Reflecting on professional practice with a cracked mirror: Productive Pedagogy experiences

Reflecting on professional practice with a cracked mirror: Productive Pedagogy experiences.

Geof Hill

The Investigative Practitioner, Brisbane, Australia

Geof@bigpond.com

Abstract: Part of the mandatory professional development agenda in a number of Queensland schools is reflection on teaching practice using the Productive Pedagogy framework. The introduction of this framework has generated substantive conversations among teachers concerning the development of the framework and what is and is not listed as productive pedagogies.

This paper is presented in the context of practitioner investigation from the perspective of a critical friend working with groups of teachers in the implementation of the New Basics curriculum in Queensland. It reports on a professional development program that encourages the use of the framework for reflection on teaching while at the same time acknowledging that the framework might be flawed.

Geof Hill is the managing director of 'The Investigative Practitioner' and has been contracted as a critical friend at one of the New Basics schools in Queensland since the introduction of this curriculum trial.

Keywords: Productive pedagogies, Reflective practice, teacher professional development.

Context

This paper is being presented from the perspective of a 'critical friend' working in association with a curriculum initiative undertaken by Education Queensland. Critical Friends were appointed to each of the schools in the trial implementation of a trans-disciplinary curriculum. Their role was intended to provide school based support for the implementation of the curriculum as well as to undertake 'action research' about the curriculum through its implementation.

What is 'New Basics'?

'New Basics' is a trans-disciplinary curriculum currently being implemented in a number of Queensland schools. The initiative involves a series of tasks introduced between grades 1 to 9. Each task adopts a trans-disciplinary approach and will often be delivered by teams of teachers, each having a different disciplinary strength.

Part of the 'New Basics' curriculum initiative is an agenda to encourage teachers to talk about their professional practice. This agenda arose out of the School Reform Longitudinal Survey (SRLS), a separate educational research project undertaken by the Education Queensland in 1998. The SRLS study replicated and used instruments from, the University of Wisconsin's Centre on the Organization of Restructuring of Schools (CORS) (Newmann & Wehlage, 1993; Newmann & Associates, 1996). CORS focused on how changes in school organisational capacity enabled changes in authentic pedagogy and improvements in student outcomes. SRLS identified twenty productive pedagogies that it believed would improve the quality of curriculum.

Teachers in Queensland were introduced to the Productive Pedagogies in a range of professional development contexts. Many of the teachers associated with the implementation of New Basics curriculum attended three-day Productive Pedagogy programs. These programs covered the theoretical background of the study and used videos of teachers as resources to help teachers identify the presence/absence of productive pedagogies in teaching practice.

In July 2002, as part of my role of 'critical friend' I was asked to deliver a Professional Development program on Productive Pedagogies to complement the professional development program that had been offered by Education Queensland.

A model

Several factors influenced the design of my proposed professional development program:

I had attended a three-day introduction to Productive Pedagogies along with a group of staff from the school at which I was working as a 'critical friend'. I had my own doubts about the authenticity of the model and the approach that was adopted in the three-day program to introduce the model.

The model appeared to be contextualised in what appeared to me to be a deficit approach. The SRLS research was used to advocate that teachers were not currently using many of the productive pedagogies. While this may have been the legitimate SRLS finding, the teachers at that professional development responded to this suggestion by questioning the representativeness of the sample groups in the study.
While I had little knowledge of the representativeness of the samples used for the SRLS, my own concern was linked to the coding tools; specifically the measurement of 'Narrative'.

"Narrative is lessons identified by an emphasis in teaching and in student responses on such things as the use of personal stories, biographies, historical accounts, literary and cultural texts" (New Basics Branch, 2001). Each of the measurement codes was based on a 1-5 range, with 1 indicating poor pedagogy and 5 indicating good pedagogy. With 'Narrative', 1 indicated little use of 'Narrative' and 5 indicated extensive use of 'Narrative'. This meant that extensive use of 'Narrative' was seen to be good pedagogy. My understanding of the use of narrative as a pedagogy was that it involved appropriate use of narrative, and so this scale seemed to be at odds with the other pedagogy measures.

