THREE VOICES: THREE METHODS:
Teachers’ voices Questionnaire My practitioner voice Auto-ethnography
Voices from the literature Multi-disciplinary literature search
Questionnaire
Role of the questionnaire in the investigation
I began by constructing my Questionnaire to reflect the span of the investigation so far: it needed to marry with the history of philosophical ideas, and to include inputs from experts in the educational field; it needed to integrate with my focus on concrete and experiential learning; it needed to access the voices of teachers at the coalface. The Questionnaire (Appendix A) was delivered to teachers at one outer suburban multi-faith Melbourne College, and then forwarded to teachers in the three countries: Australia, United Kingdom and New Zealand.
The questions, or items, addressed by the Questionnaire focussed on drawing out data concerning teachers’ perceptions, considered opinions and their practices, their teaching of thinking skills and their evaluation of what they believed to be success or failure. To avoid any legal issues regarding information the teachers may divulge I prepared and distributed legally- binding confidentiality agreements for their signing and undertook the same myself. Permission was sought from the individual schools or colleges where the participants taught, so that the individual teachers and their schools were confident that no mistakes had been made.
A legal document to this end was prepared, applied and strictly maintained over the course of the process. Documentation remained within the schools in all three countries.
By posing judicious questions related to what teachers do, this research surveys curriculum experts and classroom teachers and asks them to inquire about such a relational link. In attempting to understand secondary teachers’ practice, my research surveys secondary teachers themselves so as to reveal their perceptions, opinions and attitudes about their curriculum decision- making and approaches to the teaching of thinking. These perceptions, opinions and attitudes are critical to an understanding of how curriculum decisions are made; they are critical also to the foundations of any theory that strives towards this architecture for teaching about a virtues, values and ethics curriculum.
It was necessary to choose a group of participants who would provide experiential data, based on my Questionnaire. As personal experience had alerted me to certain apparent parallels between the United Kingdom (UK), New Zealand (NZ) and Australian approaches to education, I decided that participants from three countries would constitute one layer of data. Colleagues from a particular school asked to complete the Questionnaire, thus providing the second layer of data, because their experience in that particular community was deemed to hold the potential to show whether identifiable differences between themselves and their UK and NZ colleagues would emerge from their responses. Three acknowledged experts in the teaching of thinking skills, one from each country, the UK, NZ and Australia, were requested to comment on the different sections of the Questionnaire in order to provide a theoretical perspective as a third layer of data. Such triangulation was expected to reveal parallels and contrasts in current practice and current attitudes to the teaching of thinking skills across country and teacher experience (Flick, 2002). These responses are analysed and contrasted in Chapter 4.
No ethical risks were apparent at this stage, but a constant watch was kept in order to monitor any unexpected concerns of an ethical nature that may have arisen. Initial documentation was considered to have sufficient preparatory text addressing the likely concerns of the participants so as to allay any misgivings they may have had before the project was under way. The relevant proper administrative and ethical channels at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia, would be the first point of consultation; and of action, if needed.
As the central goal at this point in the process was to identify how teachers do know that they are teaching thinking skills, it was expected that the consultation process via the Questionnaire alone would be quite comfortable for participants.
The Questionnaire was designed by me alone to draw data with an emphasis on co-operation and consultation through data collection, and to direct attention to teachers’ responses in qualitative research. The Questionnaire was broad, open-ended, and with transitional, directed, key and evaluative questions all posed with careful intent. The questions also aimed to address the needs of teachers who were charged with teaching Religion and Society units, through Ethics, Philosophy, and Texts & Traditions, within the Victorian Certificate of Education, to a multi-ethnic, multi-faith and multi-philosophical student cohort.
The thinking behind the development of a Questionnaire
The Questionnaire asked participating teachers for descriptions and comments related to the following questions:
• What does the term thinking skills mean in your classroom
context?
• What teaching content seems to evoke strong thinking skills in students’ responses?
• How does the teacher ensure that student response will not focus on the mere parroting of content?
• How and when is it possible in a specific subject area to enhance regular applied thinking so that higher order comprehension and sophisticated content can be addressed?
• How often is the terminology of thinking skills (e.g., hypothesis, assumption, clarification, false logic, tautology etc.) used by teachers and students in classroom discussions?
