Abstract:
This research was an ethnographic case study that investigated the schema shared by novice mathematics teachers regarding student-centered teaching. My research drew from Strauss and Quinn’s (2001) interpretation of schema as the framework for my investigation. The purpose of my research was to identify the participants’ shared, tacit understandings about student-centered and teacher-centered methods and to determine how each individual applied those schema to their own teaching practices.
During a 4-month period, I interviewed five novice teachers who graduated from the same student-centered university program. My style of interviewing and data analysis was a modified method of discourse analysis, as described by Quinn (2005). Participants shared their stories, about their upbringing, their early childhood learning experiences, their university teacher training, and their current teaching practices. From those conversations, I compiled more than 24 hours of transcriptions. I then coded and analyzed the transcripts, categorizing metaphors and reasoning in order to identify the group’s tacit understandings about teaching.
I initially identified the participants’ shared schemas for the role of a teacher. I used that schema as a reference point for comparing and contrasting the participants’ student-centered and teacher-centered schemas. The schema for the role of a teacher valued five distinct traits: authoritarian, motivator, caretaker, competence, and differentness. Those traits were important in the valuation by participants of teaching methods schemas, which they classified as either “good” or “bad.” In the process of identifying the teacher-centered schema, I discovered that the student-centered schema inherently held a component of opposition to traditional, teacher-centered methods. Generally, the student-centered schema identified “good” teaching with student-centered methods and the traits I identified for the role of a teacher schema.
Teacher-centered methods were considered “bad,” and participants linked those methods with the antithesis of preferred teacher traits.
I found that the student-centered schema of the participants paralleled, rather than replaced, a pre-existing teacher-centered schema. The oppositional nature of the two schemas caused a mental condition of dissonance that I termed cognitive friction. In order to reduce that friction, each participant integrated the shared schemas to create an individual teaching schema. The participants’ individual teaching schemas did not completely accept or reject either teacher-centered or student-centered methods, but fell on a continuum of the two. The exact location on that continuum was determined by the degree that each individual identified with either the teacher-centered schema or the student-centered schema. The participants’ unique teaching schemas allowed for the coexistence of both methods schemas and accounted for the wide variation in their teaching practices.