In search of the Teachable Moment: A study of teacher autonomy, judgement and
intuition.
Abstract
Aspects of teaching, such as those relating to curriculum development and the protocols of
the teaching cycle (planning, delivery, assessment) receive much attention in literature and
are regularly the focus of evaluation. Somewhat neglected by comparison is the subject of
teacher action in the moment; the teachable moment (TM). Analysis of ‘delivery’ has
tended to focus on the organisation of learning: didactic or dialogic, whole-class or groups,
transmission or discovery for example, and is often closely linked with theoretical
perspectives on learning such as constructivism and social constructivism and general
principles of classroom management.
However, discussion of these approaches can easily overlook the detail of how teachers
operate from moment to moment and exercise their professional judgement and intuition
during the flow of classroom activity. Whatever the approach or strategy, teaching and
learning can be unpredictable. This study looks at the dynamic nature of teaching and
learning and how teachers negotiate solutions, guide learners and respond to uncertainty,
idiosyncrasies and contextual factors in everyday practice; Teachable Moment Behaviours
(TMBs). It examines factors, at classroom, institutional and societal levels, which influence
TMs and TMBs.
The study examines teacher action, firstly through the theoretical lenses of Structurism,
Agency and Power and later using Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of Flow and ideas about
professionalism, intuition and judgement. It draws on the experience of three current
primary school teachers as they reflect on their own professional practice, and analyses how
teacher autonomy, judgement and intuition, which guide much of classroom discourse, can
be easily undermined by the instruments of surveillance and scrutiny to which teachers are
routinely subjected. The conclusions acknowledge that much of the expertise of the teacher
lies in these skills, and makes recommendations about how teachers can preserve and
develop them.
1
Introduction
This study is concerned with how teachers behave whilst teaching. It examines Teachable
Moments (TMs), which for the purposes of the research are defined as unanticipated
instances which arise during a teaching and learning exchange which present opportunities
for improvised and intuitive response from the teacher. TMs lead to Teachable Moment
Behaviours (TMBs) which are defined as the behaviours (actions, words, decisions, U-turns,
organisation/reorganisation) which teachers call on in response to TMs. Whilst recognising
that learning is the result of an exchange involving teachers and pupils, the sole focus here is
on teachers and any reference to pupil behaviour is made in so much as it helps to describe
and analyse how teachers respond to it. The primary objectives here are to define and
categorise these behaviours (TMBs), to analyse them against the theoretical frameworks of
structure and agency, to gather data on teachers’ use of them in their everyday practice and
to analyse those teachers’ reflections on their own pedagogic approaches to TMs. The
analysis will examine the factors which influence how, when and why teachers behave in
these ways, and the conditions in which TMBs arise.
The project places teacher agency in the centre of attention and will explore how teachers
respond to the non-linear (Larson Freeman, 2003, cited in Van Lier, 2007) and unpredictable
nature of learning, using de Bot’s (2007) vision of the classroom as a dynamic system, in
which teachers and pupils are continually ‘adjusting, reckoning, evaluating, bargaining,
acting and changing.’ (Woods, 1979:2)
The rationale for a focus on this particular aspect of teachers’ professional practice is threefold. Firstly, improvisation, judgements in the moment and intuitive practice are
considerably neglected in literature on the skills of the teacher and on Initial Teacher
Education (ITE) programmes. This is not surprising as these particular skills are not
protocols to which a rubric can be easily attached and therefore describing, and perhaps
more importantly in the current educational climate, measuring them is problematic.
Without writing about or teaching about the dynamic nature of teaching and learning and
the skills which exist in the gaps between the protocols there is little hope of developing
practice in this area.
2
Secondly, there has been a significant political drive in recent years towards personalised
learning in primary schools in England and Wales. Whilst this includes broader issues than
what teachers do in classrooms (personalised curriculum, personalised support,
personalised homework tasks etc.) personalising learning requires a knowledge of individual
children and their interests, motivations, aptitudes, attention spans, language capabilities
and social development, to name only a few. Whilst knowledge of these elements is to an
extent gained through assessment protocols and can be addressed via teachers’ planning
instruments, teachers will inevitably respond to such matters as they arise in the flow of
classroom activity and will therefore also require a repertoire of instinctive behaviours in
order to do this efficiently and effectively.
Finally, the current political conception of the teacher is as technician, having mediocre
understanding of theoretical perspectives and wider factors influencing their everyday
activity, but an expert proficiency with relevant tools and techniques. This is largely in
response to the standards agenda in which National Curriculum levels are seen as the
output of a factory style educational process. Successive governments appear to want
professionals well versed in protocols and technique. This is exemplified in the use of the
term Initial Teacher Training (ITT) rather than Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in recent
legislative material sent to Higher Education (HE) providers; that teachers are trained, not
educated.
This tendency towards a technicist view of teaching is not new however. Fears over falling
standards in core subjects and under performance on international league tables (Boyson,
1975; (see Brown, 1998; Slee & Weiner, 1998 and Gorard, 2001 for a response)) and lack of
social mobility have, amongst other factors, prompted a gradual increase in centralised
control over primary education in the last thirty years. The introduction of the National
Literacy and Numeracy Strategies in 1998 and 1999 respectively brought with it previously
unseen levels of government prescription (see Alexander, 2004; Barkham & Miller, 2008)
with stipulated curricula, and stipulated pedagogy. Statutory guidance bore closer
resemblance to ‘standard operating procedures’ than pedagogic principles. In the last ten
years the move away from prescription (Fisher, 2004) via curricula and National Strategies
has coincided with periodic changes to the Ofsted Inspection Framework and the pressure
3
to pedagogic conformity now comes in the form of Ofsted grading criteria and the necessity
to meet pupil progress targets.
