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‘Learning Study’ as a model ofcollaborative practice in initial teachereducationPeter Davies a & Richard Dunnill aa IEPR , Staffordshire University , Stoke‐on‐Trent, UKPublished online: 18 Feb 2008.
To cite this article: Peter Davies & Richard Dunnill (2008) ‘Learning Study’ as a model ofcollaborative practice in initial teacher education, Journal of Education for Teaching: Internationalresearch and pedagogy, 34:1, 3-16
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‘Learning Study’ as a model of collaborative practice in initial teachereducation
Peter Davies* and Richard Dunnill
IEPR, Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent, UK
Learning Study provides a distinctive model for collaborative practice in teacherdevelopment. It combines the intensive ‘plan–teach–review’ model developed bythe Japanese ‘Lesson Study’ model with a focus on the outcomes of learning usingvariation theory. We present an argument for expecting this approach to helptrainees in initial teacher education to progress to more sophisticated conceptionsof teaching. We also present findings from the implementation of Learning Studyin the initial teacher education programme at one UK university over a period oftwo years. We conclude that it is practicable and beneficial to use Learning Studyin this context and that the representational device of a ‘Learning OutcomeCircle’ helps trainees to understand the implications of variation theory andopens up their vision of teaching.
Introduction
The development of trainees in initial teacher education has been characterised
(Wood 2000) in terms of shifting from more simple to more complex conceptions of
teaching. However, like most kinds of substantial conceptual change, this shift is
troublesome to accomplish (Kagan 1992; Valli 1992). This paper examines whether
the practice of ‘Learning Study’ (Pang and Marton 2003, 2005) offers a valuable
response to this problem. Learning Study combines a model of collaborative ‘plan–
teach–review’ teacher development with a focus on the structure of learning
outcomes. Following the Japanese model of ‘lesson study’, teachers work intensively
together in lesson preparation, teaching and reflection. In Learning Study, lesson
preparation is preceded by an attempt to identify variation in ways of understanding
a phenomenon that is the focus of the lesson. This phenomenographic activity
frames the learning objectives for the lesson and also features prominently in
teachers’ review of the lesson. As such, it might be interpreted as a particular
approach to creating ‘high goal clarity’ (Seidel, Rimmele and Prenzel 2005) for
teachers and students.
In the first section we explain the nature of Learning Study and offer an
argument for expecting this practice to be helpful in the context of initial teacher
education. We then describe how Learning Study was incorporated in a
postgraduate initial teacher development programme in one university. This
second section also describes how data were gathered during two years of
implementation of Learning Study. In section three we present some findings
drawing upon interview data and field notes. Our final section offers some
conclusions.
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Journal of Education for Teaching
Vol. 34, No. 1, February 2008, 3–16
ISSN 0260-7476 print/ISSN 1360-0540 online
# 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/02607470701773408
http://www.informaworld.com
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What is ‘Learning Study?’
The application of Learning Study we describe incorporated three elements:
collaboration between trainees that focused on planning, teaching and reviewing a
small number of lessons; focusing the planning and reviewing of lessons on learning
outcomes described in terms of variation theory; and using the collaborative review
process to help trainees to progress towards a more complex understanding of
learning and teaching. It is the combination of these three features that makes the
approach distinctive.
Collaboration focused on planning, teaching and reviewing lessons
The value of lesson-focused collaboration for professional development of teachers
has been widely advocated.
Collaboration – a process considered central to successful professional developmentprograms – ensures that what is discovered will be communicable because it isdiscovered in the context of group discussion. Collaboration, then, becomes essential forthe development of professional knowledge, not because collaborations provideteachers with social support groups but because collaborations force their participantsto make their knowledge public and understood by colleagues. (Hiebert, Gallimore andStigler 2002, 7)
When this approach to teachers’ professional development has been adopted, the
outcomes for students’ attainment have tended to be positive (Little 2002; Borko2004). Sim (2006) reports on nine years of implementing a collaborative practice
model within initial teacher education. She reports that the model has been
successful ‘to a point’ although limited progress has been made in building trainees’
critical analysis and the extent to which they value the relationship between theory
and classroom practice. The development of these capabilities is central to ‘lesson
study’.
