they can solve them, they can hardly be expected to be
motivated to tackle more.
(op. cit.:181)

He adds one further rider:

Problem solving is undoubtedly a powerful educational tool. However, I

would suggest that its power greatly increases if the students come to see
it as fun.
(op. cit.:183)

In a persuasive paper Thomas and Harri-Augstein (1985) argue that all

approaches to teaching, whatever their differences, can best be seen as an
organised attempt to help people bring some kind of meaning to their lives.
The difference between these approaches lies in the value that is
placed
on different states of knowing. For the personal construct psychologist,

50
 3.4 A constructivist view of teaching

teaching is seen as primarily concerned with facilitating the process by which

significant, viable, personal meanings are achieved.

For education to be an enriching experience the meanings that emerge

must become personal, and they must be significant and important in
some part of the person’s life. Meanings must also be viable; that is they
must prove useful and effective in mediating one’s transactions;
transactions with stored knowledge, with people and with the world
around.
(Thomas and Harri-Augstein 1985:257)

Looked at in this way, the essence of effective teaching and learning becomes
understanding how meaning becomes attributed, and conducting conver-
sations that elaborate, relate and extend personal meaning.
In this section we have discussed some of the key themes that emerge from
taking a constructivist perspective on education. We see that from such a
viewpoint, education becomes concerned with helping people to make their
own meanings. We see also that presenting learners with problem-solving
activities becomes an important part of putting such an approach into
practice. This discussion sets the scene to consider next what constructivism
has to offer us when examining what makes a good teacher.

3.4 A constructivist view of teaching

Constructivism holds that, basically, there is never any one right way to
teach. In considering what a constructivist approach offers to teachers, von
Glasersfeld asserts:

Constructivism cannot tell teachers new things to do, but it may suggest
why certain attitudes and procedures are counter-productive, and it may
point out opportunities for teachers to use their own spontaneous
imagination.
(1995: 177)

Teaching, like learning, must be concerned with teachers making sense of,
or meaning from, the situations in which they find themselves.
Researchers have used a variety of different methods in their attempts to
understand the meaning that teachers make of their work, ranging from
investigating the thinking and planning that teachers do outside the class-
room (Clark and Peterson 1986), through ethnographic studies of their
routines, rules and patterns of teaching, to autobiographical accounts of the
understanding teachers bring to their work (Ashton-Warner 1980; Connelly

a
3 What do teachers bring to the teaching-learning process?

and Clandinin 1990). A fascinating example of the latter approach is offered

by Louden (1991). This study follows the progress of a newly qualified
teacher in her struggle to establish professional competence. Louden
summarises this struggle in the following way:

From a practitioner’s perspective . . . teaching is a struggle to discover and

maintain a settled practice, a set of routines and patterns of action which
resolve the problems posed by particular subjects and groups of children.
These patterns, content and resolutions to familiar classroom problems
are shaped by each teacher’s biography and professional experience. The
meaning of these patterns of action only becomes clear when they are set
in the context of a teacher’s personal and professional history, her hopes
and dreams for teaching, and the school in which she works.
(Louden 1991:xi)

For Louden, the fatal flaw that pervades most attempts to improve teaching
is a failure to understand this point. If teacher improvement projects are ever
to be successful, they should always begin with the question ‘How does this
change relate to these teachers’ understandings of their work?’ What this in
turn will lead us to do is to pay close attention to the meaning that teachers
make of the physical environment of their classrooms, the syllabus or
particular teaching practices, and to act in accordance with our under-
standing of these meanings.
Louden also introduces us to the notion of teachers’ horizons of under-
standing which are constantly in the process of formation but which are
constructed within traditions, larger frames of reference which provide
shared ways of making sense. When confronted by new problems and
challenges, a teacher struggles to resolve them in ways that are consistent
with the understanding she brings to the problem and this process leads in
turn to new horizons of understanding about teaching. Thus a language
teacher’s horizons will be shaped in part by her own personal experiences,
but also by traditional ways in which other language teachers throughout
history have made sense of what it means to be a language teacher.
However, understanding is not merely the recreation of someone else’s
meaning, but is in principle incomplete and continues to grow with every
new experience. It always involves the creation of meaning from those
experiences in the light of the meaning-maker’s preconceptions and the
tradition of interpretation within which he or she acts.
Perhaps the most helpful interpretation of a constructivist approach to
teaching is offered by Salmon (1988) in a book which is both powerful
and
deceptively simple. Although she does not object to traditional studies
of
teacher effectiveness, teaching for Salmon involves far more than
this. She
describes it ‘not as the passing on of a parcel of objective knowledge,
but as

52
 3.5 The teacher as reflective practitioner

the attempt to share what you yourself find personally meaningful’ (Salmon
1988:37). She argues as a consequence that teachers are indivisible from
what they teach.
The differences between teachers, therefore, are not simply a question of
whether they are good or bad, competent or incompetent, because every
teacher is unique. As teachers we do not just act as gateways to knowledge
because we ourselves represent and even embody the curriculum. We
convey not just what we know, but our position towards it, the personal
ramifications and implications which it has for us. At the same time,
teachers experience an engagement with their learners out of which further
constructions emerge. Both teacher and learners reshape their ways of
understanding, their knowledge structures and the meanings that they
attribute to events and ideas as a result of this interactive process. They also
continually reconstruct their views of each other. Because in teaching we are
essentially inviting our learners to take up, at least provisionally, our own
personal stance towards the curriculum, we are bound to be affected by their
response to this invitation and to construe their actions and attitudes
accordingly, just as they do ours.
In contrast to a skills-based approach with its emphasis upon how to
perform effectively, which seeks to find commonalities between good
teachers, a constructivist approach to teaching emphasises the fact that no
two teachers and no two teaching situations are ever the same. For the
constructivist, both the content of any lesson and the way in which it is
offered are part of the person of each individual teacher. The need here,
therefore, is for teachers to become more self-aware with regard to their
beliefs and the ways in which they make sense of the world, particularly with
regard to their views about education and how those views themselves come
to be shaped. At the same time, they need to be aware also that they them-
selves are being construed by their learners and that their words, their
actions and their interactions form part of every individual learner’s own
construction of knowledge. It is apparent, therefore, that an important
component of a constructivist approach to education is for teachers to
become aware of what their own beliefs and views of the world are, which
leads us into the notion of the reflective practitioner.

3.5 The teacher as reflective practitioner

If teachers are to be effective in whatever approach they decide to take, it

seems reasonable to expect them to act consistently in accordance with their
expressed (or ‘espoused’) beliefs. Unfortunately, according to Chris Argyris
and Donald Schon (1974, 1978) this hardly ever occurs in any profession.
They argue that there is almost always a discrepancy between what

53
3 What do teachers bring to the teaching-learning process?

professionals say they believe (their ‘espoused’ theories) and the ways in
which they act (their ‘theories-in-action’). These authors provide an
impressive array of case studies from a wide variety of professions in
support of this contention.
In teaching, if the discrepancy, where it exists, between a teacher’s
expressed beliefs and the ways in which that teacher acts professionally is
a large one, then learners are likely to receive confused and confusing
messages. In an effort to improve teachers’ self-awareness in this respect,
some educational theorists have fostered the notion of critical reflection
(Boud, Keogh and Walker 1985). The intention here is to enable teachers to
become reflective practitioners (Schon 1983), thereby they subject their
everyday professional practice to ongoing critical reflection and make clear
their own particular world view by means of such consideration.
Schon (op. cit.) draws the distinction between reflection-in-action and
reflection-on-action. He contends that each individual’s knowledge is
mainly tacit and implied by the ways in which they act, such that ‘our
knowing is in our action’ (Sch6n 1983:49). We do not necessarily have to
think about how to act appropriately as teachers in any situation before we
do so. When we ‘think on our feet’ or make spontaneous decisions about
how to act, then we can be seen as reflecting-in-action, which in turn gives
rise to the application of ‘theories-in-action’. It is such theories, according
to Schon, rather than externally imposed knowledge or theories from
elsewhere, which underpin each professional’s own unique way of working.
The task of the reflective practitioner is to make this tacit or implicit
knowledge explicit by reflection on action, by constantly generating
questions and checking our emerging theories with both personal past
experience and with the reflections of others. This is one of the main thrusts
of the movement towards teachers as action researchers (Kemmis 1985).
Schén outlines some ways in which teachers-as-reflective-practitioners
act. Firstly, the curriculum must be seen as an inventory of themes of under-
standing and skill to be addressed rather than a set of materials to be
learned. Each student has to be treated as an individual, ‘a universe of one’
(Schon, op. cit.:333).