The coalition government have expressed a commitment to ‘sweep away the culture of
compliance’ (www.Independent.co.uk, 2010) enabling and promoting teachers’ professional
judgements, increasing teacher choice and flexibility and decreasing prescription. In January
2011 the government began a review of the primary National Curriculum which will be in
place by September 2014. In the most recent iteration of the Ofsted Inspection Framework
(Ofsted, 2012) four out of the ten criteria for judging the quality of teaching make reference
to teacher action during lessons and, whilst no specific reference is made to improvisation
or teachers using their instincts and intuition, all of the listed criteria could be interpreted as
implying professional judgement. This period of transition may prove to be an interesting
and fruitful time to gather data on and make recommendations concerning the pedagogic
practice and personas of primary school teachers.
In the discussion which follows I will be examining TMBs firstly through the sociological
frameworks of structure and agency, with specific reference to perspectives from Giddens,
Bourdieu and Foucault, and secondly through the lens of pedagogy. The former is a useful
theoretical tool for scrutinising how the profession at large, the political context and school
communities can influence teachers’ behaviour. The latter is a useful heading under which
to explore how interactions at classroom level may affect teachers’ capacity to improvise
and think on their feet.
4
Structure , agency and power: Sociological influences.
Structure, agency and power are important foundational principles upon which much study
of human social behaviour has been built. What follows is a brief exploration of these
principles in relation to pedagogy. An examination of TMs and TMBs is a study of teachers’
capacity (be it their ability or the extent to which they are permitted, by others or
themselves) to act according to their professional pedagogical instincts in a given moment.
The extent to which teachers are able to improvise in a given teaching and learning episode,
to choose a line of questioning, a physical demonstration or a timescale other than that
which was planned , or contrary to the modus operandi of the community, is partly
influenced by individual agency, the efficacy to make choices, decisions and judgements
about what they do.
At an institutional and societal level Structuralism can be a useful theoretical tool for
examining teachers’ capacity to improvise and exploit TMs in their practice; in particular,
the interaction between structure and agency. Early twentieth century sociologists such as
Durkheim (1933) and Simmel (1971:324) emphasised the dualism of structure and agency
and saw the struggle of the individual against the ‘sovereign powers of society’ as the
defining problem facing humanity. In the later twentieth century Giddens (1979; 1984;
1998) and Bourdieu (1977) amongst others, attempted to reconcile this apparent dichotomy
with theoretical frameworks which explore the relationship between the individual agent
and the collective more thoroughly.
Giddens interprets structures as expressions of what people do, and offers a succinct
definition of agency as ‘the capability to have done otherwise’ (1998:78). In the classroom
context, the opportunity, and therefore capacity, to do ‘otherwise’ may be governed by the
expectations of the head teacher, the practice of other colleagues or a shared sense within
the institution about what constitutes appropriate practice, all of which are likely to affect
professional instincts and decision making. Unlike Durkheim, who characterised society as
separate from its individual agents (1893; 1938) and portrayed structure as an opposing
force to agency, Giddens asserts that whilst structures govern our individual action
(sometimes inhibiting, sometimes encouraging), their relationship to agency is in fact more
complex than simple opposites. He attributes a dynamic nature to the relationship,
5
suggesting that structure is in fact created as a consequence of the collective agency of
individuals (Giddens, 1979). This implies that factors governing individual behaviour in
society or in institutions are to a large extent the result of the body of individuals exercising
their capability to do ‘otherwise.’ (similar to Durkheim’s ‘Collective Consciousness’,
1938:xiv). Paradoxically, this collective otherwise-ness can also act as a constraint on
individual agency. In terms of school culture and classroom practice, one interpretation of
this is that expectations and institutional norms (structures) influencing teachers’
behaviours are not fixed and external, but constitute a consensus about how things should
be done, based on what all individuals in the community ‘do’. Structures exist and in some
contexts they can be quite rigid, but they have no physical form. They only have form in so
much as they are reproduced in what people do. This does not mean that structure is
‘plastic to the will of the indvidual’ (Giddens, 1998:80), but it implies that individual agents
contribute to its construction. On the question of power and teacher agency, Pignatelli
(1993:412) advocates teachers challenging prevailing structures, but also stresses the
importance of recognising ‘their own complicity’ in them. In fact, one could argue that the
former would not be possible without the latter.
In Bourdieu’s notion of ‘Habitus’ (1977) the agent internalises the relationships, beliefs and
values of the community and becomes inhabited by its expectations; an internalising of the
external. The gradual assimilation of the agent into the cultural norms of the community is
exemplified by his or her actions which in turn co-create and perpetuate those cultural
values and practices; an externalising of the internal. This, according to Bourdieu (1977:72)
is not an intentional or conscious assimilation, ‘..collectively orchestrated, without (…) a
conductor’ but one which occurs organically. In this hypothesis doing ‘otherwise’ appears
an even greater challenge to the agent. The struggle for individual agency could be viewed
as a struggle against enculturation; against the tendency to allow beliefs, values and actions
within an environment or community to take up residence within us. For Bourdieu though,
‘Habitus’ is not an uncomfortable or undesirable disposition. In fact, we could not function
within society without its effect. Understanding and awareness of our tendency towards
‘habitus’ however, is important for the individual agent. Calhoun(1995:304) interprets
‘Habitus’ as ‘the embodied sensibility that makes possible structured improvisation.’ In this
elaboration, the phenomena is characterised not as a straight-jacket which inhibits action,
6
but as a framework through which it is facilitated. This is salient in an examination of
teacher action. Viewed in this way, the structures which are often seen by teachers as
constraints on creativity: centralised pedagogic and curricular strategies, surveillance,
excessive planning to name a few, could be reinterpreted as tools for autonomous action.