The Japanese model of ‘lesson study’ provides a carefully structured articulation
of collaborative professional development, which has recently gained some strong
adherents in the United States (for example, Hiebert, Gallimore and Stigler 2002;
Fernandez, Cannon and Chokshi 2003).
Small groups of teachers meet regularly, once a week for several hours, tocollaboratively plan, implement, evaluate and revise lessons … They begin the processof improving the targeted lessons by setting clear learning goals and then reading aboutwhat other teachers have done, what ideas are recommended by researchers andreformers, and what has been reported on students’ learning of this topic. (Hiebert,Gallimore and Stigler 2002, 9)
There are several important features of this style of collaboration. First, a group of
teachers spends many hours planning and reviewing a single lesson. The activity is
intensive. Second, the intention of this activity is to help teachers to revise their
professional knowledge, their theories of learning and teaching, in the light of their
experience of practice. Third, in order to achieve this, the teachers give great
attention to evidence from the classroom. For example, a report of a lesson study
collaboration between US and Japanese teachers:
observed the Japanese teachers continually encouraging the American teachers to seethemselves as researchers conducting an empirical examination, organized aroundasking questions about practice and designing classroom experiments to explore thesequestions. (Fernandez, Cannon and Chokshi 2003, 173)
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Lewis, Parry and Murata (2006) acknowledge two main weaknesses in the case for
‘Lesson Study’: a relatively small body of research describing how the process
operates in western settings, and an insufficient body of evidence that might be used
to explicate the mechanism(s) by which ‘Lesson Study’ achieves the effects reported
by participants. In short, there is a paucity of substantiated theory. In their defence
of Lesson Study, Lewis, Parry and Murata argue that the conclusions drawn by a
group of ‘Lesson Study’ teachers should be regarded as ‘local theory’: what works
for them with these students. For Pang and Marton (2003, 2005) this warrant is
insufficient. They criticise ‘Lesson Study’ for its lack of attention to a theory of
learning. In particular, they eschew the absence of a theory that accounts for
variation in the conceptions of different students before and after an episode of
learning.
Focusing on learning through learning outcomes
Lessons that are directed by intended learning outcomes are more likely to raise
student attainment (Seidel, Rimmele and Prenzel 2005), especially when these
intentions are understood and internalised by learners (Bereiter and Scardamalia
1989; Black and Wiliam 1998). It follows that initial teacher education programmes
can promote trainees’ development by helping them to focus on students’ learning
outcomes. However, each theory of learning generates a different way of defining
learning outcomes, and this carries implications for the type of support that is
appropriate to provide. For example, Stones (1992) suggests a 12-step heuristic for
teaching concepts, while Kinchin and Alias (2005) describe a strategy based on
concept mapping. These two examples provide useful reference points through which
to highlight the salient features of ‘Learning Study’.
Each of these approaches to lesson planning emphasises the importance of
recognizing the gap between students’ initial ideas and the ideas that the teacher
hopes they will develop during the lesson. However, while Stones (1992) refers to
students’ understanding of concepts, ‘Learning Study’ – using the language of
phenomenography – refers to students’ conceptions of phenomena. This distinction
is significant in two ways.
First, the language of ‘understanding a concept’ provides the teacher with two
categories with which to label students’ thinking: understanding and not under-
standing. Phenomenography offers a different language: there are different possible
conceptions of any particular phenomenon. In the language of ‘understanding a
concept’ we might speak of a student ‘understanding the concept of price’ that
previously they had not understood. In the language of phenomenography we might
speak of a student replacing a more simple conception of price with a more complex
conception of price. Second, different conceptions of a phenomenon such as price
are, according to phenomenography, reflections of different ways in which the
phenomenon is experienced. That is, complexity of conception does not vary across
phenomena in a uniform way as suggested by Piagetian and neo-Piagetian (for
example, Biggs and Collis 1991) theories of learning. Therefore, from a
phenomenographic perspective, variation in conceptions should be identified
through detailed analysis of data gathered through phenomenographic interviews.
