Understanding Teachers' Practice: A Goal-Systems Approach

• In Event: 29.049 - Reforming Teacher Reform

Abstract

Purpose
This paper serves to explain and illustrate how knowledge of a teacher’s goal system can serve as a starting place to change a teacher’s practice.
Theoretical perspective
To better understand why a teacher does what she or he does it is necessary to understand how existing practice contributes to attaining multiple and simultaneous goals. Goal system theorists have argued that a person’s multiple goals are organized in a goal-means hierarchy (Lord et al, 2010; Kruglanski & Kopetz, 2009). Goals at the highest levels in a goal hierarchy reflect important aspects of someone’s identity (identity goals) (Carver, 2012). These identity goals can be realized by so-called principle goals. Schema for action, in turn, implement these principle goals. In this contribution we show (primarily through a case of Joyce, a biology teacher) how knowledge of a teacher’s goal system can be used to better understand a teacher’s practice.
Method and data sources
Joyce was enrolled in a teacher education program at Leiden University in The Netherlands in which pre-service teachers take courses one day a
week at university while they teach about 10 hours a week at school under supervision of their placement tutor. Through this case we demonstrate
why Joyce’s goal system motivates her to conduct her lab practicals in a cookbook fashion despite her belief that students should learn how to ask
and answer questions about nature.
To explicate we used the ladder interview (Author, 2013):
1. First, Joyce was asked: “What do you do sequencially when teaching a practical?” (That is, what is your sequence of lesson segments).
2. Next, for each lesson segment Joyce was asked why she did this in this way, why she considered this particular segment important. For
each of these ‘higher goals’, the Joyce was asked why she considered the goal important and this question was repeated until the
teacher could not come up with yet a higher goal.
3. Finally, the Joyce was asked to evaluate her goal system (satisfied: white boxes: unsatisfied: grey boxes and bold lines) (figure 2)
Findings
Joyce’s Goal System (GS) representation shows that she was not yet completely satisfied with her regular way of teaching practicals with respect to inquiry learning. However, her GS shows she wanted to attain other goals as well. Important reasons why she designed a cookbook practical: she had only 50 minutes to complete a practical and she expected that she would not be able to support each of her 30 students when needed, which in turn would undermine classroom order.
Significance
This paper provides an important foundation for the teacher reform initiative of this session by showing how teachers’ goal systems provide a window for understanding teaching practice and teacher decision-making. Goal systems organize and hold a teacher’s daily practice in place. Teacher reform must, then, begin with a methodology for explicating a teacher’s goal systems as related to his or her everyday practices.

Author

• Fred Janssen, Leiden University