A reflective teacher needs a kind of educational technology which does

more than extend her capacity to administer drill and practice. Most
interesting to her is an educational technology which helps students to
become aware of their own intuititve understandings, to fall into cognitive
confusions and explore new directions of understanding and action.
(Sch6n op. cit.: 333)

We shall expand the idea of learners as individuals in Chapter 5. At the same

time, any school supportive of reflective teaching would find it necessary to

54
 3.5 The teacher as reflective practitioner

consider the kind of structure within which learning takes place and the very
nature of knowledge itself.

An institution congenial to reflective practice would require a learning

system within which individuals could surface conflicts and dilemmas and
subject them to public enquiry, a learning system conducive to the
continual criticism and restructuring of organisational principles and
values.
(Sch6n op. cit.:336)

In considering the implications of taking such an approach, Smyth suggests

that critical reflection can be fostered by asking a number of guiding
questions:

e What do my practices say about my assumptions, values and

beliefs about teaching?
e Where did these ideas come from?
e What social practices are expressed in these ideas?
e What views of power do they embody?
e Whose interests seem to be served by my practices?
e What is it that acts to constrain my views of what is possible in
teaching?
(Smyth 1991:116)

Smyth goes on to make the telling point that reflective practitioners and non-
reflective practitioners are not two fundamentally irreconcilable groups, but
are, rather, professionals working at different points in different ways to
achieve common goals. However, we find ourselves ultimately in agreement
with Ruddock’s point (1984:6) that ‘Not to examine one’s practice is
irresponsible; to regard teaching as an experiment and to monitor one’s
performance is a responsible professional act.’
Critical reflection is not necessarily negative in its orientation, but it does
imply at the very least that teachers should be aware of their belief systems
and constantly monitoring how far their actions reflect those beliefs or are
in keeping with them. However, in contrast to the radical constructivist
approach of von Glasersfeld with its emphasis upon the individual, social
- constructivism suggests that this is most helpfully a shared process within
which both teachers and learners are engaged in a multilevel process of
action, monitoring, reflection, feedback and further action, Thus, to be
an effective teacher in our own terms we need to look both inwards and
outwards. We need to develop our awareness of others’ viewpoints, in this

dS
3 What do teachers bring to the teaching-learning process?

case different perspectives on teaching, and to look to our own beliefs,

standards and values. We then need to construct a particular identity of
the kind of teacher that we want to be and to seek to reproduce this in our
day-to-day activities, in our actions and in our interactions in the teaching-
learning arena.
The construction of an ‘ideal-self-as-teacher’ is inevitably multifaceted.
For the remainder of this chapter we will focus on just two of these facets
by way of example, but also because we consider them to be of central
importance. These are teachers’ beliefs about learning and learners and
about themselves as functioning individuals within the role of teacher.
Before we do this, however, we need to consider further the whole issue of
teachers’ beliefs.

