The Influences of Associate Teachers on Beginning Students · The Influences of Associate Teachers on Beginning Students John Hattie ... weeks into my teachers program,

The Influences of Associate Teachers on Beginning Students

John Hattie Wellington Teachers College

1999

Most student teachers consider their placements into classrooms among the most

memorable experiences of their education. Typically, these experiences are recalled

with nostalgia, and most often are evaluated as the most critical of their training, well

above the experiences “back at university”. Such placement is not only expensive in

terms of dollars (despite the pleas by teachers that it “is not worth taking students”), but

also in terms of the number of days in the total program (often between 25 to 50% of the

time. More important, the cost is in the foregone learning that needs to occur to ensure

the students derive most benefit from these experiences.

There are many different models of mentoring/teacher placements, and the comments in

this paper pertain to most – as they typically involve placing a student with a regular

classroom teacher for a variety of experiences, culminating in the students taking full

control of the class for a sustained period of time.

We seem to assume that professional practice on the job is critical to the development of

our students, and certainly the students wax lyrical about its importance. Almost every

survey of students says that it is the most critical part and the “theory” part is less

relevant. We must ask why students conceive of every thing that is not practice as

“theory” – this points to their naivety, and our failure. It seems that students value work

experience more than learning about their experience of the work.

There are eight reasons why we should re-consider the value and worth of so placing

teachers during their most formative times of becoming a teacher.

Associate Teachers 2

1. Students, typically those straight from high schools themselves, too often experience

the classroom as a student and not as a becoming teacher. They go into classrooms

as students and see the experiences through these eyes. They look at fellow students,

often not much younger than them and empathise. I started in my first class, four

weeks into my teachers program, and certainly had these eyes. My students were 4

years younger than me, and I was posted to a Middle/Intermediate school. As a 17-

year-old the class was very well run so I could attend to the students and learning,

forgetting that the “very well run” was what I should also have been attending to as a

beginning teacher. It is only when students can arrive in the classroom as a

beginning teacher can they consider the experiences within this framework of

teaching. Until then, they conception is one of a student seeing a teacher, not as a

novitiate becoming a teacher.

2. Mary Kennedy (1996) has argued very convincingly argued that our first job is to

remove the conception of teaching in the minds of beginning students. She claimed

that the “unusual nature of teacher learning is such that students entering teacher

education already ‘know’ a great deal about their chosen field. Moreover, they will

use what they already know to interpret any new skills or new theories they acquire

during the formal study of teaching. This fact means that the simple acquisition of

new skills or theories is not adequate to alter teaching practices. Therefore, the

central task of teacher learning must be to change these conceptions” (p. 13). They

need to be persuaded that school subjects consist of more than the facts and rules

they themselves learned as students, that there is much to learned about the

complexities and ambiguities in teaching, and that developing a strong desire to

control student behaviour can be inconsistent with implementing conceptual

approaches to teaching.

Students in teacher education do have conceptions about learning and teaching

(Wubbels, 1992) and such conceptions are resistant to change, and most often used

to select and interpret information. No wonder many student teachers prefer the

classroom teacher who ignores the theory and models and provides snippets of

John Hattie, Faculty of Education, The University of Auckland [email protected]


personal craft techniques and thus does not threaten the simplistic conception of

learning and teaching. Similarly, we may have more chance of imparting deep

learning to become a teacher if we first attend to the pre-conceptions or muddled

and often debilitating conceptions of teaching these students have (typically gained

by building knowledge about teaching from their own student experiences).

Our fundamental job in the first instance is unlearning. We must unlearn naïve

conceptions of teaching, we must unlearn their beliefs about what is good teaching,

we must unlearn their notions of teaching from a student’s perspective, we must

unlearn the goals of teachings from fun and quiet and curricula to learning and

understanding and joy of learning. We must unlearn about the importance of being

on tasks to understanding and mastering meaning. Perhaps we should insulate the

students from teachers and classrooms, who typically assume that our novices have

malleable minds, are empty vessels, and therefore stipulate and are concerned most

about teaching skills and knowledge. Our students are keen to learn more about how

to teach, and too often thereby ignore beliefs, and build on shaky and indefensible

conceptions of teaching. Our task is to unlearn the students and it may be best to do

this miles away from the classroom and from mentors.

3. We are notorious for seeing the good in others and claiming we build on the

foundation of what is there. Nonsense, raid and destroy. Too many students have

the conception of teaching that straight rows, law and order, and quietness are

necessary conditions before teaching begins. Students believe that their fundamental

role in the classroom is to teach. Students believe that delivering the curricula

(whatever that might be in their uninformed minds re curricula) is the norm. These

very linear and quaint notions of teaching will not correspond to the tasks that will

lead to excellent teachers, nor to the world they will encounter in the classroom. We

need to dispel these myths and inculcate beliefs about teaching relating to learning,

to improving understandings, to manipulating ideas and discovery, to the serendipity

of learning on the go, to the conception of learning as personal development.



Consider, for example nine qualitatively different conceptions of learning held by

students (Purdie, Hattie & Douglas, 1996):

• learning as increasing one's knowledge • learning as memorizing, reproducing, and studying • learning as using one's knowledge for a variety of purposes • learning as a duty • learning as understanding • learning as seeing something in a different way • learning as personal fulfilment • learning as a process not bound by time or context • learning as developing social competence

The first six of these categories of conception match fairly closely those that have

been found in other studies with students from Western cultures (e.g., Marton,

Dall'Alba, & Beaty, 1993). From a Western perspective, Conceptions 1 to 4 have

been described as constituting a reproductive or surface conception of learning, and

have been shown usually to result in low-level learning outcomes. The latter are seen

to represent a deep or constructivist view and are commonly associated with learning

outcomes that indicate greater complexity of cognitive processing (Martin &

Ramsden, 1987; Van Rossum & Schenk, 1984).

Similarly there are multiple conceptions of teaching. The claim is NOT that one is

correct, but that having only one can be most limiting. Too often the conception of

teaching is that of surface learning. Why is it 85%+ of questions that teachers ask of

students is surface knowledge. Why is it that no matter what we, as tertiary

educators, claim, our assessments value surface knowledge. Again, surface

knowledge is not a bad thing, but it is only surface. If we want excellent beginning

teachers, we need to move beyond the surface.

Similarly, mentors have conceptions of teaching, learning, curriculum, and

assessment, and unless these are a) made explicit in word or practice by the student

teacher, b) esteemed and desired by the student teacher, and c) consistent with the

conceptions held by the tertiary educators, then the student will be asked to choose a



set of conceptions – and that which is seen as practised and “in action” is more likely

to dominant.

4. The nature of socialisation that our students receive in the classroom can be

negative. Too often students come to us with the view that everything we have to

offer is useless—that the real action is in the classroom, that students are there to be

taught, that staffrooms is where the action really is, that playground duty interrupts

the key learning experiences of the day, that teaching is a battered and bruising event

not appreciated by any other than other teachers. Students thus become inculcated

into the mores of the teachers. They learn about how to minimise effort, how to

relegate some students into categories, and they conceive of teaching as a task to be

over-learnt and smooth. Teaching, however, is non-linear, is disjunctive, is exciting,

involves passionate, is noted by as many lulls as highs in seeing outcomes, and can

be a collaborative affair. They rarely return from teaching practice seeking

knowledge and understanding from us about becoming better teachers preferring

more mentoring by the practising teachers because only in a class do they see action.

Why do they come back believing that learning is so situational specific that only

that learnt in the classroom is worthwhile? Why is it, therefore, that too many go on

to never seek advice, preferring closed classroom doors, not seeking professional

development unless forced preferring the guru with the quick fixes and brief time

involvement, why is it that they socialise so easily into the too often intellectually

dull staff rooms concerned about naughty kids and poor resources rather than the

stimulating environments of how to work together, excite the class and school, and

want to know more more more. Because they are socialised so early to expect so

little.