• In what ways are discussions promoted regularly and can students be taught to construct relevant questions?
• What proportion of discussions based on thinking skills, is matched only, or most often, to the tasks to be assessed? Is this significant in some way?
• How are the various particular thinking skills taught? As needed? Sequentially? Thematically? Any other way? Is the Philosophy for Children inquiry format familiar and used?
• Is the ‘jigsaw pattern’ of inquiry used with any regularity?
• What assignments are used to promote this style of inquiry? How many and what kind of assignments are used to actively promote the variety of thinking skills? Are there certain forms of thinking skills which are particularly helpful in a specific subject area? Following very early informal discussions and consultations with teachers within schools where I was employed, and the application of my own understanding and experience of the field (using my ‘intuitive hunches’ – which I now recognise as an early application of inductive data reduction), I clustered these questions, or items as I term them, into eight sections, as follows:
1. Obtaining an accurate profile of the respondents (Items 1-7). 2. Focusing on respondents’ professional knowledge and practice
(Items 8-11).
3. Understanding the respondents’ classroom strategies and
4. Determining the processes used to teach specific tasks, and the student responses to them (Items 16-23).
5. Determining the respondents’ knowledge of significant
frameworks (Items 24-30).
6. Determining the respondents’ processes for the teaching of thinking skills (Items 31-54).
7. Identifying where the teaching of thinking skills fits in the daily teaching-learning process (Items 55-62).
My expectation – based on my practical and theoretical knowledge – was that the responses to these questions would lead to the emergence of a set of higher-order questions, such as:
• Is it possible to further broaden the range of thinking skills listed in Sharp & Splitter (1995) within a given subject area?
• How do teachers evaluate the success and efficiency of efforts to enhance the use of thinking skills in student work?
• Is evidence of enhanced thinking skills used by students better identified and assessed by oral, written or project-based assignments?
• How does a beginning teacher establish the classroom climate most likely to produce student accessibility to thinking skills?
• Is it better to use thinking skills to enhance understanding of subject content, or to use subject content to enhance the efficient acquisition of thinking skills?
• Are there recommendations possible to provide for continuing teachers in each subject area?
The development of the Questionnaire
The study involved the collection of directed and open-ended written comment via a number of questions that I constructed after the theoretical framework had become more developed. At this early stage, the thesis
question and the subsidiary questions became the basis for the whole inquiry and, as a consequence, the Questionnaire.
Following Wilson’s insistence that the Philosophy, Sociology and Psychology of Education, are all central to the provision of moral education, I carefully designed questions to address elements of each of these fields.
The Questionnaire was based on elements of pedagogical practice, and on the role and function of person-particular procedures that bring success, pertinent either to a given subject or discipline, or to an underlying philosophy and psychology of education. Ontological questions about the big ideas, fundamental precepts and understandings that underpin the teaching of thinking skills were embedded in each section. Epistemological questions about the level of knowledge and skills necessarily applied to the teaching of the variety of thinking skills for decision-making processes, were focussed in Sections D, E, and F. Effective strategies and techniques (techné) regarding the asking of questions, the use of formats like Philosophy for Children with its Community of Inquiry were framed to discover how teachers go about the teaching-learning process.
Administering the questionnaire
I deemed it important at this stage to construct the process under which exact and valid information could be requested:
• Arranging for the Director of Studies at the chosen P-12 College to invite willing participants (from a possible total of 70 secondary teachers) to be involved; to collect any completed Questionnaires that were to be handed to me at a later date. There were 19 respondents from the school.
• Organising for possible respondents in the UK, NZ and other Victorian secondary schools, through third persons; obtaining, completing and returning the Questionnaires. There were 11 respondents from these sources.
• Adapting to a major blow that surfaced when the targeted experts, who were members of the boards of relevant professional journals specialising in Moral Education (Wilson), Philosophy for Children (Lipman) and Religious and Values Education (Vardy), were unfortunately unavailable to address my Questionnaire. Finally, arrangements were made for three practitioner-experts in applied thinking skills to generously act as substitutes. These three people chose to comment, in general terms, on each section of the Questionnaire, rather than on every item.