3.6 Teachers’ beliefs

There is a growing body of evidence to indicate that teachers are highly

influenced by their beliefs, which in turn are closely linked to their values, to
their views of the world and to their conceptions of their place within it. One
comprehensive review of the literature on teachers’ beliefs concluded that
these had a greater influence than teachers’ knowledge on the way they
planned their lessons, on the kinds of decisions they made and on their
general classroom practice (Pajares 1992). Beliefs were also found to be far
more influential than knowledge in determining how individuals organise
and define tasks and problems, and were better predictors of how teachers
behaved in the classroom.
Beliefs are notoriously difficult to define and evaluate, but there do appear
to be a number of helpful statements that we can make about them. They
tend to be culturally bound, to be formed early in life and to be resistant to
change. Beliefs about teaching, for example, appear to be well established by
the time a student gets to college (Weinstein 1989). They are closely related
to what we think we know but provide an affective filter which screens,
redefines, distorts, or reshapes subsequent thinking and information
processing (Nespor 1987). Our beliefs about one particular area or subject
will not only be interconnected, but will also be related to other more
central aspects of our personal belief systems, e.g. our attitudes and values
about the world and our place within it. Because they are difficult to measure,
we usually have to infer people’s beliefs from the ways in which they behave
rather than from what they say they believe (Agyris and Schon 1974).
We have stressed earlier the importance of teachers reflecting upon their
own actions in order to make explicit their often implicit belief systems and
to help them clarify what is personally meaningful and significant to them
in their professional roles. Teachers’ beliefs about what learning is will affect

56
 3.6 Teachers’ beliefs

everything that they do in the classroom, whether these beliefs are implicit
or explicit. Even if a teacher acts spontaneously, or from habit without
thinking about the action, such actions are nevertheless prompted by a deep-
rooted belief that may never have been articulated or made explicit. Thus
teachers’ deep-rooted beliefs about how languages are learned will pervade
their classroom actions more than a particular methodology they are told to
adopt or coursebook they follow. If the teacher-as-educator is one who is
constantly re-evaluating in the light of new knowledge his or her beliefs
about language, or about how language is learned, or about education as a
whole, then it is crucial that teachers first understand and articulate their
own theoretical perspectives.

Beliefs about learners

Teachers may hold any one or a combination of beliefs about those whom
they teach. The sociologist Roland Meighan has suggested that there are at
least seven different ways in which teachers can and do construe learners
and that such constructions reflect individual teachers’ views of the world
and also have a profound influence on their classroom practice (Meighan
and Meighan 1990).
Meighan suggests that learners may be construed metaphorically as:

® resisters;
e receptacles;
¢ raw material;
e clients;
© partners;
e individual explorers;
e democratic explorers.

He sees these constructs in terms of a continuum which reflects the nature

of the teacher-learner power relationship. Thus the first three constructs are
heavily teacher dominated while the latter constructs involve increasingly
active learner participation.
The notion of learners as resisters sees learners as people who do not want
to learn but only do so because they are made to. Such a view has given rise
~ to the commonly associated assumption that force or punishment is the most
appropriate way of overcoming such resistance in the classroom. Even at its
most benign, the assumption that children do not start with what Bruner
calls ‘the will to learn’ will lead to a view that instruction is the natural
function of the teacher.

a7
3 What do teachers bring to the teaching-learning process?