Giddens (1981:27) sees this interplay between freedom and constraint as constant and all
pervasive, and refers to it as the ‘dialectic of control’.
The key similarity between Giddens and Bourdieu here is the emphasis on agents as
collaborators in defining and developing structure, not simply as victims of it. Both
conceptualise structure as more than merely the background against which actions occur,
and both view agency as the freedom to recognise and respond to causal events in the
world. In this sense, according to Bourdieu, structures are not only objective, they can also
be subjective. As Grenfell and James (1998) point out, structures can take on
phenomenological characteristics as they are built by and understood as products of human
experience and activity. Translated into a classroom context, for the teacher this consists in
the capacity to notice events in the dynamic environment; questions or comments, degrees
of understanding among learners, and the ability to choose a causal response, viewing
learners as interactive partners and the classroom itself as a dynamic space in which agents
interact. This capacity depends in part on what the teacher contributes to the collective
values of the community.
If structure is created by the individual agents in a community, one could ask what it is that
inhibits agents (teachers) from exercising greater autonomy over their action within that
community, assuming that their intentions are always to serve the educational interests of
their learners? To answer this question it is necessary to define more clearly the origins and
form of structures which influence a teacher’s behaviour.
Ozga and Lawn (1981) point to the political and economic structures which have resulted in
the progressive deskilling of the profession. They argue that while teachers are prepared to
accept evaluation, scrutiny and appraisal as essentially worthwhile and for the greater good,
they are contributing to the very system which robs them of control over their labour.
There is an implied call to organisation and militancy here.
7
Government solutions to the challenges of societal progress tend to favour centrally
designed and universally applied programmes and strategies. Often based on regional
research findings and generalisations about learning, these large scale prescriptions,
referred to by Eisner (1985) as scientific methods have been applied with increasing
frequency by successive governments since the arrival of the National Curriculum in 1989.
The difficulty for the teacher as agent is that repeated dispatching, revising and repackaging
of protocol from central government sends the message that innovation begins not in the
classroom, but in the corridors of Whitehall. As far back as 1981 Ozga and Lawn warned
about the ‘proletarianisation’ of the profession. The analogy to workers lacking ownership
of the means of production, with only their labour to sell is an interesting one. This power
relationship is contrary to Connelly’s (1972) conception of the teacher as ‘user-developer’,
who leads curriculum development from the classroom through reflective practice. Within
this climate of surveillance and rubric, performance management and grading criteria
argued Brighouse (1987:11, cited in Woods, 1990), the teachers who survive will be the
‘systems people’; those who can adhere to the syllabus and adhere to the script, exercise
their agency within the imposed structure.
Whilst it is easy to understand how teachers contribute to the structures in their immediate
environment, local structures you might say; often the most imposing and inhibiting
structures to everyday classroom practice are those of national policy. Centralised control
of education, whether exercised via government initiatives, publishing of performance data
or routine inspection, exemplifies Foucault’s hypothesis about coercive power; that it is at
its most potent when it is hidden. He illustrates this insight into the nature of power by
describing penal reforms from Renaissance to Classical Europe (1977). In the former,
punishments were brutal and public and designed to send unequivocal messages to the
population about the supreme power of the monarch. With the introduction of prisons in
19th century Britain the emphasis shifted towards the new, more humane notion of
rehabilitation. What in fact happened, according to Foucault (1977:135), is that public
mutilation and death was replaced by the production of ‘docile bodies’, automatons
reduced by the power of the state, for the purposes of the state. A current version of this
history can be seen in the way that governments promote control of curricula, setting of
teaching standards and surveillance of performance, as performing its public duty, and
8
schools as ostensibly benevolent for complying with this agenda (or failing when
incompliant.) The modern meta-narrative (Peters, 2001) being that these practices will
bring people out of poverty, promote social mobility, spread prosperity and widen
opportunity. This can be seen as a small-scale outworking of Foucault’s ‘Governmentality’
(Foucault, 1991), the rationalities and technologies with which society is rendered
governable. Less emphasis however, is given to the by-products of this system, in which,
according to Hartley (1994:230), young people become resources and commodities to
grease the wheels of the capitalist project. He describes this as an ‘isomorphic structure (...)
whose purpose is the management of consent, and whose justification appeals to the
culture of consumption.’ This sort of power is strong, according to Foucault, precisely
because it solicits our:
‘…willingness to accept and internalise questionable limits on what we
can know about ourselves and how we might act, as a natural condition.’
(Pignatelli, 1993:412)
Schools, continues Pignatelli, can be hazardous places for those wishing to extend personal
and professional agency, as they:
‘..extend the self-limiting rule of normality and the marginalizationrehabilitation of the deviant.’ (1993:420)
The implication here is that compliance can easily become firmly established as the Cultural
Capital (Bourdieu, 1986) amongst the staff in a community, and disagreement or nonconformity frowned upon.
Ozga (2000:14) suggests that such deviancy in the teaching profession is ‘managed’ by
either promulgation of professional ideology, in which behaviour is regulated through
‘reasonable co-option’, or via direct regulation.
Whilst Giddens and Bourdieu devote their time to the question of what agents do in
exercising freedom and power, Foucault, in offering vivid portrayals of historical characters
and events as points of reference, is more preoccupied with prompting readers to consider
who they are. Self-knowledge seems particularly important for teachers wishing to identify
9
and manage what they invest in their surrounding professional structures. This could be
seen as a call to teacher rebelliousness, but agency, according to Murphy (1988:182), is
much more concerned with ‘persons assuming responsibility for truth’ than with
‘normlessness.’ (According to Foucault (1980), power always attaches itself to truth.) This
could in fact be seen as a call to research. By engaging in field studies, teachers confront,
and perhaps dilute the forces of disempowerment by shifting the locus of power towards
themselves as agents. To move from consumers, or indeed victims, of research, to
engineers of it. From ‘docile bodies’ to active agents.