In these interviews, students are asked to explain a phenomenon that is rooted in
their experience. The interviewer must be careful to avoid prompting lines of
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explanation, but must also be persistent in encouraging the student to expose the full
depth of their thinking. Extensive qualitative analysis is then used to identify
qualitatively distinct ways of experiencing a phenomenon that can be detected in the
range of interview data that have been gathered. The demands of this research tool
limit its practicability as a routine part of teachers’ practice. We return to this point
in our discussion of data collected in this study.
We now pursue the significance of these distinctions through a specific example
taken from Kinchin and Alias (2005) and reproduced in Figure 1.
Figure 1 presents a ‘concept map’ in which the subsidiary features (cement,
water, etc.) are connected to the concept ‘concrete’. If students are asked to draw
concept maps of ‘concrete’, variations in their thinking will be suggested by the links
they include and the ways in which they categorise these links. In the terminology
used by Stones (1992) we might identify which of the features included in Figure 1
are ‘criterial attributes’; that is, essential to the ‘proper’ concept of concrete.
However, Kinchin and Alias (2005) are less interested in acquisition of a ‘proper’
concept of concrete. For them, concept mapping is a way of expressing and
developing ever more complex, and thereby useful, ways of understanding of
concrete. As more links and categories are added, ‘concrete’ becomes more
interconnected within an individual’s understanding.
The conception of understanding that underpins Learning Study has some
characteristics of each of these approaches. But it combines these characteristics in a
way that gives rise to a distinctive prescription for teaching. We refer to the
‘Learning Outcome Circle’ diagram in Figure 2 to illustrate these points. First, as
with Stones, it is accepted that a conception highlights certain ‘criterial attributes’ of
a phenomenon. For example, one conception of concrete might be that it combines
the features water, cement and aggregate as shown by the continuous bold edges of
three boxes in Figure 2. However, this conception of concrete would not allow for
any appreciation of variation within the characteristics of concrete. Another
conception of concrete might posit a relationship between the strength of concrete
Figure 1. A net-type concept map for a topic on ‘concrete’. Note: Reproduced from Kinchin
and Alias (2005, 580, Figure 5).
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and the relative proportions of water, cement and aggregate, as indicated by the bold
dashed lines. That is, instead of ‘criterial attributes’ referring to the concept of
concrete, they may refer to the features of any particular conception of concrete. In
concept mapping there may be a huge number of different conceptions. Each time a
link is added or subtracted a new conception is suggested. However, a basic tenet of
phenomenography is that there will only be a small number of qualitatively distinct
conceptions of any one phenomenon.
These differences in the way that students’ understanding is conceived lead to
different prescriptions for teaching. Stones’ (1992, 110–111) 12-step heuristic
concentrates on using exemplars and non-exemplars of criterial attributes and
concepts. Kinchin and Alias (2005) argue that there will be benefits from concept
mapping in terms of more precise learning objectives and a better match between
learning objectives and the sequence of activity for students. In Learning Study it is
expected that the target conception for some students will be more complex than the
target conception for others, given the different starting points in students’ thinking.
Teachers are expected to identify the features (or ‘criterial attributes’ in Stones’
terminology) of the conceptions they wish learners to learn and to provide students
with an experience in which all of the features of the target conception are varied
simultaneously.
There are two points to note here that contrast with Stones’ approach. First,
features (criterial attributes) are highlighted in this approach through variation. That
is, if the objective is to draw students’ attention to water as a feature in concrete, then
they should be exposed to examples where everything remains the same except for
water. This principle, known as variation theory, is attributable to Dienes (1959).
The point is not simply to stress the existence of the feature, but to highlight its
relevance through variation. Second, if each feature is varied in turn, then learners
will experience confusion. Each time they experience a variation in just one feature
they are prompted to think of the phenomenon just in relation to that feature – hence
the requirement in variation theory for simultaneous variation in the features that
are critical to the target conception.
Figure 2. A ‘Learning Outcome Circle’ for concrete based on variation theory.
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Learning Study (as exemplified in Pang and Marton 2003, 2005; Davies and
Dunnill 2006) combines a focus on learning outcomes with a collaborative ‘plan–
teach–review’ method of lesson study. This combination also serves to distinguish it
from the approaches described by Stones (1992) and by Kinchin and Alias (2005)
where collaboration is referred to as a desirable option rather than as an essential
part of the process.
