Walter Geerts & René van Kralingen - The Teachers' Handbook

TheTeachers’ Handbook

be a positive effect on the quality of work if professionals are regularly expected to explain and justify what they do and why. Doctors, lawyers and legal advisers need to be able to explain to their clients in understandable language why they opt for a specific treatment or strategy. This reinforces their own commitment while simultaneously increasing the acceptance and cooperation of their patients or clients. However, in the educational field it hardly ever occurs that students ask why a teacher chooses, for example, group work over an in-class discussion. In other words, students rarely ask a teacher to justify educational choices. Nev ertheless, parents, colleagues and future teachers do have specific demands: they insist on knowing which options are available and why a certain approach was selected. In order to do so, a teacher needs to possess reflective skills. Metaphor ically speaking, you should be able to rewind the tape once in a while, describe what you see and explain why you acted in a certain way. Phrasing it as such suggests a teacher always acts consciously, which is cer tainly not the case. Research on teacher cognitions (Beijaard, Van Driel, Veld man, Verloop &Vermunt, 2014) indicates that practical knowledge, representing the teacher’s personal theory of teaching, is often unconscious and in any case instantly applied without specific explanations. Performance will be partly based on routines and partly on intuition which has not (yet) been made explicit or shared with others. The practical knowledge theories in this handbook are not imperative but serve rather as a means to develop your own unique teaching style. This will by no means be effortless. The same research on teacher cognitions showed that interactive cognitions are fairly malleable (teaching novices were taught by sea

soned teachers, e.g. by means of video footage, how to cope with students and what was cru cial in specific lesson scenarios). On the other hand, deeper cognitions – strongly connected to personal opinions and belief systems – ap peared not to be so easily influenced.  This second type of cognition is partly based on mental images adopted from teachers and formed during one’s own school period. Al though such types of dominant cognitions might be hard to analyse, there certainly is merit in dis cussing these kinds of beliefs and behaviours. As a result, teachers will ask things like: ‘Do I act in a certainway because I saw it done that way when I was younger?’ potentially followed by a question like ‘Does my behaviour, shaped by ingrained be liefs, actually match the school policy?’ or ‘Does my unconsciously shaped behaviour fit the needs of these students?’

When we learn how to drive, we first need to be able to control the vehicle it self. Once we have established this and it has become to a certain extent an automated process – e.g., shifting and steering should become routine behav iour – we can actually focus on the traf fic around us. Some teachers always explain a particu lar topic in the exact same way. They have become accustomed to this and are no longer able to adapt to their stu dents’ needs due to their own limited repertoire. These teachers invest neither in renewal of their instructional meth ods nor in their teaching strategies or testing procedures.

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