The extent to which teachers can assume active control of their professional activity is
questionable however. In some school contexts the structures and technologies of control
are so unyielding that opportunities for decision making, creativity and flexibility (with
curriculum, timetable, approaches etc.) are minimal.
One prevalent feature linking the technologies of power (Foucault, 1991) (surveillance,
coercion, public accountability) in recent societal discourse is discomfort with uncertainty.
It is paradoxical in this postmodern age, in which Newtonian certainties have been replaced
by quantum uncertainties and unpredictability in the scientific field, in which existential
questions previously answered with certainty by the church are now open to interpretation,
in which objectivity has been all but replaced by subjectivity, that the need for certainty
exerts such a significant grip on societal structures in Western democracies. In education,
as in other domains, this is most clearly articulated through the increasing requirement to
state outcomes and products of learning before the process of teaching and learning has
begun. This could be seen as a considerable obstacle to teacher agency. When discussing
research methods later, I will elaborate on the challenges of using a postmodern approach
and qualitative methods and instruments to evaluate practice in a stubbornly modernist
system (education) and stubbornly modernist institutions (schools).
The discussion so far, whilst acknowledging the interdependence of structure and agency,
has nevertheless cast structure as the villain and agency as the hero. Or, put another way,
structure as the oppressor and agency as the oppressed. In the classroom context this is
something of an Orwellian over-simplification (planning and preparation bad, improvisation
good) and this is certainly not my intention. The interplay between protocols teachers must
10
follow and the intuitions and the hunches they may act upon is an interesting one. The two
are certainly not mutually exclusive, and represent a microcosm of the relationship between
structure and agency. Planning does to an extent facilitate improvisation because it can
provide vital space for professional reflection and is therefore linked inextricably to action
and evaluation.
However, as Hoyle and John (1995) point out, practitioner autonomy is at the heart of
professionalism. In their view, the very term professional assumes dealing with uncertainty
and exercising judgement, and suggest that judgement is in fact ‘more important than
routine’ in professional practice. They go on:
‘..it is essential to effective practice that they (professionals) should be
sufficiently free from bureaucratic and political constraints to act on
judgements made in the best interests (as they see them) of the clients.’
(1995:77).
Professional autonomy is by its very nature limited autonomy however. As well as asserting
agency, professionalism asserts structure and limitations on freedom to act, professionalism
is structure. Here we find an interesting counterpoint. Professional status is defined
simultaneously by both autonomy and boundaries, by agency and structure; professionals
have a licence, not just licence Hoyle and John (1995). A critical question here therefore is
how these two forces can be balanced in the best interests of pupils. Figures 1 and 2 below
present possible relationships between structure and agency which may help to answer this
question.
Structure
Agency
Fig.1 (my model)
In this model structure and agency are seen on the same continuum. A move towards one
is a move away from the other; as one increases the other decreases proportionally. In this
11
conception of their relationship, agency becomes a function of the degree of structure
present in a system (a school for example). An increase in structure increasingly limits
freedom, autonomy and possibly creativity and spontaneity. Increased agency in this view is
an indication of decreased structure; however structure is the causal mechanism here, not
agency.
D
B
C
Agency
A
Fig.2 (my model)
Structure
The relationship presented in Fig.2 is significantly different from that of Fig.1. In this
conception there is no causal correlation between the two forces and thus no inverse
proportionality. An increase in one does not necessitate a decrease in the other, and vice
versa. This model does not assume that all professionals want high levels of autonomy and
presents agency as residing with individuals, largely independent of structure, dependent on
the degree to which the individual chooses to exercise their agency; on a measure of their
intention to act autonomously. This Kantian view of autonomy posits that as creatures of
will, human beings are able to act ‘for the sake of principles we have set for ourselves.’
(Lindley, 1986:16) Bandura (1977), Elder (1995), Flammer (1997) and others interested in
efficacy have emphasised this internal process of ‘acting individual’ (Evans, 2008) in relation
to the external environment.
12
Therefore, a professional at position A with high agent intentionality operating in a system
low on structure may experience high levels of professional satisfaction. A professional at
position B with low agent intentionality operating in a similar system may experience some
professional anxiety. A professional at position C with low agent intentionality operating in
a system high in structure may enjoy similar levels of professional satisfaction as their
colleague at position A, but for different reasons and finally, a professional at position D,
with high levels of intentionality operating in a highly structured system may also
experience professional anxiety. Factors which may influence degrees of teacher agent
intentionality in the classroom include personality, experience, characteristics of the pupils,
value placed on this characteristic of professionalism by the school and perhaps teacher
education. Some of these factors will be analysed in relation to the participants of this
research, in the Insights and Analysis section.
Hoyle and John (1995:81) reflect on the means by which autonomy is either afforded to or
removed from teachers and imply that it is rarely explicit.
‘Given the inescapable fact of a strong link between educational achievements
and occupation in industrialised society, the content goals of education (...)
have an appeal to consumers. ...this is currently taken as the legitimating of
a more prescriptive approach to educational goals...the teacher’s autonomy
is thereby reduced.’
