Identifying Key Structures for Teaching: Teachers' Professional Scripts for Practice

• In Event: Efforts to Conceptualize Key Structures of Teaching Practice in the Content Areas

Abstract

Objectives
There is currently a push to make teacher education more practice-focused (Ball & Forzani, 2009). These efforts are characterized by close attention to the ways in which teacher educators support novices as they learn and begin to enact complex pedagogical practices with students. However, there is little understanding of how teachers progress from a technical, procedural understanding of pedagogical practices to developing the ability to flexibly adapt those practices to meet the needs of particular students learning particular content in particular contexts. In this paper, I conceptualize teachers’ practice as the product of their professional scripts for teaching (scripts). I examine a secondary English Language Arts (ELA) teacher’s enactment of the practice of leading a classroom discussion in order to explore the affordances and constraints of using scripts—both the construct and the name—to better understand practice for the purpose of improving pre-service teacher education.

Perspectives
I argue that scripts are common organizational structures underlying teachers’ context-specific versions of practices. They support in-the-moment enactment and decision-making as teachers adapt practice to students, content, and contexts. They also bound what may even be considered competent professional practice. My framework builds on research on novices’ development of both pedagogical technique and professional judgment (Lampert et al., 2013), cultural scripts that shape teachers’ understanding of what teaching is (Stigler & Hiebert, 1998), cognition and decision-making (Kahneman, 2013), and professionalization (Abbott, 1998) and communities of practice (Wenger, 1998).

Methods and Data
I illustrate what scripts are and how they support the enactment of practice by closely examining a single master teacher’s practice of leading a whole-class discussion. Data sources include videos of the focal teacher leading a discussion of the same two Russian short stories with two distinct secondary ELA classes. I use the two videos to clarify what a script for practice is and to consider the affordances and constraints of parsing practice in this way in order to study teaching. In addition, I analyze this teacher’s script for leading a classroom discussion to consider what the term “scripts” offers toward the project of improving practice-based teacher education.

Results
The structure underlying the teacher’s practice is recognizably the same across both enactments, despite context-specific adjustments he made in order to address the needs of students in each class. Additionally, I identified instances in which the teacher’s script conforms to cultural and professional norms for leading a classroom discussion, as well as instances in which the teacher demonstrated professional judgment by adapting his practice both to meet the needs of each class as a group and to respond to individual students. Conceptualizing the teacher’s enactments as a script for leading discussion highlights what about his practice is stable, as well as when and why he made adjustments.

Significance
Examining practice in this way allows for the identification of key elements of enactment and how they work together in professional practice. This has implications for strengthening both pre-service teacher education and professional development.

Author

• Rebecca Gadd, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor