A Quiet Form of Research

What is teaching excellence? James Britton (1987) described good teaching as "a quiet form of research." Effective teaching, he said, "depends upon the concern of every teacher for the rational by which he or she works... This requires that every lesson should be for the teacher an inquiry, some further discovery...and that time to reflect, draw inferences and plan further inquiry is essential" (p. 115).

In Reflective Teaching: An Introduction, Zeichner and Liston (1996) assert that "it is through reflection on our teaching that we become more skilled, more capable, and in general better teachers" (p. xvii). I believe that reflective teaching, then—taking time to plan, to think about what we are doing and why, and to reflect on the result—is an important component of teaching excellence.

I learned a lot about the value of reflecting on my teaching while doing my doctoral dissertation research, which I conducted after I came to Murray State University. I had become interested in using writing and speaking activities to help students in my reading methods class understand course concepts. I expected to try out some writing and speaking activities and to find out which worked well. What I learned, however, from analyzing students' work, interviewing students, and reflecting on my teaching, was not what I expected. I found that my students and I had different views of learning. They tended to see learning as memorizing information and writing as supplying the "correct" answer, rather than a way to think and learn. They often found ways to complete the writing and speaking assignments without really engaging in thinking. I realized that to help my students learn from the writing and speaking activities (and to help them understand that learning is more than memorizing and supplying correct answers) I needed to provide more demonstrations of how to engage in thinking through these activities, and I needed to give students more feedback.

While we can't possibly do in-depth analyses of everything that we do in our classes, we can strive to be more reflective in our teaching. What is reflective teaching? Zeichner and Liston (1996, p. 6) describe five key features of reflective teaching. A reflective teacher:

• examines, frames, and attempts to solve the dilemmas of classroom practice;
• is aware of and questions the assumptions and values he or she brings to teaching;
• is attentive to the institutional and cultural contexts in which he or she teaches;
• takes part in curriculum development and is involved in school change efforts; and
• takes responsibility for his or her own professional development.

We reflect when we design the activities for our courses each semester, when we review our programs, and when we design new courses. We also reflect when we meet with colleagues to discuss common problems and share ideas for solutions. I want to suggest a few simple ideas for becoming more reflective in our teaching.

First: Take more time to plan. While we all go through the lesson-planning process in some form—informally "in our heads" or more formally in writing—I have found that when I take the time to write a formal lesson plan, specifying what I want my students to learn and what activities I will use to accomplish this each day, I teach a better lesson.

Second: Make reflection part of the planning process. In the College of Education we train future teachers to use a lesson planning process that includes not only goals and activities, but also includes reflecting after the lesson on what students learned and how to improve or refine the lesson. Taking just a few minutes to reflect on paper lets us identify problems with the lesson, think of better ways to teach it, and perhaps most importantly put our thoughts in permanent form, so we can go back and review them when we are putting our courses together for the next semester.

Third: Organize a group of colleagues to discuss teaching or a particular concern.

Fourth: Choose a question to explore in your classroom, and keep a journal of your reflections.

Fifth: Consider conducting research on your teaching. Choose an assignment or issue to investigate and collect data systematically. Present your work at a conference.

Whether you conduct formal research or make your teaching a more "quiet" form of research, taking time to become more reflective is one way to work toward teaching excellence.

Reference list:
Britton, James (1987). A Quiet Form of Research. In: Dixie Goswami & Peter Stillman (Eds.), Reclaiming the Classroom: Teacher Research as an Agency for Change. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Heinemann.
Zeichner, Kenneth M, and Liston, Daniel P. (1996). Reflective Teaching: An Introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.