An alternative view, of course, is that children begin school full of desire

to learn, but gradually, sometimes even rapidly, lose such desire as a result
of their learning experiences (Holt 1964). The psychologist and educator
William Glasser expressed this point particularly well in his book Schools
Without Failure: ‘Very few children come to school failures, none come
labelled as failures. It is school and school alone which pins the label of
failure on children’ (Glasser 1969:26).
It would of course be naive to think that all learners attending classes to
learn a new language are there because they want to be. For a host of
possible reasons, language teachers might meet some degree of resistance
from some of their learners. However, if learners are viewed narrowly as
resisters, teachers may well employ methods involving compulsion rather
than seeking ways of helping them to want to learn the language or to see
the value in what they are doing. What we would emphasise here is that the
use of force or punishment has never been found to be particularly useful
in helping learners to master a language or to foster a lifelong love of
languages; far more effective ways exist of helping reluctant learners. We
shall take up this point further in later chapters.
Perhaps an even more common conception of learners is one in which they
are seen as receptacles to be filled with knowledge. This is sometimes
referred to as ‘the jugs and mugs’ theory. The teacher is seen as having a
large jug of knowledge which is poured into the learner ‘mugs’ or receptacles,
which in turn can only accept a certain amount of that knowledge
according to the size of the learner’s IQ. Here again we can see that
instruction and information-giving become the natural way of working for
teachers who begin with such assumptions, particularly if they also view
intelligence as something which is fixed at birth and immutable. Freire
(1970) describes this as the ‘banking’ conception of education, where
learners are like bank accounts into which deposits are regularly made and
drawn upon later for specific purposes such as examinations. Thus, if
language teachers view their learners as receptacles, with a specific amount
of language aptitude which determines their capacity to absorb language,
they will be likely to adopt methods which involve transmission of language
items to their learners.
Another common metaphor conceives of learners as raw material, like
clay to be moulded into a fine work of art or building material to
be constructed into a solid and well-designed building. There is much to be
said in favour of such an approach insofar as most of us remember being
influenced by an inspirational teacher, and this view does in fact form
a
part of social interactionist theories. However, there are also dangers
of
manipulating learners and shaping them according to the teacher’s wishes.
The notion of learner as client places greater emphasis upon the identif
i-
cation of educational need and begins to alter the nature of the relati
onship

58
 3.6 Teachers’ beliefs

between teachers and learners. Much adult foreign language learning begins
with such a premise, and this view has been prevalent in teaching English for
Specific Purposes (ESP) for some time. The prospective learners are likely to
know what they want to learn and how much time and money they are
prepared to invest in doing so, while the role of the teacher can be seen as
attempting to meet those needs. Interestingly, while this is a common way of
working with fee-paying adults in language schools, it is nevertheless still
rare to involve school children in deciding what they need to learn, or in
evaluating how helpful they find their lessons to be.
An alternative conception is that of learner as partner, where the
emphasis is shifted from consultation to negotiation and where it is possible
in Freire’s terms for the teacher to ‘take on the role of student amongst
students’. The assumption here is not one of equality but one of a sharing
relationship within which teachers recognise that they are also learners. The
starting point for this kind of teacher is not one of ‘I’m in charge!’, but one
of ‘Let’s decide together how we can all benefit from our time together’. The
underlying notions are of mutual trust and respect leading to growth and
development for teachers and all their learners. This approach is best
exemplified by humanist teachers such as Carl Rogers. In the language
classroom, learners can be treated as partners by involving them in decisions
about what activities to carry out, asking them what topics they are
interested in or allowing them to select books to read. It is also a view that
has underpinned work on the use of process syllabuses in language teaching.
Two further possible conceptions of learners are those of the learner as
individual explorer and the learner as democratic explorer. In the first of
these the role of the teacher becomes almost entirely one of facilitator
working largely from a Piagetian perspective, i.e. the classroom is organised
in such a way as to enable the learners to explore for themselves and come
to their own conclusions with a minimum of prompting from the teacher.
This particular approach became very popular with teachers of young
children in the UK following the publication of the Plowden Report (1967).
This is a view that has tended to pervade approaches to language teaching
based on input and acquisition, i.e. the teacher’s role is to provide appro-
priate comprehensible input, which the learners act on in their own ways,
leading to language acquisition.
Democratic exploration takes this process one step further and sees it as
the function of any learning group to set its own agenda, decide upon its
goals and preferred ways of working, and how, if at all, it wishes to draw
upon the particular knowledge and expertise of the teacher. Meighan clearly
favours this particular approach, at least in working with mature learners.
Although it is difficult to envisage how this could be put intoypractice with
younger learners, perhaps the classic example of an attempt to do so is
provided by A. S. Neill’s alternative school, Summerhill (Neill 1962, 1967).

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3 What do teachers bring to the teaching-learning process?