Stages in developing as a teacher
Phenomenographers have also identified qualitative differences in teachers’
conceptions of teaching. While a majority of these studies have been conducted in
the context of higher education (for example, Prosser and Trigwell 1999), the
findings of these studies are broadly consistent with those that have been undertaken
with school teachers. Wood’s (2000) study of the conceptions of teaching held by
trainee teachers is particularly relevant for our purposes. Wood identifies (2000, 83–
84) three qualitatively distinct ways of thinking about teaching:
N Focusing on the agent of teaching: ‘teaching as imparting knowledge’.
N Focusing on the act of teaching: ‘preparing pupils to use knowledge’.
N Focusing on the object of teaching: ‘preparing students to understand and be
aware of their own thinking and learning’.
One of the most consistent findings in studies of conceptual change is the resilience
of preconceptions. Teachers and trainee teachers do not easily change their
conception of teaching, and this is confirmed in Wood’s study. So does participation
in ‘Learning Study’ make it more likely that trainee teachers would change their
conception of teaching? The rationale for expecting this outcome is that the learning
study process explicitly asks participants to plan to achieve conceptual change, and
the collaborative process should encourage them to articulate and hopefully
internalise a theory of what they are doing and why they are doing it.
Method
We developed an approach to incorporating ‘Learning Study’ as an integral element
within a programme for initial teacher education. This development took place
during 2004/05 and 2005/06 involving trainees preparing to teach business and
economics and Design and Technology in secondary schools. There were 33 trainees
in the first year’s cohort and 36 trainees in the second.
We included three ‘cycles’ of learning study in the first year and two ‘cycles’ in
the second year. Each cycle comprised five steps:
N choosing the object of learning;
N investigating ways in which the object of learning (or phenomenon) might be
understood;
N collaborative planning and teaching of a lesson. In our case each collaborative
group would consist of a small tutorial group of trainees, the higher education
institute tutor and a school mentor;
N evaluation of the lesson focusing on how differences between students’
understanding are related to observations of the teaching; and
N documentation of the process and outcomes of the research.
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Each cycle was spread over one calendar month. One university session was devoted
to clarifying the lesson focus and designing strategies for gathering data on
conceptions, two sessions were devoted to lesson planning and one to reviewing the
lesson. In total, four university tutors and 12 school mentors took part each year
involving 17 schools and colleges from the university’s initial teacher education
partnership over the two years. In the first year of implementation, the university
sessions were incorporated in the tutorial programme. In the second year, learning
study was embedded in the professional issues programme. In this format the
separate group work was preceded by and punctuated by time spent as a larger
group considering the intentions and processes of the learning study approach. Also,
the idea of expressing variation theory through ‘Learning Outcome Circles’
(Figure 2) was only developed during the second year of the initiative. This increased
the clarity with which tutors and trainees were able to discuss its implications. Some,
but not all, of the mentors were able to join in university sessions preparing and
reviewing teaching. However, the major opportunities for mentors’ involvement
came in supporting trainees’ preparation for the Learning Study as part of their
regular in-school support and through joining in the observation and review of
lessons.
One of the key issues to be examined in this implementation of Learning Study is
the feasibility of gathering data that would expose qualitative differences in students’
conceptions of the phenomena. Trainee teachers could not be expected to gather
such data using phenomenographic methods: training to use phenomenographic
method was impracticable and, in any case, the time it would have taken to fully
implement phenomenographic analysis of the data was simply not available.
Moreover, this could not have become a routine feature of the trainees’ professional
experience given their workload during training and beyond. We therefore
encouraged trainees to develop alternative approaches to gathering initial data on
students’ conceptions, largely through one-to-one conversations and short ques-
tionnaires.
Data were collected from trainee teachers through their written accounts of each
learning study episode, through a piece of reflective writing that was required half-
way through their training year and through in-depth interviews conducted at the
end of the training year. Evidence was collected from mentors through a pro forma
written evaluation.
Findings
Collaboration
The response of the majority of the trainees to the collaborative element of the
Learning Study was very positive. They welcomed the opportunities to learn from
each other. However, there are several strands to the collaboration in the lesson
study/Learning Study format and it is pertinent to ask whether one of these strands is
more important than the others. That is, trainees collaborate through sharing their
articulation of their learning objectives and their lesson planning, they share through
observing each other teach and they share their interpretation of what has happened
in the lesson. The Lesson Study format emphasises the importance of collaboration
in reviewing lessons, stressing the potential for learning through being required to
justify interpretations of events and outcomes of the lesson.