This interpretation of how teacher autonomy decreases places emphasis on how
educational goals are defined. The more clearly defined and linked to ‘credentials’, the less
autonomy teachers enjoy. The less defined the goals and the more emphasis is placed on
the processes of education, the greater the teacher autonomy. This continuum can be
mapped onto Fig.1 as shown in Fig.3
13
Emphasis on
educational
processes
Emphasis
on defined
goals
Fig.3 (my model)
Agency
Structure
The more defined the goals, the more focussed the accountability. The less defined the
goals, the more room there is for teacher interpretation. However, as iterated more than
once already, this does not mean that structure is the enemy of agency, or accountability
the enemy of interpretation. On the contrary, these elements are engaged in a necessary
dance. An important question here is not which is right, or which should exist, but how can
they relate to one another most productively? There are parallels here with Camus’
conclusion about the complex relationship between freedom and justice in his novel The
Rebel:
‘Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom.
To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.’
(Camus, 1951:291)
The interdependence expressed here can also be applied to structure and agency, that
absolute structure neutralises individual agency and absolute agency renders structures
impotent and that neither case is fruitful. In the case of teachers and teaching, we see this
interplay in the relationship between curriculum prescription and pedagogical flexibility; the
fruit in this case might be job satisfaction for the teacher and learning for the pupil. Evans
(2008:93) characterises this relationship through the concept of ‘bounded agency’, that is,
autonomy conceived as socially situated, ‘influenced by but not determined by
environments’. The similarities here with Giddens and Bourdieu are clear, both emphasise
the relationship of the individual agent to their surrounding structures and see agents as
contributing to social reproduction. This forms part of a wider sociological discussion (see
Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1998; Furlong & Cartmel, 1997 and Engel & Strausser, 1998) about the
nature of gradual individualisation in industrialised societies. Bringing the discussion into
14
the primary school, Pollard (2008:91) explores how this ‘dialectical relationship’ between
society and individuals brings about a ‘constant interplay between social forces and
individual actions.’ The next chapter will examine exactly how this interplay can influence
the day to day professional practices of teachers.
15
Improvisation, responsiveness and professional judgement: Teacher action at classroom
level.
According to Clark and Yinger (1987:98), teachers are constantly engaged in creative
processes because of the unpredictable, uncertain and complex nature of the classroom.
They note that every teaching and learning situation is the result of ‘uniquely configured
events’ and requires unique solutions. Tripp (1993:18) conceptualises teaching in terms of
problem solving and describes the teacher’s task as to ‘problematise’ the critical incidents of
everyday practice. Noticing and capitalising on TMs requires a particular set of tools, a
certain understanding of and disposition towards learners and the learning process. Woods
(1990:33) highlights the importance of teachers ‘cultural attunement’ to their pupils and
suggests that alertness to and understanding of each situation in the classroom is a prerequisite to fruitful exchanges. This is similar to Eisner’s (1985) idea that connoisseurship in
teaching lies in the art of perception and appreciation. Woods however, emphasises the
unpredictable nature of classroom exchanges and notes that:
‘A brilliant and original programme of work cultivated over a weekend
might fall on stony ground on Monday morning, forcing a fall-back on
to routines.’
(Woods 1990:33)
This unpredictability stems from the many variables and dynamics which exist in everyday
classroom activity; factors ranging from the children, their experiences, personalities and
emotional states and the teacher’s preferences, confidence and approach, to the physical
environment and structure of the timetable. Such factors contribute to what Eisner
(1985:104) describes as the ‘inordinately complicated affair’ that is teaching. He cites
examples such as pupils’ expressions, posture and pace as factors to be interpreted and
made use of by the teacher, and wonders what the teacher is communicating to the pupils
via their the tone, use of praise and the pace of the lesson. How teachers manage and
capitalise on uncertainty is of crucial importance to this study. Woods (1990) posits that
breakthroughs in learning are sometimes the result of deliberate experimentation in which
the teacher plans for uncertainty. In such situations the interactions and activities may
involve the teacher and/or the pupils trying various methods, demonstrations, approaches,
settings or groupings. On other occasions, breakthroughs may be the result of sudden or
16
gradual realisations during classroom discourse; unplanned for and unanticipated.
Whatever the means by which the breakthrough occurs, the task of the teacher remains the
same, to seize it and capitalise on it.
Herbert (2010:70) highlights the similarities between the teacher and the artist, referring to
Schleiermacher’s notion that pedagogy is ‘art in practice’. Two particular features of this
comparison should be emphasised. Firstly, that learning emerges out of interaction and
secondly, that the course the learning takes is the result of negotiation and development of
an initial framework, which the teacher ‘bears in mind’.
Taking these in turn, the very nature of interaction presupposes that both parties (in this
case the teacher and the pupils) contribute to whatever is being created. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary (1988:283) to interact is ‘to act on each other’. The traditional
model of the teacher-pupil relationship in which the pupil is the passive recipient of
whatever the teacher transmits can barely be considered an interaction in this sense
because of the unidirectional flow of influence. In this interpretation of teaching and
learning the teacher influences the action, utterances and outputs of the learner, but not
vice versa. Schleiermacher’s assertion, inspired in part by Schiller, suggests that both
parties influence and respond to one another (Winkler and Brachmann, Eds., 2000), and
that the explanations, demonstrations, and facilitation of activity are, to a degree, subject to
those actions and utterances. In this view, a proportion of the planning for learning must
take place in the moment, during the lesson. That is not to underestimate the importance
of pre-planning, which in itself can be a response to learners’ previous utterances and
knowledge of their dispositions, however, in view of the unpredictability of children’s
questions and comments (Pollard, 2008) and the numerous factors determining theirs and
teachers’ behaviour, it could be argued that some of the most important decisions affecting
learning will take place during lessons, not necessarily before them.