Approaches such as community language learning draw a little on this

conceptualisation of learners. More particularly, task-based approaches to
language learning which involve giving groups of learners tasks to engage in,
allow groups the freedom to decide how they wish to work, although it is,
of course, generally the teacher who selects the activities.
It should be readily apparent that the social constructivist approach which
we favour tends to fit more comfortably with the latter end of Meighan’s
continuum than with the former, but it is also clear that the extent to which
teachers feel able to work with their learners as democratic explorers rather
than as, say, clients, often depends on factors outside of their control. In
making their belief systems about learners explicit, however, teachers should
be able to identify inconsistencies and frustrations in their work and thereby
search for ways of bridging the inevitable gap between their espoused
theories and their theories in action.

Beliefs about learning

As important as their views about learners are teachers’ beliefs about
learning, although the two are inextricably linked. In Chapters 1 and 2 we
outlined a number of different psychological approaches to learning. We
have also made the point that teachers’ beliefs about what is involved in
learning will influence the way in which they teach.
It is, of course, impossible to contemplate teaching in isolation from
learning. The question of what makes a good teacher must ultimately be
concerned with what and how and how much learners learn and what
exactly that learning is for. This is just as true for the language teacher as it
is for any other. We can only be really effective teachers if we are clear in
our minds what we mean by learning because only then can we know what
kinds of learning outcomes we want our learners to achieve. If our aim is
to teach enough language items to pass an examination, then this will have
significant implications for the way in which we teach. If, on the other hand,
we see learning a new language as a lifelong process with much broader
social, cultural and educational implications, then we will take a very
different approach to teaching it.
As a result of their comprehensive review of the literature on conceptions
of learning, Gow and Kember (1993) suggest that most approaches to
learning can be subsumed under one of the following headings:

® a quantitative increase in knowledge;

¢ memorisation;
° the acquisition of facts, procedures etc. which can be retained
and/or used in practice;

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e the abstraction of meaning;

¢ an interpretative process aimed at the understanding of reality;
e some form of personal change.

The first three of these conceptions can be conveniently subsumed under the
heading of reproductive approaches while the subsequent three can be seen
as meaning-based. It would, of course, be unwise to view such approaches
as mutually exclusive. Most methods used in language teaching appear to
belong to several overlapping categories, and most teachers’ views would
incorporate a mixture of these. However, a few examples can usefully be
given to illustrate these categories. ‘The quantitative increase in knowledge’
might lead to transmission of knowledge about how the language operates
or explanation of grammar rules. The learning of vocabulary or verb tenses
might belong more to ‘memorisation’. Teaching learners skills such as
guessing meanings of words from their context are more concerned with the
‘learning of procedures which can be used in practice’.
‘The abstraction of meaning’ is a particularly interesting category, which
appears to belong more to communicative approaches to teaching a
language and techniques such as task-based listening, reading with infor-
mation transfer, or tasks requiring meaningful interaction. These particular
techniques would also belong to the fifth category, ‘an interpretative process
aimed at the understanding of reality’, provided the language used con-
veys reality. This issue of ‘purposefulness’ of language is taken up in
Chapter 8.
The final category, ‘some form of personal change’ will have particular
implications for the way in which a language is taught. A belief in this form
of learning would lead to the selection of activities that have personal
significance or relevance to the learners leading to some personal benefit
such as learning to think, learning some social skill or learning about the
world. These are all issues that are taken up in future chapters.
We are now in a position to make our own statement as to what we
believe learning involves, and which we consider represents central aspects
of our own espoused theory.
We believe that worthwhile learning:

e is acomplex process;
¢ produces personal change of some kind;
e involves the creation of new understandings which are personally
relevant;
e can take a number of different forms;
e is always influenced by the context in which is occurs;

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e results mainly from social interaction;

e often needs to be mediated;
e differs from individual to individual;
® is an emotional as well as a cognitive process;
e is closely related to how people feel about themselves;
e isa lifelong process.