While this was only a small instance of irregularity in the coding, it raised for me questions about the rigour of the whole project. This was a comment that surfaced at a number of different contexts in which the SRLS was discussed.

There appeared to be no substantiation for the groupings of the pedagogies in their sets.

The resentment of a deficit model to introduce the Productive Pedagogies framework was broader than the teachers in New Basics. The teachers at the school at which I was working as a 'critical friend' had been introduced to the Productive Pedagogies framework prior to it being included in New Basics. When I was asked to deliver an introduction to Productive Pedagogies to the Senior School (a section of staff not covered by the New Basics professional development) at the beginning of 2002, I was subsequently made aware of this resentment.
Subsequent discussions with teachers in a number of contexts raised an issue regarding the use of the term 'Productive Pedagogies'. Some questioned the use of the word 'pedagogy' suggesting it was academic speak and not the language of their professional discussions. Others suggested that this term inferred that any pedagogy not listed in the chosen twenty was not productive, and this inference raised problems for them regarding several pedagogies that they could not see clearly articulated in the model, and that their experience had taught them were productive or useful worthwhile pedagogies. They gave as two examples time management and safety management.

As a result of these factors I developed my own model of professional development with the following features.

In contrast to a deficit model I based my approach on an appreciative inquiry. I grounded my approach on an assumption that teachers were already using a number of these pedagogies and that reflection on the model would lead to a greater consciousness of their use as well as increased use.

I valued a reflective practitioner (Schon, 1983) approach and sought a professional development that:

Introduced the essential theory.
Encouraged teachers to reflect on their day-to-day teaching practice in the light of that theory.
Generated a number of individual teacher research projects associated with productive pedagogies the reporting of which formed the basis of substantive conversations about productive pedagogies. I had previously used this approach in my work with reflective practice in the coal mining industry and was then using it with a reflective practice unit for higher education teachers.

I also applied the reflective practice to my own curriculum delivery. In each session I asked the participants to use the section of the framework they had just studied as the basis for critiquing what I planned to teach them in the next cycle.

I took a theoretical stand about theory and models, and suggested that models were just a way of making something that was essentially quite complex, simpler. This did not make any model truthful nor perfect. The Productive Pedagogy framework, from this perspective was then seen as a useful but not necessarily all encompassing model.
My observations of the protocols that were necessary in order to use videos of teachers teaching prompted me to choose mainstream videos (For example: Play it Forward (Kevin Stacey as the classroom teacher);

Anna and the King (Jodie Foster as the classroom teacher);

Dead Poets Society (Robin Williams as the classroom teacher);

To Sir with Love (Sidney Pointier as the classroom teacher).

that contained examples of teaching. Suitable training videos were often difficult to obtain and there appeared to me to be reluctance on behalf of teachers to critique what teachers saw as their peers. I believed that teachers would find it easier to critique someone they knew was an actor acting to be a teacher.

The program

The program I designed used four reflective sets each of which addressed one aspect of the Productive Pedagogy (PP) framework.

A. Recognition of Difference

B. Connectedness

C. Intellectual Quality

D. Supportive Classroom Environment.

Teachers met in groups of six for 90 minute sessions separated by a two-week break.

In the first session for any given aspect of the Productive Pedagogy framework the participants:

Were introduced to the specific aspect of the Productive Pedagogies framework (Recognition of Difference, Connectedness, Intellectual Quality or Supportive Classroom Environment).
explored the set of pedagogies in that aspect of the framework, examining their own understanding of the terms used to describe the PP and how these compared with the definitions of the PP given in the framework.
observed a video of teacher in a classroom situation and critiqued the movie star classroom teacher to develop the skills of using the framework as a critical framework. They identified what the actor/teacher was doing that could be labelled PP and suggested ways in which, if they were taking the same class, they could improve on the teaching through the introduction of specific teaching strategies. This helped to develop a critical framework for looking at their own teaching or another teacher's teaching, without having to spend time developing protocols for talking about a teacher's work.