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A number of trainees found the dynamics of negotiating shared preparation very
challenging. When asked what he recalled most strongly about his experience of
Learning Study, one trainee replied:
The fact that we had plenty of time to prepare, I think that we had six or seven people inthe group and it made life a little bit difficult. You might have an idea and say right thisis what we are going to do but when you have six or seven different inputs the lessonscame very, very, thick with loads of resources and loads of ideas
One of the interesting facets about this comment was that none of the groups
contained more than four trainees, but for this trainee the difficulty of the
negotiation had left an impression that the groups were much bigger. There were
indications that one source of difficulty in collaboration was the variation in the way
that trainees were thinking about teaching. Those trainees who were still thinking of
teaching in terms of transmission (Wood’s ‘agent of teaching’ category) seemed to
find the experience particularly troublesome. The task of reconciling their belief that
teaching required them to impart knowledge made it more difficult for them to
engage constructively in collaborative planning with colleagues. However, it may be
that the troublesome nature of this collaboration was, in the long run, the most
important factor in changing trainees’ thinking.
A number of trainees stressed the value they placed on being able to observe
fellow trainees teach. For example, one trainee commented at the end of the year:
I think that part of the important learning process is being in the classroom when otherof my colleagues (trainees) have actually been delivering lesson content and I’veprobably got more out of that exercise in terms of my observation of trainee teachersthan observing another teacher in my placement school.
The experience of learning from others who were at a roughly similar stage in
professional development was productive. As most of the trainees work as a pair in
their main teaching experience in the year, it is pertinent to ask why the experience of
observing fellow trainees in the Lesson Study/Learning Study format should be so
distinctive. There are two differences. First, in the Lesson Study/Learning Study
format the trainees have experienced more intense collaboration in preparing the
lesson, and this may create a more fertile environment for the subsequent
observation of teaching. Second, the Lesson Study/Learning Study format involves
trainees working in a group of usually four or five rather than working as a pair. In
this circumstance they are exposed to a greater range of perspectives.
Using the conception of variation in planning and reviewing lessons
The task of trying to identify possible conceptions that students might hold seemed
to prompt a shift in thinking about teaching from ‘imparting knowledge’ to
‘preparing students to use knowledge’ earlier than might have otherwise occurred. A
key aspect of this was the way in which the process led trainees to confront
differences between the way they conceived of a phenomenon and students’ ways of
thinking about the phenomenon. One trainee was particularly struck by the
optimism of students who took it for granted that they would not experience
unemployment:
We did set off and asked a few questions about, does anybody expect to get a job andwhat we meant to say by that was, are we aware of unemployment being typical and theanswer that we got back was: of course we will or no they won’t because they go to
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university or to school, so I learnt to have a different perspective. I’m 41 years of agemyself and this is how I see the world. I’ve got to remember how younger people see theworld.
However, this outcome might be achieved perfectly well without any reference to the
way of thinking about teaching and learning that is integral to variation theory. In
the second year of the initiative we developed the idea of using ‘Learning Outcome
Circles’ to help students to explore and express the idea of variation. We now
provide two examples of how groups of trainees tried to use the ideas of variation
theory in their lesson planning.
In the first example, a group of Design and Technology trainees planned a lesson
on ‘packaging’ for a class of 12-year-old to 13-year-old students. They identified
seven dimensions of the phenomenon of packaging that they wanted students to
incorporate in an ‘additive’ way in their conception of packaging: cost, aesthetics,
function, ergonomics, quality, user-friendliness and environment-friendliness. Before
their detailed planning, they explored students’ conceptions of packaging through
one-to-one conversations and the use of a short questionnaire administered to
students in the schools where they were teaching (rather than the school in which
they would teach their collaborative lesson). They felt uncertain in their
interpretation of the data they gathered through these methods and decided to use
the first part of their lesson to try to expose students’ thinking in a different way.
