You are your discipline: Representations and teacher thinking

Reading notes for Wilson, Shulman & Richert (1987), Freedman (1990), and Wineburg & Wilson (1989).

The readings for Thursday focus teacher thinking, particularly on how teachers develop the representations they use to explain their discipline's concepts, principles, and structures to their students.

Read the Wilson, Shulman, & Richert piece, "150 Different Ways of Knowing," first. This chapter provides the theory we will use to think about representations and the kinds of thinking teachers do when they teach. After an introduction which decries the lack of research on how teachers use their subject-matter knowledge in teaching, Wilson and her colleagues begin to describe what was then current research. On pages 109-110, they introduce the concept of "representations," or the analogies, demonstrations, applications, thinkalouds, and the like that teachers use to help their students develop their own knowledge of the subject.

To create representations, teachers transform their own subject matter knowledge, using what they know of students' lives, experiences, and prior knowledge. Wilson, et al., describe this process on pp. 113-114, and introduce the idea of pedagogical content knowledge, fondly known by some as PCK. They go on to give examples of teachers developing representations and reasoning through difficulties. What examples of representations can you think of, either from your own experience, or by considering how you might represent some of the big ideas, concepts or principles in your own discipline? During Jigsaw Week (next week) you will be developing representations to use in your microteaching. While you are collecting data in the field, you will be looking for the kinds of representations teachers used and what they tell students about the discipline.

Based on their research, Wilson and colleagues develop a model of pedagogical reasoning, shown in Figure 4.2. Compare this model with the model of experiential learning on p. 198 of Moses & Cobb's Appendix (Algebra Project). Are there examples from your own experience or your observations of classroom teachers you can use to test this model of teacher thinking?

Structure of the Disciplines. In the middle of p. 118, Wilson, et al., describe subject matter knowledge as including the structure of the disciplines being taught. They contrast the syntactic structure (the ways new knowledge is created, discovered, validated, and evaluated in the disciplinary community) and the substantive structure, the subfields, big organizing concepts, conceptual themes that organize the knowledge in that discipline. We will be talking about this important idea in class.

Freedman (1990) and Wineburg & Wilson (1989) are examples. The teachers in these pieces use representations to communicate about both the substantive and syntactic structures of their disciplines. Freedman describes Jessica Siegal and her students, and provides a look into how she uses her knowledge of her students to make pedagogical decisions, helping them develop their own disciplinary knowledge. Wineburg & Wilson (the same Wilson as in 150 ways) describe history teachers in their research project and the representations they use. We will discuss these examples in class, along with the representations used by the French I and Language Arts teachers we saw in the videos last Thursday.