Managing the Mess: Uncertainty & Teacher Thinking

Robert Martinelle

School of Education, Boston University

SED CT 770, Professor Tate

December 17, 2012

INTRODUCTION

However arduous the task of writing may be, my time as a doctoral student has provided

me the opportunity to engage in what schooling seldom affords (Copland, 2003, p. 378), time to

think. Given my natural propensity for metaphors as a pedagogical device, I’m reminded of the

story about the boiling frog. Supposedly, if a frog were to be submerged in water that is

incrementally rising in temperature, the frog would allow itself to be boiled alive. Though

modern biologists claimed to have debunked this myth (Gibbons, 2002), I remain fascinated by

why the frog would seemingly accept its plight. Perhaps the creature, cognizant of the change in

temperature, longs to escape but just as it considers doing so, the heat rises yet again. Either the

frog is unaware of its imminent death or it is so conditioned to its ever-changing environment

that is has little time to process what is going on. Dewey (1902/1964) might offer the latter as a

conclusion:

“Familiarity breeds contempt, but it also breeds something like affection…We get used to

the chains we wear, and we miss them when removed…because meaningless activities

may get agreeable if long enough persisted in.” (p. 355).

My experiences as both a teacher and budding researcher would agree. A year and a half ago, I

decided to take a year off from teaching. I figured the time afforded to think and focus on my

studies would provide a type of clarity I was yearning for—that I would return the following year

a better teacher and leader than I was before. Instead, I only returned wondering what exactly

“better” was along with the consequences of opening this inquiry to discussion with my

colleagues. I came back uncertain, far more critical of my practice and the underlying

assumptions of my school’s mission and organization than ever before. Nowhere was this better

exemplified than on my first day back.

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Every year, the staff at my school are assembled in front of our headmaster for an

unveiling of the previous year’s MCAS scores. With each passing slide, applause rang out, as

our students’ scores were on the rise. Fittingly, my headmaster offered numerous “shout-outs” to

individual teachers for “their” performance. All around me were cheers and smiles. Yet I

remained in my seat, quietly enraged while thinking, “The teachers in this building are rarely, if

ever, recognized for their work yet we applaud them for this.” I was initially perplexed at my

frustration. After all, this was nothing new, as our school year always began this way. However,

that the object of my affection was now the focus of my disdain became clear upon reflection.

As a teacher the past five years, I have been the frog, blissfully unaware of the dread that

was growing around me. I accepted this because my bureaucratic surroundings denied me a

“deepened consciousness” of my own situation (Freire, 1970, p. 85). Beyond the time spent

actually teaching, the list of things I am routinely subjected to doing as a teacher in a school have

little to do with teaching and learning. And so, time for reflection is limited to my twenty-

minute lunch break or my nightly ride home. On occasion, these reflections raise important

questions about my practice, but the “temperature” usually rises before I can consider them in a

meaningful way. This being the case, I am left wondering if any of the actions or decisions I

make throughout the course of a day are preceded by any thought at all.

It took a year away from the “water” to actually realize that it was boiling in the first

place. That some would find my choice of the ‘boiling frog’ metaphor a bit dramatic—likening

my school to an oppressive, intellectually poisonous environment—I would argue the problem

lies not in the metaphor itself but in its absence from my school’s discourse. This absence does

not stem from a lack of staff willingness to engage in such dialogue. Quite the contrary, I have

much more faith in them. Yet the practice of teaching remains complex, uncertain, and riddled

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with dilemmas (Clark, 1988, p. 10). We’re just simply not provided enough time to think and

reflect on them.

MANAGING THE MESS

Originally, this paper was to be a work of pure objective summary and analysis. Having

looked over my writing numerous times, my advisor has told me that I need “stop thinking like a

teacher and think more like a researcher.” There are considerable merits to her plea, as I’ve

often struggled to set aside my own experiences when trying to make sense of others’ ideas.

Furthermore, it has proved difficult reading research on teaching without considering how I

could experiment with its findings. In many ways, I envy “pure” researchers, as their lens likely

prevents them from “wandering off” into the world of practice as they wade through the

literature.

Complaints aside, it was of the utmost importance that I use this paper to familiarize

myself with some of the research on teacher thinking—more specifically how teachers think

within their specific contexts, as my intentions are to research the possible commonalities that

exist between the contextual thinking of expert history teachers. Heeding the advice of Wilson &

Wineburg (1993) who cautioned that, “teaching cannot be judged apart from the time and place

in which it is situated” (p. 756), I sought out Schon’s (1983) seminal work on professional

knowledge, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action.