5. Our students enter routinized classrooms. Most teachers who survive the first few

years at least have routines. Such routines are necessary, but the difference between

these experienced teachers and expert teachers, is that the former do not and the

latter use the extra resources to be constantly vigilant and almost impassioned when

dealing with student learning. The experienced, as opposed to the experts, emphasis



organization and flow rather than student learning. Learning is not an organized,

flowing experience; it is more a staccato of trial and error, a process of

accommodation and assimilation, a refocusing of beliefs and understandings, and

often a grind of learning, re-learning, and over-learning. The expert teacher attends

to student learning by providing challenging tasks appropriate to the student, and

provides much feedback relating to the tasks in a manner that ensures that this

feedback is assimilated by the student. These are the processes that the expert

teacher, with the extra resources, can attend to and which make the difference in

enhancing student learning. This is what the student teacher needs to learn. They,

however, esteem the routines as this is not unimportant as too often the routines are

needed to then move beyond them to the exciting of learning.

But these routines are in place, so the hardest task (at least that considered hardest by

the students) is already in place when they get into the classroom. No wonder

students constantly consider “control” as most critical – probably because they have

seen it in place, heard war stories about how to get control, and have never

participated in learning experiences to gain control. It remains the great unknown –

the ever present, the fundamental condition of learning in their eyes, and the source of

invention, mystery and possessed by the experienced. They see routines, covert them,

and they becomes the fundamentals of learning in their minds. Before they visit a

classroom they need exposure to many methods and types of routines, they need to

consider how such routines are established, and they need to deeply understand that

routines are preconditions for learning and they are not learning sui generis.

6. Students are too often placed with mentor teachers, but when they are released into

the real world they are placed in schools. Schools are not teachers. The school

climate, the collegiality of teaching, the importance of students interacting is beyond

the placement with a teacher. Some programs place the students with the school --

but what typically happens is that a single teacher takes the responsibility for the

student. Hence, the students are quickly socialised into the isolation model of egg

crates – that which happens when the classroom door closes is considered teaching,



the rest is the unnecessary extras. Too rarely do teachers collaborate, and less often

do our students see teachers at work with teachers about teaching. Yes, teaches meet

with teachers about students and curricula and sports and organisation (kids,

kurricula, kicking footballs, and koordinating), but about teaching – hence, our

students are subtly socialised into a lonely Mr Chipps model of teaching – it is you

or no one.

Our students do not experience the top down pressures, except as a negative

influence and impediment to their mentors best teaching models; too often they do

not ever participate in the give and take of these policies but are sometimes tolerated

for their input but seen as novices barely emerging as real people, and too often our

students are temporary renters who have paid too little to have a say in who does

what, when, and to whom.

7. Expert teachers have much automaticity. Not only do experts perform better than

novices, they also seem to do so with less effort (Sweller, 1988; Sternberg &

Frensch, 1992). They achieve this because many types of cognitive skills become

automatic with extensive practice and expertise; these skills are based on routines

and on wider, deeper, and more functional representations such as patterns or

‘chunks’ built up with practice (Chase & Simon, 1973; Chi, Feltovitch,& Glaser,

1981, Leplat, 1985, Cooke, 1992; Shulman, 1992) . They can automate well-learned

routines, can produce think-aloud protocols that are richer and more interpretative,

and because of their more extensive “knowledge or scripts” have more cognitive

resources to devote to other aspects of the classroom. “Automaticity” is the ability to

perform complex skills with minimal effort and attention” (Samuels & Flor, 1997,

p.108)—it is seemingly effortless, permits higher-order processes to take place, and

there exists a reserve of attentional energy available for expenditure on other tasks.

“If an act became no easier after being done several times, if the careful

direction of consciousness were necessary to its accomplishment on each

occasion, it is evident that the whole activity of a lifetime might be



confined to one or two deeds - that no progress could take place in

development” (James, 1892, p. 37).

Muhammand Ali was asked how could he react when he received a major punch,

and he commented about how he went into automatic to protect, attack and defend

although the synapses were not conscious. Pashler (1994), as a consequence of an

extensive review, claimed that such automaticity involves two properties:

proceeding without voluntary control (being obligatory) and not requiring capacity

or processing resources. Posner and Snyder (1975) claimed that automatic behavior

occurs without intention, without interfering with other behaviors or cognitive

processing, and without necessarily giving rise to conscious awareness.

