Self-study and the power of seeing teacher education as a

discipline
Tom Russell

This paper provides background and overview for the ideas I presented at
The MOFET Institute, TelAviv, as a Visiting Scholar in the period March
18-21, 2007. I begin by summarizing the context in which I now see the
importance of self-study to ongoing efforts to improve pre-service and in-
service teacher education. I continue by arguing that self-study contributes to
and supports seeing teacher education not as a field drawing on many others
but as a discipline in its own right.

The Cultural Context of Teaching and Teacher Education

In most cultures, teaching is an activity in which one person (usually older
and more experienced) works to introduce one or more other persons to
information and ways of thinking about that information. In most "western"
countries, schools have evolved into institutions where those designated
as teachers work to convey information prescribed by the state to those
designated as learners (or students, or pupils). To prepare those older, more
experienced individuals for their work as teachers, we have developed
institutions for pre-service teacher education. Both schools and teachers
colleges are now well-established in many different countries and cultures.
The quality of work in our schools and teachers colleges is often criticized,
both from within and without, yet the basic patterns of interaction tend to
be quite stable (Sarason, 1996), even as we update curriculum documents,
provide in-service education for teachers, make computers available to
students, and otherwise add new features and responsibilities to the work of
teachers and teacher educators.

Teaching looks easy

Teaching is generally seen by outsiders as an easy activity. In most western
countries, virtually all children attend school, at least to the age of 16, and
many continue to university level. As a result, virtually every member of a
society has extensive experience watching what teachers do. Teaching looks
easy, and good teaching looks even easier. At the same time, weak teaching

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 is readily recognized, and nowhere is it more readily recognized than in
programs of pre-service teacher education. Lecturers who tell prospective
teachers how to teach science by inquiry or who tell prospective teachers that
telling is not a productive teaching strategy are instantly recognized for the
contradiction between what they are saying and what they are doing.

Teaching is not easy

In sharp contrast to the everyday views of teaching held by those who do not
teach, most teachers have a sense that they are working quite hard, not just
when planning lessons or assessing work, but also when actively engaged
in a lesson, trying to read the individual responses of 30 or more students.
Most teachers do not involve their students in activities that would indicate
the complexity of teaching. Most teachers do not take the time to indicate
the rationale for either a lesson's content or the way that it is taught. This
oversight has several unfortunate consequences for students. Much of what
happens and how it happens in a classroom appears to be arbitrary, left to the
teacher's personal or professional whim and certainly not requiring careful
analysis. While teaching is definitely not easy, every member of a society
who attends school is inadvertently and unintentionally taught several things
about teaching:
1 Teaching is relatively easy.
2. Teaching involves a great deal of talk by the teacher.
3. Management of students has nothing to do with how they are being
taught.
4. Schools must ensure that children meet standards, but how schools operate
should be the same as one's own schooling; innovation and change are
too risky.
Is it any wonder, then, that teaching patterns have remained so stable despite
decades of criticism and calls for change (Sarason, 1998)?

Prior views of teaching are significant

As a former physics teacher and now a teacher of a pre-service physics
method course, I am well aware that students (including those with a degree
in physics) enter a physics class with many everyday experiences that are
incorrect from the perspective of the discipline of physics. Examples include

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 the common-sense notions that an object in motion must have a force acting
on it to keep it moving and that if one of three batteries is placed in the
direction opposite to the other two, the flow of electricity will be blocked.
When we shift our attention from prior views of physics to prior views of
teaching, I am particularly aware that students enter a pre-service program
of teacher education with expectations that are not easily changed. Examples
include the common-sense notions that the most important thing a new
teacher needs is a vast array of resources with which to build lessons during
the first year of teaching, and that how students respond to a lesson has little
to do with how it is taught.

Seeing teaching and teacher education as disciplines

Returning to teach in a school inspired self-study
In 1991 and again in 1992, I returned to the secondary school context to
teach one physics class for 75 minutes each day for half a school year. The
powerful insights I gained into what I was trying to prepare pre-service
physics teachers to be able to do in schools prompted new ways of looking
at my own teacher education practices that continue to this day. In a 1992
AERA symposium, I presented with four other teacher educators who were
also committed to studying their own teacher education practices, in part to
identify gaps between what we were trying to achieve and what our students
were experiencing. It was against this background that I joined a group of
teacher educators and teachers in 1993 to form the Self-Study of Teacher
Education Practices (S-STEP) special interest group within the American
Educational Research Association (AERA). "Self-study" has now become a
familiar term in teacher education circles, and it is associated with a growing
literature that includes a two-volume international handbook (Loughran,
Hamilton, LaBoskey, & Russell, 2004), a range of books, and the proceedings
of six international self-study conferences.