Schon’s study documents a type of knowing and thinking that is problematic, the likes of

which bring to mind the works of Freire (1970) and Cochran-Smith & Lytle (1999; 2009). His

central idea of “reflection-in-action” is more about how professionals try to make sense of

conflicting values and uncertainty than how one solves them. These reflective practitioners don’t

fix problems. They “manage messes” (Schon, 1983, p. 16). As a practitioner, I can strongly

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identify with this notion. And so, I approach this paper as an attempt to manage a particular

mess, one that has been a recurring theme throughout CT770. It is a mess I try to manage every

day as a classroom teacher and also one highlighted in some of the research on teacher thinking

(McAlpine, Weston, Berthiaume, & Fairbank-Roch, 2006; Clark, 1988)—the conditions under

which teachers reconcile the tension between theory and practice.

In previous papers, I’ve tried to clearly distinguish between reflection and objective

analysis. I purposely make no such distinction here. By positing practitioners as researchers,

Schon (1983) defiantly blurs the line between research and practice, modeling (perhaps

unknowingly) the type of thinking he was trying to study in the first place. As a result, I instead

offer this paper as somewhat of a small case study of how a practicing teacher reflects on action

and tries to make sense of his uncertainties. The practitioners profiled by Schon were not bound

by any false dichotomies, rendering much of their thinking more exploratory than conclusive.

Thus, my intentions are similar here. I begin first with a discussion of Schon’s study,

interweaving between analyses of his work, the reflections it provokes, and its relationship to

imagination and vision in teaching as described by Hammerness (2006). This is followed by a

discussion of research on teacher thinking, specifically highlighting its implications to teacher

education. Finally, I conclude with an examination and reflection on the types of environments

that hinder and facilitate reflection-in-action.

TECHNICAL RATIONALITY

As a public school teacher, I probably make over one hundred decisions on any given day

in my classroom. Many of these decisions spring from situations I anticipate happening, others

from more spontaneous dilemmas. Problematic to the reasoning and frequent uncertainty that

underlies these decisions is their invisible nature. This reasoning is not observable nor do I take

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or usually have the time to formally articulate it. In the event that one of my lessons goes

smoothly, meaning my students were highly engaged and understood what I was trying to teach,

traditional logic would infer this to be a result of some innate personal qualities. How I make

sense of and reconcile the uncertain nature of classroom life could even be characterized as

mysterious. I’m reminded of how a former student teacher reflected on the difficulties she

encountered upon assuming complete autonomy of my class. “I think I struggled because you

made it look too easy,” she confided in me. Of course it never was easy. I was simply unable to

explain how I went about my reasoning. Schon (1983) argues, “We are usually unable to

describe the knowing which our action reveals” (p. 54). This dilemma of invisible knowledge

lies at the heart of The Reflective Practitioner.

According to Schon, there lies a difficulty in trying to describe and teach how people

“make sense of uncertainty…when these processes seem mysterious in the light of the prevailing

model of professional knowledge” (p. 19). The model he is referring to is that of technical

rationality, an epistemology that dates back to the early nineteenth century. Historically, Schon

describes how such thinking derives from positivism and populates many of the applied sciences.

In such “hard sciences” lay a hierarchical relationship between knowledge and application,

whereby something could only be accepted as truth if it rests on empirical evidence (pp. 21, 35).

Here, the world’s disagreements could be explained by reference to observable facts with the

solving of problems resting solely on the application of basic science (p. 32). That technical

rationality became implicit in universities during the twentieth century could be attributed to the

successes of the Manhattan Project and Sputnik as both “created a sense of urgency about the

building of society based on science” (p. 39). However, the strict application of this paradigm to

education is problematic.

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For example, technical rationality would infer that the reason my students immediately

quiet down at the beginning of every lesson is because I simply stand at the front of the class and

smile. While there is truth in such an inference as my cheerful disposition does have somewhat

of a Pavlovian effect on my students, overlooked are the hours spent cultivating relationships

that enabled that behavior to be effective. Surprisingly to my student teacher, this strategy

proved ineffective when she tried it herself. She had to learn the hard away, that there is more to

teaching than simply technique.

The dilemma faced by my student teacher highlights some of the limits to technical

rationality—specifically, how it thrives on predictability, dichotomies, and unambiguous ends. It

pays mind to the problem but often ignores the circumstances surrounding it. My student

teacher’s allegiance to this epistemology created a conflict between theory and practice, one that

she could not reconcile. In like fashion, my advisor’s insistence that I “think more like a

researcher” is likely owed to this loyalty as well given her background in experimental and

cognitive psychology. As, Cochran-Smith & Lytle (1999) describe, when there exists a marriage

between technical rationality and teacher education:

“Teaching is understood as a process of applying received knowledge to a practical

situation: Teachers implement, translate, use, adapt, and/or put into practice what they

have learned of the knowledge base…they have insights and can make judgments…but

are not regarded as knowledge generators or capable of theorizing classroom practice” (p.

257)

This of course runs counter to the phenomenon of practice.