This leads to the second point; planning provides a framework, a rough sketch or map from
which learning episodes develop. A teacher will know the desired destination and possible
directions for the lesson, but the route can be negotiated based partly on what happens in
the lesson itself. The ubiquitous and hermeneutic view of education espoused by
Schleiermacher (Winkler and Brachmann, Eds., 2000), Goethe (Oberski & McNally, 2007),
17
Pestalozzi (Gutek, 1987) and other European polymaths of the post-enlightenment era, in
which learning is viewed as non-linear, negotiated and sometimes unpredictable is of
interest here because they share a common conception of the teaching and learning
process. Since the goal of education, according to these pedagogues, is to provide a radical
response to the individual, teaching is seen as a process of interpretation, in which the
teacher acts, and then finds in the experienced results of that action (the learners’
responses) clues as to what should follow, a sort of trial and error approach. The key point
here is that until the initial action has been carried out, be it questioning, an activity,
challenge or classroom discourse, the next set of teacher actions remain unknown. The
implication here, elaborated upon by Herbert (2010) and Atkinson & Claxton (2000) is that
certain subtleties of individual pupils’ (and collective) needs emerge during lessons, and are
not apparent before them. Classroom interaction itself uncovers new perspectives on
learners’ dispositions, attitudes and understandings as they grapple with new concepts,
which are of use to the teacher in designing next steps and approaches. A key challenge for
teachers in responding in these moments is dealing with uncertainty.
Dreyfus’ (1981) ‘novice to expert’ rubric, Csikszentmihalyi’s (2008, 1990, 1997) notion of
‘Flow’ and Atkinson & Claxton’s (2000) examination of intuitive practice, provide an
interesting framework within which to further explore TMs and TMBs. According to
Dreyfus, the key characteristics of a novice are reliance on taught rules and plans
(Structure), limited situational awareness and a lack of discretionary judgement. In the
classroom this might translate as a high dependency on guidance from initial education, inservice training and pre-prepared plans; emphasis on one’s own performance and a limited
overview of children’s performance or classroom dynamics, and few, if any, judgements
made which deviate far from the lesson plan. The characteristics of the expert are the
direct opposites, little or no reliance on structures, comprehensive situational perception
and instinctive decision making. Dreyfus’ implication here is that development from novice
to expert takes place over time and tracks alongside experience and, whilst he attaches no
timeline to this transition, following it to its logical conclusion one might assume that
everyday classroom practice will only show characteristics of expertise after several years of
teaching. My own experience of teaching and of observing student teachers’ practice leads
me to question the validity of this assumption and raises a question about what other
18
factors might influence the development of expertise. The relationship between experience
and expertise will be explore further in later sections.
Csikszentmihalyi describes ‘Flow’ as a state of optimal performance in which ‘consciousness
is harmoniously ordered’ (2008:6) and intrinsic motivation high. Flow is a psychological
state of full absorption in which individuals perform tasks and strive to meet goals
effortlessly, and when creativity thinking peaks. There are similarities here with Dreyfus’
suggestions about expertise and one could posit that Flow might be a characteristic of the
expert, most notably the implication that optimal performance is characterised by
spontaneous, unanalysed thought and action. Csikszentmihalyi’s own analysis of what he
calls the Flow Channel indicates that Flow is not a constant state of mind and action,
individuals move in and out of the Channel as their own levels of skill and challenge,
boredom and anxiety shift. High levels of challenge and low levels of skill produce anxiety,
high levels of skill and low levels of challenge bring about boredom, both of which position
the protagonist outside the Flow Channel. It seems that experiencing Flow in action is
dependent on an individual’s relationship to the task at hand, their level of proficiency and
how well they are matched to the particular challenge. Here we find another correlation
with Dreyfus, how good one is at a particular activity bears strongly on the likelihood that
one will perform fluently and instinctively. There is also however, an important difference
in the way these two notions are conceptualised. According to Csikszentmihalyi Flow can be
experienced by novices as much as by experts. It is not a goal in itself, but rather a
psychological state one experiences when levels of skill and challenge are balanced, novices
are as likely to experience this in the early stages of development and experts are after
years of practice. In contrast, the characteristics of expertise are presented by Dreyfus as
unobtainable to novices. The language used to describe the two concepts also reveals a key
difference in the two conceptions. Expertise is explained in terms of what protagonists ‘do’,
whereas Flow is explained as something protagonists experience.
It is the accessibility of Flow to novices that makes it interesting as a tool for analysing
improvisation and responsiveness in teaching because it suggests that TMBs are perhaps as
likely to be seen in the everyday practice of inexperienced teachers as they are in that of
experienced ones. The difficulty though is that whereas in Csikszentmihalyi’s model the
novice takes on challenges proportionate to their experience, in teaching, the demands
19
made on newly qualified teachers are not dissimilar to those made on their more
experienced colleagues. The question remains therefore (and will be addressed later in my
description of the teacher participants and analysis of findings) whether the features of
professional practice associated with TMs and expertise can be expected or encouraged in
novice teachers.
A third lens through which TMBs can be analysed is that of intuition. Atkinson and Claxton
(2000) identify six varieties of (‘non-mystical’) intuition: Expertise, Learning, Judgement,
Sensitivity, Creativity and Problem-solving and Rumination. They cite Bastick (1982) who
identifies key features common to all varieties of intuition: a resistance to abstract,
analytical or logical thought, a tendency to see situations holistically, achieving synthesis
without the need to break the experience into its constituent parts first and an ability to
draw on experience in flexible and centripetal ways. In his analysis of intuition as
‘expertise’ Claxton (2000:34) offers the following description of professional practice:
‘The expert teacher may go through a whole lesson, adjusting or even
abandoning their actions and intentions as they go, without being conscious
of much reasoning, and without being able to say why or how they made the
‘decisions’ they did, or to what clues they were responding.’