Neves and Anderson (1981) describe three stages of automaticity: (a) the encoding

stage in which knowledge is stored as a set of discrete facts, each of which might

consume a chunk of memory space; (b) the proceduralization, in which the separate

facts are regrouped into larger units; and (c) the composition stage in which the

entire process is accurately represented in memory as a high-quality single unit, and

access to the entire sequence is easy and immediate. Miller and Perlis (1997) called

these representations “defaults”: Experts hold a substantial number of defaults, hold

a substantial number of default denials, each indicating a common mistake to be

avoided, have the ability to deal with exceptions to defaults, and know what they do

not know. Novices defaults tend to be overly specific or overly general.

Schneider and Shiffrin (1977) claimed that any mental operation that has been

practiced consistently becomes automatic. Holding onto a memory load probably

interferes with concurrent tasks not because it uses the central bottleneck but

because it makes it harder to fully prepare for tasks (Pashler, 1994). Pashler,

however, concluded that “there is no reason to believe that either familiar object

recognition in particular or consistently practiced activities in general qualify as

automatic. ... practiced tasks obviously take less time, and this fact by itself is bound



to make it less disruptive to switching between performing the task and engaging in

other activities.”

Sabers, Cushing, & Berliner (1991) suggested that novices simply did not possess

the ability to monitor and interpret the simultaneously-occurring multiple events

that occur in the classroom, probably because of their limited experience. Thus, it

may be that experienced competent teachers do not differ in automaticity from

experts. Hence, automaticity is insufficient by itself; experts develop automaticity

so as to free working memory to deal with other more complex characteristics of the

situation. That is, they use the increased opportunities to seek and give feedback.

Merely arguing that automaticity is sufficient for effective teaching would

encourage a “moss rock” mentality. Moss rocks are those teachers who have built

up automatic schema for reacting to students and their classes are models of

smoothness and routine with little excitement and even less reflection. Students do

learn, but the rate of learning is a smooth low gear with little attention to the

constructions of knowing among students and all students move to a happy median.

More is needed, and thus the model advocates that the opportunities provided by

this successful automaticity needs to be taken with respect to increased feedback to

the teacher and by the teacher to the students.

“According to some researchers (Wickens, 1984, Dreyfus, 1992; Sternberg &

Frensch, 1992) this automaticity comes at a cost because they result in experts

becoming set in their ways or inflexible in their behavior when they have to deal

with unfamiliar situations in their domain” (Cellier, Eyrolle & Marine, 1997, p. 29).

Further, not all tasks become automatic - such as tasks that are constantly changing,

and those that continue to require attention and effort.

Why do we choose mentor teachers – because they are the best, among the excellent

at teaching. Hence, they are often high in automaticity. They too often therefore

assume that what they do is obvious, that what they do is what they say they do, and

they too often ignore the hard road they have undertaken to get where they are.



Unless the mentor is automatic then we have problems in terms of modelling good

practice, but the price we can pay is that these same teachers are poor teachers of

student teachers as the very skill that needs to be learnt is not in the awareness of

the teacher.

8. When we place teachers we often implore them to be “reflective” and when they

return from the classroom we ask them to be “reflective”. Reflection, however is

very difficult. You do not see it by observing another teacher (so what chance do

our students have), it is often post-hoc justification about what we did, and it

assumes non-automaticity. Reflection refers to the “knowing how” as opposed to

the “knowing that”.

Reflection was well supported as far back as Dewey (1933), who claimed that

“reflection limits the impulsive nature of teaching and enables the educator to act

with intent and deliberations”. My colleague Helen Timperley has noted that the

mentors are more effective at eliciting the student teacher’s theories than they were at

articulating their own, which tended to remain at the implicit level. Practical advice

was ever present, and this advice tended to be personal.