REFLECTION-IN-ACTION

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Schon (1983) describes situations of practice as complex, uncertain, and unique (p. 14).

A teacher understands this all too well. Such characteristics do not fit the model of technical

rationality, for it usually fails to account for peculiarities (p. 39). In addition, because of how

contextual practical situations are, there often lies a conflict between theory and practice.

However, when a practitioner is confronted with this dilemma, they are faced with a choice.

They can fall back on the positivist epistemology that created the dilemma in the first place or

they can envision how this dilemma can be reconciled. When choosing the ladder, practitioners

reflect-in-action.

Schon describes reflection-in-action as “an epistemology of practice implicit in the

artistic, intuitive processes which some practitioners do bring to situations of uncertainty,

instability, uniqueness, and value conflict” (p. 49). Embedded within reflection-in-action is the

idea that practitioners theorize their practice, positioning them as researchers in a practical

context (p. 64). Understandably, reflection-in-action could be viewed as antithetical to technical

rationality, as both rigor and relevance seem mutually exclusive. However, such thinking would

be misguided. It is better viewed as something complementary to technical rationality or as a

paradigm that is actually trying to reconcile the two. Reflective practitioners are not bound by

dualistic portrayals of thinking and doing or subservient to established theories (p. 67). Rather,

they should be viewed as contextual problem framers or artistic theorizers. To reflect-in-action

is to hold scientific knowledge as neither dogmatic nor futile. There is room for grayness.

CONTEXT, IMAGINATION, & VISION

“One of the hallmarks of the professional is the ability to take a convergent knowledge

base and convert it into professional services tailored to the unique requirements of the

system…” (p. 45)

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From what Schon describes here, it would appear that reflection-in-action requires both

imagination and considerable knowledge of the practitioner’s context. This is clearer when

applying this to the work of a teacher. For a classroom teacher to pedagogically transform

content so that students can understand depends very much on the depth of their content

knowledge but more importantly on empathy, a largely imaginative act. By empathy, I mean it

not in its most simplistic form, the act of “getting inside one’s head.” Lee (2005) correctly

defines empathy as entertaining ideas very different from our own (p. 47). For a teacher, this

means imagining how certain knowledge might mesh with the experiences of their students.

Here, a teacher finds commonalities amongst two seemingly dichotomous notions by imagining

its possibility. From this supposed dilemma, the teacher, or practitioner, then “constructs a new

theory of the unique case” and conducts an experiment (Schon, 1983, p. 67). But a willingness

to experiment hinges largely on one’s knowledge of the “unique requirements” Schon speaks of.

I speak of the importance of context here and its relation to vision in teaching.

Hammerness (2006) describes vision as “set of vivid and concrete images of practice” (p.

1). Reaching beyond the purely philosophical, one’s vision of teaching is more personal and

gives meaning to their work (p. 3). Interestingly enough, reflection, as Alexandersson (1994)

and Schon (1983) define it, is an attempt to grasp the essential meaning of something. The

creation of any definitive model of how context, vision, and reflection-in-action interact with one

another is likely to bear little fruit. What encompasses each of them are a set of peculiarities, all

of which when considered together make it nearly impossible to determine what precedes or

follows the other. And yet this lack of any definitive account is strangely conclusive at the same

time. Through a particular lens, vision in teaching and reflecting-in-action, both imaginative

acts, seem synonymous with one another, as both are attempts to reconcile the ambiguities

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created by technical rationality. In the absence of any imagination at all, contextual factors are a

hindrance to reflection, especially when one’s contextual knowledge is limited. However, when

a practitioner combines imagination with extensive contextual knowledge, it gives way to vision.

Thus, vision in teaching, to be conscious of what is possible (Hammerness, 2006, p. 2), hinges on

the imaginative experimentation embedded within reflective practice and vice versa.

Ladson-Billing’s (1994/2009) “dream-keepers” and Grant & Gradwell’s (2010)

“ambitious” teachers are excellent examples of practitioners reflecting-in-action. Both studies

examined teachers that were able to problematize supposedly irreconcilable contradictions. In

the Dream-Keepers (1994/2009), urban school teachers reimagined the “problems” of African-

American students into their promises, successfully teaching students looked upon as incapable

of learning. Likewise, in Teaching History With Big Ideas: Cases of Ambitious Teachers

(2010), a group of New York state history teachers taught history for meaning and understanding

amidst a high-stakes testing climate that encouraged rote memorization. However, that their

contextual knowledge was considerably high played a considerable role in encouraging their

vision and reflection-in-action. In the case of Grant & Gradwell’s (2010) study, this meant

teachers understanding how inquiry-based curriculum could actually lessen student anxiety over

high-stakes tests. In addition, this knowledge extended to understanding how to navigate the

bureaucracies that discouraged them (p. 175). In summation, to reflect-in-action is to take

advantage of context so that new theories can be generated. It means neither relying on nor

discarding established theories but attempting to see how they might merge with practical

situations. In many ways, research on teacher thinking, the systematic documentation of the

cognitive processes teachers undergo amidst these attempts has arisen from the dilemma of

adapting theory to practice. However, while such research stands to position teachers as

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knowledge generators and improve teacher education curriculum, its findings must be treated

with prudence.