In total, 33 respondents participated and it took three months to finalise the return of the completed Questionnaires. Despite this being a frustrating process, I considered this to be a random sample: there was no influence, on my part, to impact on the process of obtaining responses.
The findings of the Questionnaire are reported in detail in Chapter 4.
Auto-ethnography
I realised that in addition to collecting evidence from other teachers, I could also analyse my own experiences, my own expertise and my own knowledge, in parallel with the Questionnaire. I saw that by documenting the variety of teaching instruments that I had myself developed, and by explaining the underpinning concepts, that I could inform some of the investigation’s conclusions. But harnessing my knowledge was possible only after my compilation of the completed findings from the Questionnaire. It was important that I address the teachers’ voices before and not after I marshalled my own responses to the Questionnaire, because subconscious influences informed by my own thinking could have prejudiced my understanding of individual teachers’ voices.
The work of Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly (1994, pp. 413- 427) and their concept of Narrative Inquiry, shaped my reflections on the framework I was to employ for the blending of my classroom experience in 12 schools over 36 years, with the extensive use, for professional
development purposes, of seminars, conferences, tertiary level qualifications and extensive reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action (Schon, 1983, 1987), cited in (Heasly, 1995). I used these sources to develop a cohesive professional perspective. Without access to such internal and external applied thinking skills and relevant considerations, this thesis would not have been possible.
A further development for me arose as a result of my realising that it was no longer the responses to the Questionnaires or the identifying themes from the literature that provided a satisfactory basis for understanding any conceptual links between virtues, values and ethics; there was a need for a further extension of sources. In particular, I realised that these links were both embedded in, and emergent from, the means by which I had gained my personal perspective with respect to these ideas.
I decided to embark on a reflective process that resulted in an auto- ethnography of my lifetime in this field, an integration of: the professional experiential learnings over 36 years, workplace learnings, and emergent new learnings obtained through the pursuit of a range of post-graduate qualifications; the teaching skills that underpin the teaching about virtues, values and ethics – a ‘bricolage’ (Ling, 2012 in press) of my professional life. I had realised there was a need to construct an ‘architecture’ for the teaching about virtues, values and ethics, to explain these diverse theoretical and practical inputs of contemporary education, and this meant that my auto- ethnographical account (Chapter 5) would become an essential part of this new construction.
I used the work of Wolff-Michael Roth (2005b) to develop a sufficiently inclusive exposition of the depth and potential of the auto-ethnographical retrospective to allow me to construct this investigation with confidence. I could then appreciate the cyclical nature of my experiential learning and integrate that with my formal studies. Roth (2005a) provides an array of authors versed in auto-biography and auto-ethnography as praxis of research
Roth also provides an introduction to the use of auto-biography and auto- ethnography as tools for learning about learning; Chaim (as cited in Roth, 2005a) highlights the writing of a research journey; Joe Kincheloe’s (2005) work, which instructs the reader in how to become a reflective person, encouraged me to critique my learning accurately. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are the direct outcome.
I recognised the crucial importance of accuracy when listening to my own ‘voice’, and of recognising that the presence of ideological content could invade both my own self-critique and the voices of the teachers and educationalists I had marshalled. Accuracy, therefore, must be accompanied by transparency in my development of this study.
Clandinin & Connelly (1994) carefully describe the essence of personal experience methods, drawing on the work of Dewey (1944) and especially emphasis on the primacy of experience to research. For the purposes of this investigation, it was crucial for me to remember their emphasis on the significant inwards/outwards and the backwards/forward elements, examining the autobiographical details designed to elucidate parts of the considerations behind the genesis and prosecution of this thesis. Ethical considerations have been addressed; voice and signature is central to the development of my methods here (Clandinin & Connelly, 1994).
Literature review
Having situated both the initial thesis question, and the subsequent questions, for analysis within the Questionnaire, and having established the various methods for valid qualitative research that I would employ, I surveyed a wide range of voices from the literature of various inter-disciplinary authorities. These are attached to a schema that shapes the Literature Review in Chapter 3. These authors are separated into two categories: the first comprises those whose works clarify and define much about the themes and sub-themes which emerge from of my research data; the second details those authors whose works support and clarify many of the surrounding and inter-related
concepts that contribute to the questions and considerations which emerge from the data in the form of trilectic logic.