Seeing teaching as a discipline

One of the more recent consequences of my close association with John
Loughran since 1993 in the promotion of self-study perspectives has been
the insight that teaching can and should be seen not as something whimsical,
based on a teacher's personal preferences, but as something disciplined - as

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 a discipline in its own right. By extension, if we see teaching as a discipline,
we also need to explore the implications of seeing teacher education as a
discipline. These insights arise in part because those who engage in self-
study and use their findings to change their teaching come to see in quite
personal and practical ways that they can change their "default" habits of
teaching (originally acquired largely by observation of their own teachers)
and begin to help their students move closer to the kind of teacher they wish
to become (Loughran, 2006; Russell & Loughran, 2007).
The idea of teaching and teacher education as disciplines may have
escaped consideration because teaching is an activity or a performance,
while academics traditionally use the word to refer to a particular body of
knowledge (complete with its own history and way of viewing the events it
seeks to interpret). Disciplines reside in universities, where studying teaching
and knowing how to teach well are usually not seen as important activities
or skills. Despite all the talk in schools and universities about developing
critical and independent thinking, transmission of as much knowledge as
possible in the time available remains a pervasive reality. In the sections that
follow, I introduce three perspectives that point to the importance of seeing
teaching as a discipline, including a special sub-section on teacher education
as a discipline.

Recognizing that how we teach determines the skills we develop

The words of Olson (1974, p. 12) can help us move beyond what we teach to
also consider the importance of how we teach:
Knowledge and skill are related to experience in distinctive ways in
that skills are tied to particular types of activity while knowledge is not. To
illustrate: one may acquire the knowledge that the stove is hot by (1) touching
it, i.e., through direct contingent experience . . . , or (2) seeing someone recoil
from touching it, i.e., through modeling or observational learning, or (3)
hearing, understanding, and believing the sentence, "the stove is hot." As to
the knowledge they convey, these forms of experience converge.
Olson goes on to draw the following conclusion from his example of the
hot stove:
Any experience involves both knowledge and skill. But while quite different
forms of experience can generate the same knowledge, every different form
of experience generates or calls upon quite different mental skills. (pp. 12-13)

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 Olson's perspective suggests that teacher education might focus more
on teachers' development of skills than on their development of knowledge.
Their development of knowledge can occur in many different ways but,
following Olson, their development of skills depends directly on how they
are taught. What skills do new teachers need most? They need to be able not
only to act as a teacher but also to read the impact of their actions on the
many individuals they teach. They need to learn how to take knowledge of
teaching and translate it into actions that have the effects on students that
their knowledge of teaching tells them to try to achieve. Only with careful
and constant attention to how we teach pre-service teachers can we as teacher
educators read the impact of our own actions on those we teach. Self-study of
our own teacher education practices becomes essential.
Three fundamental problems that require development of skills1
Darling-Hammond (2006) has described three fundamental problems
associated with learning to teach, and these problems present challenges to
familiar assumptions and perspectives.
1. The problem of the "Apprenticeship of Observation": "Learning to teach
requires new teachers to understand teaching in ways quite different from
their own experience as students." (p. 35)
2. The problem of "Enactment": "Learning to teach requires that new teachers
not only learn to 'think like a teacher' but also to 'act like a teacher.'" (p.
35)
3. The problem of "Complexity": "Learning to teach requires new teachers
to understand and respond to the dense and multifaceted nature of the
classroom." (p. 35)
The first problem, concerning the apprenticeship of observation, is intriguing
but rarely addressed directly in planning and enacting a pre-service teacher
education program. "A significant challenge teachers face is that they enter
teaching having already had years of experience in schools." (p. 35)Darling-
Hammond cites Lortie's seminal sociological analysis of teaching:
They are not privy to the teacher's private intentions and personal
reflections on classroom events.Students rarely participate in selecting goals,
making preparations or postmortem analysis.Thus they are not pressed to
place the teacher's actions in a pedagogically oriented framework (Lortie,
1975, p. 62).

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 This suggests that teacher educators need to help beginners develop the
skills required to make explicit their implicit understandings of teaching,
so that they can appreciate the constraints they face as they construct
a perspective on teaching. They need to learn how to confront what they
inadvertently learned from experience and understand how different it is
from what they learn by being told. Touching a hot stove will always be a
more powerful experience than being told that a stove is hot.
If new teachers are to move beyond their default teaching moves to explore
the approaches we so often advocate within a teacher education program,
then it is essential that they develop skills for overcoming the problem of
enactment. Many new teachers seem to assume not only that new teaching
ideas are easily remembered but also that new teaching ideas flow smoothly
into practice. Thinking and acting like a teacher are not simple developments,
for they require leaving behind the routines of thinking and acting like a
learner in a classroom.
Finally, new teachers need to develop a set of skills for identifying and
making sense of the complexity inherent in any classroom of 20 or more
students. Perhaps more than anything else, identifying complexity requires
skills of listening to learners, reading each one's behavior for clues to unique
learning needs and responses so that thought may be given to teaching
actions that will address those unique needs. Just as a hot stove may appear
no different from a cold one, so students may appear on the surface to be
very similar. Where does a new teacher practice the skills of recognizing and
responding to the complexity below the surface in every classroom?
Teaching to create a context of productive learning Sarason's extended
analysis of underlying patterns of school culture inspired him to argue the
importance of seeing the teacher's role in terms of creating for students a
context of productive learning, for which he suggests three criteria:
1. Recognizing and respecting the individuality of the learner.
2. The teacher knows the subject matter well enough to know when or where
the learner may have difficulty.
3. The teacher is always seeking ways to stimulate and reinforce the learner's
wanting to learn and do more. (Sarason, 1999, p. 143).
These three criteria illustrate that teaching is far from simple or easy. As
a teacher educator, I find them attractive because they apply just as much