Over the following two weeks the participants observed their own classroom teaching from the perspective of the aspect of the PP framework they had studied. They noted teaching strategies that in their opinion were in line with the specific PP that had studied, as well as problems they had encountered in endeavouring to implement this collection of PP into their teaching.

The second session of a reflective set:

The participants discussed their experiences of implementing PP into their teaching
They generated lists of teaching strategies that they have found helpful in implementing the Productive Pedagogies.
They used the set of Productive Pedagogies that they had studied over the past two weeks to critique my draft program for the subsequent set of productive pedagogies. This established a hierarchy of critical reflection. They had firstly critiqued an actor, then they had critiqued my work (the work of another teacher) and finally (I was hopeful) they would be willing to critique their own teaching.

At the time of writing this paper the school has undertaken five cycles of professional development. Ten teachers have undertaken reflective practice on all four segments of the Productive Pedagogies framework. From these cycles:

There is evidence of substantive conversations on pedagogy. In one of the sessions within the fourth cycle one teacher mentioned that she did not feel that her practice showed evidence of a specific pedagogy. Another teacher commented that in his observation of her teaching there was evidence of this.

There is evidence in the projects that teachers initiated that they were actively reflecting on their teaching practice and making changes to it in line with the Productive Pedagogies framework.

There is evidence of teachers critiquing the framework and suggesting that there were other pedagogies, such as time management and safety focus, that they felt were also productive.

There is evidence that teachers were more comfortable with the language of productive pedagogies through the projects they have chosen and their talking about their projects.

Teachers were effectively using collections of productive pedagogies to audit my lesson plans.

An interesting outcome, though not directly linked to the productive pedagogies, was that having chosen mainstream videos, which had not been prepared with productive pedagogies in mind, each of them provided suitable video clips with a range of examples of productive pedagogies. This is perhaps more due to the fact that the scenes being shown were intended to demonstrate good teaching, and thus automatically demonstrated many of the productive pedagogies.

The overall program appeared to be successful. Principals of both the schools (a Middle school and a Primary school) have indicated that they will continue the productive pedagogies program next year. The only glitch in the program was that while the school was undertaking what they believed was an appreciative inquiry approach to productive pedagogies, two researchers with the QRLS visited the school to undertake the mandated research that was part of the agreement to become a 'New Basics' school. These researchers sat in the classroom and made notes about several teachers and provided no feedback to the teachers about their observations. They earned themselves the name of 'crows on the fence' and an objection was raised with Education Queensland about the inappropriate research approach. The response was that this was mandated research and was not intended to be action research and that the researcher's approach was in keeping with the research model. This one instance undermined much of the attitude change that had been emerging from the appreciative inquiry approach.

Give that Productive Pedagogies is a mandatory professional development in Queensland schools, the need to create constructive dialogue about the framework is essential for teachers being able to use the framework to review their teaching practices. However 'right' an educational initiative may appear, there still needs to be consideration for the attitudinal factors in having teachers adopt the initiative. By acknowledging that the framework was not perfect, it enable us to apply the framework to teaching without being sidetracked about the flaws in it, and this meant that maximum time was able to be devoted to teacher reflection. That is not to say that discussion was blocked. Having acknowledged the flaws we were still able to spend some time looking at these aspects of the framework, without this detracting too much from the reflective practice.

.......................

I welcome comments and feedback about this paper and can be contacted on Geof @bigpond.com

Newmann, F. & Associates. (1996). Authentic Achievement: Restructuring Schools for Intellectual Quality. San Francisco: Josey Bass.

Newmann, F. M., & Wehlage, G. G. (1993). Standards for authentic instruction. Educational Leadership, 50(7), 8-12.

Schon, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action. U.S.A.: Basic Books.