RESEARCH ON TEACHER THINKING

Clark (1988) is correct to argue against overly prescriptive use of teacher thinking

research findings. To do so would be a slight to contextual factors and antithetical to the

epistemologies from which teacher thinking research derives. He does however assert that it

bears usefulness for the researcher’s application to their own practice as teacher educators (p. 5).

For example, teacher thinking research can help reverse the apprenticeship of observation

(Lortie, 1975/2002) for novice teachers, not by prescribing how teacher educators should teach

but by raising questions for teacher educators (Clark, 1988, p. 7). Among these questions—how

can field observations be structured to make teacher thinking more visible?

Last spring, as a teaching fellow for an introductory course to the education field, I

encouraged students on their field visits to ask their cooperating teachers questions about some

of their actions or decisions that seem rather obvious. Of note, many of them spoke to me during

lunch about how many of the reasons underlying the actions of their cooperating teachers were

surprising, not because of what the teachers claimed to know but because of the uncertainty they

projected. Clark writes:

“Teachers are subject to the full range of insights and errors in human judgment…just as

all humans are when faced with complex, fast-paced, consequential, and occasionally

emotion-laden social judgments and action situations” (p. 5)

It is possible that this instance served as a reminder to the students of teaching’s emphasis on

making sense of such errors as opposed to knowing all of the answers (p. 10).

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In like fashion, teacher thinking research in planning could be of service to teacher

educators. Understanding teacher planning is akin to understanding how teachers transform and

interpret knowledge for their students (p. 8). In many ways it can come close to capturing the

imagination I alluded to earlier. I was unable to (or unaware that I should) articulate this

imagination and its accompanied uncertainty to my own student teacher a few years ago. As a

result, she greatly underestimated the cognitive demands of teaching, rendering her vision in

teaching somewhat impaired during those tumultuous months. Because my lack of

communication failed to “reflect the intrinsic uncertainty of teaching” she spent the rest of the

year, unable to deal with teaching’s grayness (p. 10). To summarize, the value of research on

teacher thinking lies not in the definitive but initial preparation of teachers and teacher

educators. Like any curriculum, its findings should be used as a means to a much greater end—

in this case, the perpetuation and acceptance of teaching’s inherently problematic nature.

CONCLUSION

In the few years leading up to Schon’s (1983) study, a group of researchers at M.I.T. led

an in-service professional development for teachers (p. 66). When the teachers were asked to

reflect in action and “explore their own intuitive thinking about apparently simple tasks,” the

most important discovery they came upon was the acceptance of confusion (p. 67). They began

to think differently about teaching and learning. Though not intended as professional

development by researchers, “informants” of teacher thinking research have also reported that,

given how action oriented the job is, describing their thinking forces them to stop and think

(Clark, 1988, p. 9). At times, I do envy teachers such as these. Twice this year, I have had

visitors in my classroom. Not once have I been questioned. Not once have I been given any

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feedback. Not once have I been asked to think, positioning me as the “frog,” back in the water

once again.

Perhaps the school I envision practicing in is one in which the staff could be afforded the

opportunity to notice and question when the temperature of the water is beginning to rise. Schon

(1983) fittingly concludes the The Reflective Practitioner with a description of such a place. In

this school, supervisors inquire into teachers’ understandings with the meaning of ‘good

teaching’ a matter of constant institutional concern (p. 335). Naturally, such thinking would

stand to disrupt the predictabililty of a bureacratic organization, endangering “the stable system

of rules and procedures” that keep complete autonomy in the hands of observers (p. 328).

Because of this, it is understandable that many teachers would be reluctant to reflect-in-action.

The tension that accompanies it makes for a difficult, even disobedient task by “pushing against

the theory of knowledge which underlies a school” (p. 334). Even more alarming, to reflect-in-

action is to relinquish one’s claim to truth. It leaves a “mess.”

I however am grateful for this “mess” and the opportunity to manage it. I may not be in a

school that encourages reflective practice but the opportunity to think and write over the past few

years of school has afforded me the time to rework my epistemological stance. I shudder to

think of where my ideologies would lie had I not returned to graduate school or hit ‘pause’ for an

entire year—the things I would merely be gazing upon, overlooking, and disregarding. That

being said, management, like reflection, is ongoing and in no way definitive. Throughout the

rest of my career, the temperature of the water is sure to rise, ever so subtly as it does every year.

It is just with continued hope that I am able to jump out from time to time before the water boils.

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