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 to my own teaching as they do to the teaching that occurs in our schools.
In the case of teacher education, knowing the subject matter well involves
knowing the relevant school curriculum and knowing the challenges and
frustrations associated with moving from being a student to being a teacher.
When I combine Sarason's perspective on productive learning with Olson's
perspective on how skills are developed and Darling-Hammond's description
of fundamental problems of becoming a teacher, I find myself moving steadily
away from the common-sense view that teachers who are told what to teach
are free to teach as they prefer.
Teaching can be crafted very deliberately and carefully, and this is what
many of our best teachers do (Bain, 2004). Teaching can be seen as a discipline,
but it is not enough for teacher educators to move to this perspective. Those
we teach - the next generation of teachers - could also benefit powerfully from
coming to see teaching as a discipline. Teacher educators and new teachers
alike rarely recognize that it is possible to be highly disciplined in the ways
one thinks about teaching, learning, and the close dependence of each on
the other. Perhaps we might then begin to make progress in overcoming the
familiar inadequacies of pre-service teacher education programs:
Conventional teacher education reflects a view of learning to teach as a
two-step process of knowledge acquisition and application or transfer. Lay
theories assume that learning to teach occurs through trial and error over
time. Neither view captures the prevailing position that learning occurs
through an interaction between the learner and the learning opportunity.
If we want to understand how and why teachers learn what they do from a
given learning opportunity, we have to investigate both what the experience
was like and what sense teachers made of it. (Feiman-Nemser & Remillard,
1996, pp. 79-80)

Every teacher educator has two disciplines

One of the many challenges to self-study of teacher education practices and to
seeing teaching and teacher education as a discipline is the common perception
of those who work in teacher education institutions that they already have a
discipline (a school subject or a foundational discipline such as psychology)
and an associated focus for personal research. Some teacher educators seem
to view themselves as accidentally located in a school of education instead
of in a disciplinary department, rather than viewing themselves as teacher

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 educators first and foremost. We might make impressive progress if all
teacher educators saw themselves as having two disciplines, one of which is
teaching and teacher education.

Self-study encourages viewing teaching as a discipline

When we consider the fundamental challenges facing those who would
become teachers and those who would help them, self-study and viewing
teaching as a discipline go hand in hand, building on the important challenges
in questions such as the following:
How much do we take for granted and accept without question about our
own work in pre-service programs?
How often do we challenge our perceptions of our own work and our
assumptions about what teacher candidates are learning in our classes?
Are our premises really different from those dominant in society generally
and, if they are not, why is that the case?
Are we telling people how to teach, or are we designing teaching activities
that will develop the skills required for seeing teaching as a discipline and
as a subject for personal inquiry over the course of a teaching career?
These questions permit me to close with ideas that may encourage others
to begin self-studies to examine their own assumptions about how people
learn to teach and about how pre-service teacher education does and does not
create contexts of productive learning.

Acknowledgement
I am grateful to my Queen's colleague, Andrea K. Martin, and to John
Loughran of Monash University for conversations that helped me to develop
the ideas presented here.

References
Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Darling-Hammond, L. (Ed.), (2006). Powerful teacher education. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Feiman-Nemser, S., & Remillard, J. (1996). Perspectives on learning to teach. In
F. B. Murray (Ed.), Teacher educator's handbook: Building a knowledge base

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 for the preparation of teachers (pp. 63-91). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Lortie, D. (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Loughran, J. (2006). Developing a pedagogy of teacher education:
Understanding teaching and learning about teaching. London: Routledge.
Loughran, J. J., Hamilton, M. L., LaBoskey, V. K., & Russell, T. (Eds.). (2004).
International handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education
practices. Dordrecht, TheNetherlands: Kluwer.
Olson, D. R. (1974). Mass media versus schoolmen: The role of the means of
instruction in the attainment of educational goals. Interchange, 5(2), 11-17.
Russell, T., & Loughran, J. (Eds.). (2007). Enacting a pedagogy of teacher
education: Values, relationships and practices. London: Routledge.
Sarason, S. B. (1996). Revisiting "The culture of the school and the problem of
change." NewYork: Teachers College Press.
Sarason, S. B. (1998). Political leadership and educational failure. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Sarason, S. B. (1999). Teaching as a performing art. New York: Teachers
College Press.

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