They presented students with four objects: an Easter egg in its display package, a
banana, a mobile phone in its packaging and a watch in its packaging. They asked
students to comment on which packaging was best and to give their reasons for their
choice. The majority of students at this point considered that the Easter egg had the
best packaging and they did not regard the banana as having packaging at all. The
reasons they gave for their judgement invariably referred to the visual attractiveness
of the Easter egg packaging. They saw the quality of the packaging in terms of their
prior experience as consumers.
The four different types of packaging implicitly presented the students with
simultaneous variation in each of the dimensions that the trainees wanted to
highlight. In order to draw students’ attention to these dimensions, they asked them
to score each package against each of the seven dimensions in their target learning
outcome. In their review activity with students towards the end of the lesson the
three dimensions that elicited most response were cost, function and environmental-
friendliness. None of these dimensions had featured in students’ talk in the initial
activity in the lesson. The trainees concluded that the way they had highlighted
variation had extended students’ thinking about packaging although they had not
had opportunity within the lesson to develop students’ thinking about the
relationships between the dimensions (e.g. is there a tension between making
packaging attractive to consumers and making it environmentally friendly?)
The most important observation arising from this example is the way in which
trainees were able to overcome the inadequacy of their initial data on students’
conceptions. In the first year of using Learning Study we had not developed
the device of a Learning Outcome Circle, and trainees often struggled with the
limitations of their collection of data on possible ways of understanding the
phenomenon. For example, in the words of one trainee:
We did find variations and we did try and take that in when planning, I think that theproblem was that its still difficult when you don’t know the group you were working
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with, we were assuming that the group that we will be teaching is similar to the groupsthat we researched, and that hasn’t been the case al the way through. (Jim)
There were two problems: being able to gather sufficient data to reveal the range of
conceptions that might be held by the students who would be taught, and also being
able to gauge the probable distribution of ways of thinking about the phenomenon. In
particular, the trainees were sensibly keen to identify whatever conception was likely to
be held by a majority of the students they were to teach. Their use of a ‘Learning
Outcome Circle’ helped to clarify their thinking at this point of their planning. By
focusing on the dimensions they wished to be included in students’ conception of the
phenomenon they were able to draw up an approach to teaching that highlighted
simultaneous variation in these dimensions. They addressed the question of exposing
students’ current thinking in their design of the initial activity so that subsequent
teaching could focus on supporting a change in students’ conceptions.
A second observation is that, in this case, working with ‘Key Stage 3’ students
aged 12–13 years, the target conception involved many dimensions of the
phenomenon but no relationships between these dimensions. This distinction is
similar to that found in the SOLO Taxonomy (Biggs and Collis 1991).
Our second example is provided by a group of trainees preparing to teach
Business Studies to 14-year-old to 15-year-old GCSE students. In this case the
students were aiming for a more complex learning outcome. They expressed the
phenomenon that provided the focus for their teaching as ‘How can a marketing
strategy be implemented to increase sales?’ The students in the class they were
teaching had already been introduced to some features of marketing: price, product,
promotion and place. The intended learning outcome for this lesson was that
students should develop a conception of marketing that recognised relationships
between the features of marketing in a way that allowed them to suggest the relative
importance of these dimensions in particular contexts. Their initial data collection
indicated that the majority of students did not include any relationships between
features in their concept of marketing. In fact, a popular conception of marketing
remained focused on promotion, with an emphasis on celebrity endorsement and
television advertising. To clarify their expectations the group of trainees drew up a
‘Learning Outcome Circle’ identifying the relationships they wished students to
include in their understanding. They decided to focus on price and promotion. In
their initial task they presented students with three scenarios. In each case a business
reduces its price to increase sales but there is also an additional variation in the
behaviour of competitors or costs that complicates the situation. Students are asked
to predict the probable effects of the combination of factors on future sales. Students
were then given a similar activity focused on advertising and asked to produce a
written account of how best they could increase sales for a particular business. These
written answers suggested that the students’ conceptions of marketing at the end of
the lesson included relationships between two features but they were rarely more
complex than this. For example:
If we lower the price we will get more sales but we might get less income depending onhow much more people buy.
If we advertise the product more it will cost more. It will cost thousands of pounds toadvertise. And if you don’t get more people buying the product you lose money. If youdo get more people to start to buy the product you will get the money back you paid toget it advertised and maybe more.