This has clear parallels with how Dreyfus characterises expertise and Csikszentmihalyi’s
model of Flow. There is a necessary absence of premeditation and self-consciousness about
the action. On this, Claxton goes on to suggest that:
‘..becoming too aware of and reflective about one’s action, in the
heat of the moment, may result in a loss of fluency and even, in
extremes of self-consciousness, in paralysis.’
The suggestion is that feeling one’s way, holding on loosely to lesson plans and teaching
without knowing outcomes in advance can facilitate fluency and responsiveness. This
appears to be an endorsement of the value of ‘not always knowing what one is doing.’
Atkinson and Claxton (2000).
20
The teachers participating in this research used the term creative when describing the
attributes teachers need in order to notice and capitalise on TMs. Creativity is a somewhat
panoptic concept (Sternberg, 1999) which has been particularly difficult to characterise in
research (Boden, 1990) because of its broad scope. When humans create, they call upon a
wide constellation of skills, dispositions and abilities and these are influenced by an equally
wide range of environmental and contextual factors. Creativity is much bigger than TMBs
and not all TMBs might necessarily be described as creative, however there are certain skills
and dispositions within that constellation upon which teachers might call in a TM.
Improvisation, for example, is not creativity itself but some creative expression results
directly from it. Taking risks is not in itself creative, but creative people are often risk takers.
Intuition and Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow concept are not creativity, yet both are routinely
associated with creative endeavour (Atkinson and Claxton, 2000; Csikszentmihalyi’s, 2008,
1990, 1997; Henessey and Amabile, 1988). In the insights and analysis section I will take a
closer look at these skills and dispositions, the conditions in which they may arise and
discuss how creativity relates to TMs and TMBs.
21
Methodology
The Teachers:
The three participants in this research project are qualified, practising primary school
teachers of varying lengths of service. The following table shows profile information for
each teacher which is relevant to the analysis which follows.
Gender
Years
Management
Current Number
experience responsibilities
year
Age range
Other teaching
in class
experience
experience
30
Year 2
Civil Servant.
group/s
Amy
female
3
none
Year 3
Animal
demonstrator
at a zoo.
Robert
Rufus
male
Male
15
23 years
Deputy Head
Mixed
None
22
Years 3-6
1 year teaching
class
grade 6 (11-12
yrs 4,5
yr olds) in
&6
Canada
Year 5
30
Years 3-6
1 year teaching
currently, but
grade 3 (7-8
previously Key
year olds) in
Stage 2 leader.
Australia
In the interest of promoting individual agency through this process each teacher was asked
to choose a pseudonym (as above) and write their own brief introduction, including
whatever information they chose about themselves.
Rufus: has been teaching for twenty three years. He began his career in inner London,
working as firstly a class teacher and then a support teacher for children with English as an
additional language before returning to class teaching. He then taught in Australia for a year
as part of an exchange programme. In 2000 he became a Key Stage Two leader in an inner
city school in Bristol. For the past five years he has returned once again to class teaching
22
while occasionally supplementing his income by training volunteers from local businesses
who come into school to support children in their maths.
Robert: has been a primary school teacher for fifteen years and is currently deputy head of
a small rural school on the outskirts of Bristol. He has taught previously in the suburbs of
Bristol and rural east Essex. In his role as deputy head he mentors and offers pastoral
support to other teachers as well as being a critical friend to the head teacher. He is
passionate about children, their learning and all round development. He enjoys getting
children to think critically and creatively. He is also the ICT co-ordinator at his current
school.
Amy is in her fourth year of primary teaching during which she has taught at the same
school in a large suburban area in north Bristol. She has taught year two throughout her
career so far. Amy's additional responsibilities are music subject leader which she has held
for three years. Amy has previously worked in the civil service and as a volunteer animal
demonstrator in a zoo at weekends.
Professional context:
All three teachers, whilst working in different schools are subject to certain common
contextual factors. Each has their own class for which they plan and teach the curriculum.
Each has a line manager, in the case of Rufus and Amy this is their key stage co-ordinator
and for Robert this is the head teacher. All three have professional pupil progress targets
relating to performance management objectives which are reviewed at least annually. At
the time of the focus group discussion Amy had undergone an Ofsted inspection the
previous week, Rufus’ school was inspected in the autumn term earlier in the year and given
a second consecutive ‘Satisfactory’ judgement and Robert’s school was anticipating an
inspection.
23
Gaining insights into practice
The research paradigm of this project is largely interpretive. Whilst acknowledging some of
the rigours of the positivist paradigm (e.g. checklist data and video evidence) it is
characterised primarily by the subjective dimensions of participant observation and
personal and professional reflection. (I use the term ‘Professional feelings’ to describe how
the teachers feel about their improvisatory behaviours in the classroom.) The process of
gathering insights and interpreting practice is intended to be a developmental opportunity
for the participants, thus demonstrating absolute respect (Levinas’ ‘Radical Alterity’, 1989)
towards the teachers involved. The underlying philosophy here is hermeneutic and reflects
my own assumptions about the nature of teaching and learning as an exchange, and about
my beliefs on the ‘social realities’ (Blaikie, 2000) of the practice of teaching. The design of
the strategies outlined below is rooted in the epistemological belief that the most effective
way to understand what, why and how teachers do what they do is to give them the
opportunity and tools to tell you themselves; to understand the practices and behaviours
from within (Burrell and Morgan, 1979).