We note that with the NBPTS that very best teachers had to be taught to be reflective

– this should not mean that these expert teachers where not so good because they do

not reflect. To the contrary they were probably expert because they do NOT do it.

But rather if we are to understand the process of teaching better it may help to

appreciate the thinking that occurs when teaching.

Such reflection models of becoming a teacher involves even closer watching, copying

and mimicking. But does not this “learn as I do” model assume all is explicit.

Consider Jonah Lomu as an All Black. I am sure he does not get the ball, and then

reflect about what he is going to do, consider the various options available, and then

pursue a line of action. He is highly automatic, highly adaptable, and has over-learnt



and highly refined anticipation skills. And we expect our students to see this, to hear

it, to copy it; and we expect our mentors to articulate it.

When most teachers reflect they enter post-hoc justification. I recall Richard Peters

argue that the concept of motivation has no place in our lexicon because it presumes

that we are wilful in our actions and too often when asked “Why did we do x’ we

enter into a post hoc justification that may or may not have any bearing on why we

did something. Try asking a 9 year why they hit their peer as they went passed their

desk and the best answer surely is the Mallory factor when asked about climbing Mt

Everest – Because he was there. Sure, a clever boy will invent sometimes novel-like

expositions, but reflection?

Recall the learner driver, we want them to NOT reflect but to appropriately do, as

there is no time for reflection when you “do what you do when you do not know what

to do”.

Concluding comments

The aim of this paper is to argue that mentoring is not necessarily desirable, that

teachers never presume that the knowledge and performance and dispositions that we

may want our students to acquire will of necessity by transferred by placing them in

classrooms. This osmosis model of teacher training is bankrupt – but too often is highly

valued by teachers and student teachers. There is so much we should do before students

ever get near a class. We need to unlearn and reteach; there is so much that we must do

with the mentors to ensure they are not destroying or assuming they are teaching by

modelling and reflecting.

Fundamentally the model of mentoring is the greatest gamble in our business. We need

to constantly to ask for evidence that it is effective. What are our standards of

excellence for mentors? Certainly not that they are excellent teachers, wonderful

people, and prepared to do it, but because they have a demonstrable positive and

worthwhile impact on student teachers. We must articulate these standards of impact



and then ask (a) are they the best standards; (b) are the student teachers reaching these

standard, and (c) what evidence would you seek (positive and negative) as to whether

these mentoring experiences are leading your students to these standards. This will

mean that you concentrate more on whether your students are attaining the standards and

not whether the mentors are providing the conditions. This will mean that you will be

more attuned to feedback and remediation for those students who are not attaining the

standards with this teacher mentor. This will mean you will get more prepared student

teachers regardless of the qualities of the mentors.

I am not suggesting you ask the Mentors for the evidence of their qualities. When I

asked some mentors about what evidence would they use to adjudge the quality of their

mentoring they included: they copied what we were doing, they would come back, they

would be responsive to my suggestions, they would listen to my advice, they would

prepare and present well. Not one snippet about impact on students, not one snippet

about their gaining automaticity, not one snippet about improving the students feedback

skills, not one snippet about students’ reflection, not one snippet about trial and error

and learning error detection and remedies. No, compliance, copying and congratulations

were desired.

Aim for the impact on student teachers – and then ask whether mentors are helping or, as

they often do, hinder the students learning. Do not assume that associate teachers or

mentoring is desirable. They are merely an ends to a means – educating student teachers to

have positive influences (cognitive, relationship, moral etc.) on their students when they

graduate. Mentoring is no Holy Grail.

Negative Evidence

1. Students enter classrooms as students and see the experiences through student eyes.

2. Students have conceptions about learning and teaching that are resistant to change,

impede learning, and classroom experience often reinforce these conceptions.

3. Associates are notorious for seeing the good in others and claim to build on the

foundation of what is there.



4. The nature of socialisation that students receive in the classroom is too often

negative.

5. Students enter routinized classrooms and thus are less likely to learn routines,

believe routines are the basis of good teaching, and believe that learning is

routinized.

6. Students are too often placed with mentor teachers, and are less exposed to the

experience of schools.