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If price is lowered sales will increase but not necessarily increase profit. Competitorsmight lower their price below yours.
When students summed up their views, they therefore lacked a framework that they
could use to guide their judgement and tended to resort back to judgements that
referred to only one feature (usually advertising), with an unsupported claim that
this was the most important.
Learning Study as a vehicle for developing trainees’ conceptions of teaching
Our purpose in using Learning Study within the programme was to make it more
likely that trainees would progress from Wood’s ‘imparting knowledge’ conception
to a conception of teaching as ‘helping students to use knowledge’ and to ‘helping
students to be aware of their own understanding’. A first requirement, then, was thattrainees should change their conception of teaching. Each of the trainees interviewed
at the end of the course claimed to have changed their understanding of teaching and
claimed that this had a categorical effect on their practice in the classroom. When
asked if their understanding of teaching had changed during the course, one trainee
replied:
Well categorically, yes it has changed without doubt. Throughout the course, thecombination of the course with the actual teaching experience and also the experiencewith dealing with different types of classroom situation, different abilities of studentsand combine that with the university stuff, my understanding, the way that I view theclassroom situation and my role has changed quite dramatically over the course of theyear and in terms of my thinking.
The thought process that I have put into it is very much more careful I think, and maybedeeper in terms of the way I think about what my role is and what my job is within theclassroom and what sort of role I’m playing in the development of the students.
As this interview extract indicates, any such change could be attributable to different
experiences during the year, making it difficult to attribute a specific causal role to
Learning Study. All that we are able to do at this stage is to provide some supportivecomments from trainees that are consistent with field notes made by mentors and
tutors. Mentors were asked to evaluate the benefits of the Learning Study process for
trainees’ progress, and all indicated that they thought that the process had led either
to ‘some’ or ‘substantial’ development for trainees.
One trainee who claimed that the Learning Study had played a formative role
suggested that he was only ably to discern this at the end of the course as he reflected
on the range of his experiences:
Well yes I did [change my thinking in the light of the Learning Study experience], whilstI didn’t know it at the time it probably helped me to put together the process of learningand the process of delivery and some of the elements that I have to be aware of in termsof my delivery of lesson content and maybe just brought that together, in a way that I’verecently just described as far as being aware of different styles of both teaching andlearning.
Some other trainees felt able to be more explicit about the way in which Learning
Study had changed their thinking:
I think the first one we did actually made me look at things differently because at thestart you, there’s a lot to take on board and you are still there looking at the book andthinking this is the information I’ve got to give and you need things structured at thestart as being a teacher you think, I need to know everything in this book and that’s the
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lesson there and I need to get it across to the students but the focus. Like I said it mademe switch the focus on the learning rather than the teaching.
The reference here to ‘the first one’ was the trainee’s first experience of Learning
Study six weeks after they had begun the course. By the end of the year some trainees
spoke of their experience of Learning Study as having fostered a new way of thinking
about students’ experience of learning and the implications this held for them asteachers:
At the start of the course … what you don’t think about is where they get their valuesfrom, where they get their underlying ideas from, peer pressure those sorts of things,either way seems to be of a similar level and you expect to go in, here’s the material andby large at the end if the lesson you have achieved the objective as somebody has learntit. In reality what you need to do is to take it down a step, a different shape from theoutset and say that I need to achieve this, this and this for different levels, and that’scertainly from the learning study.
Others felt able to articulate the way in which they believed the Learning Study had
provoked a change in their thinking:
Because they [the Learning Study experiences] have been spread out pretty well as we’veseen a development and the structures of lessons have been probably quite simple andstraight forward throughout but I think the thinking behind setting the tasks in thesecond and third learning studies have been more complex and required for us to discussa lot more about learning outcomes.