Each of these statements reflects an important aspect of social construc-

tivism with an additional emphasis upon the affective dimension as well as
the cognitive. Each will be taken up, therefore, at different points within this
book and will be represented as ongoing themes throughout.

Teachers’ beliefs about themselves

At this point, therefore, it seems appropriate to turn finally in this chapter
to consider how teachers’ views of themselves as persons and what they
believe to be the most appropriate form of social interaction with their
learners can influence the learning process. Our view of education has much
in common with many aspects of the humanist approach introduced in
Chapter 2, particularly as exemplified by statements of the following nature:

Effective teachers create learning atmospheres which are cognitively and

affectively expanding; learning atmospheres which enable the learner to
become a more adequate and knowledgeable person.
(Pine and Boy 1977:iii)

It is clear that this kind of approach places great emphasis upon what the
teacher as a person brings to the teaching-learning relationship and how
the learner can be helped to develop as a whole person by the provision of a
supportive learning environment, which allows individuals to develop in
their own way.
For the humanistic teacher, teaching is essentially a personal expression of
the self. As Pine and Boy express it, ‘Pupils feel the personal emotional
structure of the teacher long before they feel the impact of the intellectual
content offered by that teacher’ (op. cit.:3). This obviously has particular
implications with regard to teachers’ views of themselves since a
teacher
who lacks self-esteem will find it impossible to build the self-esteem
of
others. This is equally true when it comes to conveying dignity and respect.
Similarly, the teacher who does not accept her learners for who
they are
makes it difficult for them to accept themselves. Thus, the languag
e teacher
needs to convey a sense of self-confidence in using the language
whilst at the

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same time respecting learners’ attempts to express themselves and their

views in the language.
One further quality which is central to the humanistic approach is that
of permissiveness. “Permissiveness’ is defined here in a very special way as
‘permission to be oneself’, to pursue interests and curiosity in search of
meaning in one’s life, as well as the freedom to have ideas, beliefs and
values.
Humanistic education is sometimes described as learner-centred teaching.
However, such a definition does not do justice to the full implications of
taking this approach to one’s teaching. Whilst it is true that humanistic
teachers begin with the premise that everything they say or do has, or could
have, a significant impact on the personal growth and development of their
learners, it is equally true that in every teaching act the teacher defines
herself as a person. Humanistic teaching, therefore, is not just learner-
centred, but person-centred. A teacher’s view of teaching mirrors her view
of herself and her teaching behaviour reflects her essence as a person.
One natural consequence of taking such an approach is that we have
to accept that teaching is an expression of values and attitudes, not just
information or knowledge. Another consequence is that teachers must
recognise that they themselves are constantly involved in a lifelong process
of learning and change. The influence of the developmental theories of such
psychologists as Maslow and Erickson, as outlined in Chapter 2, provide the
foundation upon which this approach is based.

3.7 Conclusion

In this chapter we have argued that there are no simple answers to the
question of what makes a good teacher. Studies which focus exclusively
on what good teachers do or even on what learners and others think that
teachers do appear to be surprisingly unhelpful to individual teachers
wanting to improve their own practices.
A more helpful approach seems to lie within the area of teachers’ beliefs;
about themselves, about learning and its educational relevance and about
learners. At the same time, the consistency with which teachers’ actions
reflect what they claim to believe would appear to be a vitally important
aspect of effective teaching. The notion, therefore, of the teacher-as-
reflective practitioner becomes central to our developing perspective.
Constructivism lies at the core of our pedagogical model. Therefore,
teachers’ constructions of learning and learners need to be made explicit.
At the same time, social interactionism emphasises the importance of
both the context of learning and the nature of the social and communicative
interactions that take place within that context, usually a classroom. A

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humanist perspective has been offered as one which should help teachers to
focus on both the cognitive and affective aspects of such relationships.
In the next chapter, we take the role of the teacher a step further and
consider more precisely some practical implications of this kind of model
with particular reference to the work of Reuven Feuerstein.

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