7. Associates are often automatic and thus cannot see the developing proficiencies in

student teachers.

8. Reflection can interfere with developing automaticity and works against developing

problem solving, and dealing with personal concerns.


References

Cellier, J.M., Eyrolle, H., & Mariné, C. (1997). Expertise in dynamic systems.

Ergonomics, 40, 28–50.

Chase, W.G., & Simon, H.A. (1973). The mind's eye in chess. In W.G. Chase (Ed.),

Visual information processing. New York: Academic Press

Chi, M.T.H., Feltovich, P.J., & Glaser, R. (1981). Categorization and representation of

physics problems by experts and novices. Cognitive Science, 5, 121-152.

Cooke, N. J. (1992). Modeling human expertise in expert systems. In R. Hoffman (Ed.)

The psychology of expertise, cognitive research and empirical AI (pp. 29-60). New

York: Springer Verlag.

Dewey, J. (1933). How we think (rev. ed.). Boston: D.C. Heath.

James, W. (1892). Psychology: Briefer course. London: Macmillan and Company.

Kennedy, M.M. (1996). Research genres in teacher education. In F. Murray (Ed.), The

teacher educator’s handbook: Building a knowledge base for the preparation of

teachers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Leplat, J. (1985). Les represéntations fonctionnelles dans le travail, Psychologie

Française, 30(3/4), 269-275.

Martin, E., & Ramsden, P. (1987). Learning skills, or skill in learning? In J.T.E.

Richardson, M.W. Eysenck, & D.W. Piper (Eds.), Student learning (pp. 155-167).

Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press.

Marton, F., Dall'Alba, G., & Beatty, E. (1993). Conceptions of learning. International

Journal of Educational Research, 19, 277-300.

Miller, M. & Perlis. D. (1997). Toward automated expert reasoning and expert-novice

communication. In K. Ford, P. Feltovitch, & R. Hoffman (Eds.), Expertise in

context: Human and machine. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Neves, D.M., & Anderson, J.R. (1981). Knowledge compilation: Mechanisms for the

automatization of cognitive skills. In J.R. Anderson, (Ed.), Cognitive skills and

their acquisition (pp. 57-84). New Jersey: Erlbaum.

Pashler, H. (1994). Graded capacity sharing in dual-task interference? Journal of

Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 20, 330-342


Posner, M.I. & Snyder, C.R.R. (1975). Facilitation and inhibition in the processing of

signals. In P.M. Rabbitt & S. Dornic (Eds.), Attention and performance (Vol. 5, pp

669-682). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Purdie, N., Hattie, J. & Douglas, G. (1996) Student conceptions of learning and their use

of self-regulated learning strategies: a cross cultural comparison. Journal of

Educational Psychology, 88(1), 87-100.

Sabers, D.S., Cushing, K.S., & Berliner, D.C. (1991). Differences among teachers in a

task characterised by simultaneity, multidimensionality, and immediacy. American

Educational Research Journal, 28(1), 63-88.

Samuels, S.J., & Flor, R.F. (1997). The importance of automaticity for developing

expertise in reading. Reading and Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning

Difficulties, 13, 107–121.

Schneider, W. & Shiffrin, R.M. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information

processing I.: Detection, search, and attention. Psychological Review, 84, 1–66.

Shulman, J. (Ed.) (1992). Case methods in teacher education. New York: Teachers

College Press.

Sternberg, R.J., & Frensch, P.A. (1992). On being an expert: A cost-benefit analysis. In

R.R. Hoffman (Ed.), The psychology of expertise (pp.191-203). New York:

Springer.

Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive

Science, 12, 257–285.

Van Rossum, E.J. and Schenk, S.M. (1984). The relationship between learning

conception, study strategy and learning outcome. British Journal of Educational

Psychology, 54, 73–83.

Wubbels, T. (1992) Taking account of student teachers’ preconceptions. Teaching and

Teacher Education, 8(2), 137-149.


Documents

The Influences of Associate Teachers on Beginning Students · The Influences of Associate Teachers on Beginning Students John Hattie ... weeks into my teachers program,