Conclusion
There are good grounds for expecting ‘Learning Study’ to play a valuable role inInitial Teacher Education: the benefits of the collaborative element of ‘Lesson Study’
are well attested by empirical data, and these are consistent with the outcomes of
other approaches to collaborative teacher education (Hiebert, Gallimore and Stigler
2002); the focus on the outcomes of learning provided by Learning Study is
supported by considerable evidence of the benefits for attainment when teachers
adopt this focus (for example, Siedel, Rimmele and Prenzel 2005); and the
collaborative process provides the means, and the focus on learning outcomes
provides the focus for helping trainee teachers to progress from less productive tomore productive conceptions of teaching (Wood 2000). However, there are problems
to be overcome in trying to realise this potential within a programme of initial
teacher education.
First, there are difficulties to be faced in making it practicable to include
‘Learning Study’. In order to provide substantial time for preparation it is necessary
to identify the focus of lessons several weeks in advance, and this is usually
problematic for mentors. It is also necessary to organise trainees into groups and to
support their lesson preparation in the weeks leading up their work with students in
the classroom. In this project we have shown that these difficulties can be overcomeand that doing so creates new opportunities for collaboration between tutors,
mentors and trainees that strengthens a teacher education partnership between
schools and a higher education institute.
Second, there is a substantial problem in helping trainees to identify qualitative
variation in possible conceptions of a phenomenon. There is an inherent problem in
trying to help trainees who still think of teaching as ‘imparting knowledge’ to use
phenomenographic methods to identify variation in students’ conceptions. Even if
14 P. Davies and R. Dunnill
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the time was available it is difficult to see how such trainees could understand what
they were doing or why. However, we found that the device of a ‘Learning Outcome
Circle’ overcame this problem. It provided a way of representing the learning
problem in a way that was accessible to trainees while they were developing their
understanding of teaching. It helped them to reflect on the demand that they were
making on students’ understanding and a way of portraying differences between the
understanding that students began with and the understanding that the trainees were
aiming to develop.
Third, there is an issue as to whether initial teacher trainees are ready to benefit
from the intensive focus on students’ learning that is required by Learning Study.
The majority of trainees began their course with an assumption that teaching meant
imparting their knowledge. However, some trainees appeared more ready than
others to move on from this conception. This revealed itself in their first Learning
Study, which some trainees responded to enthusiastically while others found it
deeply troublesome. That is, Wood’s classification of thinking of teaching as
‘imparting knowledge’, ‘helping students learn’ or ‘helping students to reflect’ might
be overlaid by a judgement of readiness to move on to a more complex
understanding. In addition, most of the trainees who found the experience
troublesome looked back on it as an important step in their development over the
year.
However, even accepting all this we are still left with the question ‘Was it worth
it?’ The realization of Learning Study required substantial organization and effort,
particularly in setting up lessons, working with mentors. Did it reap sufficient
benefits in speeding trainees’ development? Our interview evidence indicated that
trainees did believe they had changed their understanding of teaching during the year
and that this was shaping their practice. We are also able to provide evidence from
interviews with trainees and evaluations from mentors that attribute a role for
Learning Study in this change. While this is only circumstantial evidence it provides
a basis for the collection of more systematic evidence. In the meantime we have
extended the use of Learning Study to other programmes in the university and we are
working with colleagues to introduce the practice in four other institutions.
Finally, the requirement of the variation theory element in Learning Study puts
trainee teachers into a role that may not be properly captured by the three categories
suggested by Wood. That is, they are required to actively research the meaning of
learning in different contexts. One of the notable features of subjects such as
Business and Economics and Design and Technology is that relatively little is yet
known about variation in conceptions in relation to the majority of phenomena
studied. Trainee teachers cannot gather appropriate knowledge from previous
research findings. A number of trainees in the second year of the initiative began to
recognise explicitly and relish the research element in the demand that was being
placed upon them, and this appeared to influence the way in which they were
developing their conception of teaching.
Learning Study appears to offer a way of increasing the speed at which trainees
move to more complex ways of understanding teaching and opening up their vision
of their role as teachers. However, the results presented here are drawn from a small-
scale implementation with trainees preparing to teach two subjects in secondary
schools. It remains to be seen whether these results generalise to other contexts for
initial teacher education.
Journal of Education for Teaching 15
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Acknowledgements
This project was funded by the Teacher Development Agency. The authors are
grateful to Journal of Education for Teaching’s two anonymous referees and
participants at the British Educational Research Association Conference, Warwick,
UK, 5–7 September 2006 for their comments on earlier drafts of the paper.
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