Insights into the teachers’ professional experience were collected in the following forms and
via the following means:
1. TMB Checklist– the teachers used a checklist of TMBs each day for one week to log
those they have made use of. The behaviours on the list were initially identified by
me but extended and modified through consultation with the teachers. At an initial
meeting they made suggestions of additional TMBs and through discussion the
wording, definitions and interpretations of each behaviour was negotiated and
agreed. It was decided by consensus that in addition to the defined behaviours,
there would also be a category titled ‘Other’ in which they would record new TMBs
which occurred to them during the process. It seems appropriate that a study
examining improvisation and the classroom as a ‘dynamic system’ (de Bott, 2007)
should be open to novel behaviours arising in the Teachable Moment. The
participants completed five versions of the checklist over the week of their choosing
during the Autumn term of 2011, highlighting the behaviours and indicating the
context (e.g. lesson, stage of the lesson etc). (These can be found in Appendix A.)
24
2. TMB Reflective Log– each teacher also completed a daily entry in a reflective log in
which they enlarged upon their TMBs and explored their own professional feelings
about this aspect of professional practice in this area over the week. There were
prompt questions to aid their thinking, however the remit here was flexible. The log
could be used to elaborate further on one particular TM and the TMBs which
accompanied it; it could be used to give an overview of improvisations in one
particular lesson, half day or day. They could explore the wider contexts
(environment, hierarchies, relationships etc.) which may have influenced their
behaviour. The only stipulation placed on this activity was that participants should
explore how it felt to be in that moment (Professional feelings). My hope was that
the teachers would each take ownership over this reflective process. (These can also
be found in Appendix A.)
3. Videoed Lesson – each participant videoed themselves teach one lesson during the
week and watched it back, evaluating their own improvisations and intuitions in
TMs. There were no specific questions or prompts for this analysis, but all
participants were asked to make some notes whilst watching the video about the
TMBs they observed in their own practice. Only the teachers themselves watched
their own videoed lessons. Their own observations, evaluations and analysis of
themselves in action formed the basis of the last activity, a semi-structured focus
group discussion.
4. Focus group discussion– all three participants took part in the discussion and were
asked to reflect on their TMBs as captured in the checklist, reflective log and videoed
lesson, and on their thoughts and professional feelings about this aspect of their
professional development. The questions also prompted them to consider factors at
different levels influencing their behaviour. (Questions used in the discussion can be
found in Appendix B.) In addition, within this group interview the teachers were
given two tasks which they carried out independently as a group. Task 1: (appendix
C) to discuss and decide upon five likely characteristics of teachers who are expert at
improvising in TMs. Task 2: (appendix D) to discuss and decide upon five necessary
25
characteristics of schools in which such teachers thrive. For both of these tasks the
teachers were left alone. Finally, the participants were prompted to evaluate the
research process.
Ethics in brief:
The teachers and I discussed the aims and objectives of the research in advance. They were
given the opportunity to ask questions and clarify expectations. Their participation was on
the basis of voluntary informed consent and the right to withdraw at any point during the
process (BERA, 2011). It was explained that neither their names or the names of their
schools would not be published, this enabled them to contribute candidly at each stage of
the research without anxiety about the consequences (Newby, 2010). This was of particular
importance because, as discussed in the previous section, a key factor influencing TMBs is a
teacher’s sense that they are permitted to improvise and exercise their own judgement.
Comments alluding to lack of permission prohibiting such behaviours could be seen as
criticism of line managers, head teachers or even school governance of their respective
schools, therefore anonymity was essential to the process.
Situated ethics and postmodern evaluation: Co-researching with the ‘Other’.
When viewed as situated knowledge (Simons, 2000), ethics and research methods become
intertwined and arguably are most usefully be discussed together. The following section
explores these elements in relation to postmodern interpretations of qualitative research
and their relevance to this study.
Levinas (1989) criticises the way that research ethics are dominated by epistemology in his
rejection of binary oppositions that have traditionally held sway in qualitative research,
with promises of clarity, certainty and universal generalisation. That is, ethics understood
primarily as evaluators obtaining accurate data from subjects. This, he writes has led to a
lack of respect for the Other. The crux of the criticism here is that in the dominant
methodologies the Other (participants) is seen as distinct; an ‘object of knowledge.’ (Usher,
2000:176). By drawing on Cartesian dualisms of mind-body, cognition-emotion and
26
individual-social to seek absolutes and certainty from participants and data derived from
them, the researcher risks failing to acknowledge what is uncertain, or unknowable. Here
lies an ethical compromise, that the Other becomes reduced to something knowable and
universal, losing his or her singularity. In a useful overview of post-colonial commentators
(Trinh, 1989; Spivak, 1993; Bhabha, 1994) Stronach and Maclure (1997:4) suggest that
‘disappointment’ with the myth of representational clarity (post-structuralism) is something
researchers in social sciences should both seek out and find comfort with. Conceptualising
the Other in part as inaccessible and unrepresentable is, according to Levinas, more
respectful. In response to this I have avoided any attempt to objectify the teachers, either
through psycho-analysis, judgement or categorising behaviour; preferring instead to let
them tell their own stories.
Levinas borrows analysis from Lacan’s (1973) work on identity and suggests that the radical
alterity of the Other, the unassailable uniqueness of each individual, is what is at stake. In
Lacan’s conception of the Other , the individual is considered a ‘locus’, an originator of self
and can only become a subject (i.e. subordinate or ‘participant’) if they choose to adopt this
position. In this study, the teachers volunteered because they recognised the value in
opportunities for professional dialogue and reflection which the process facilitated.
Centrally controlled curricula radically subordinates individuals, relieving them of their
alterity. It was my intention that the evaluative processes in this research would not
confound this tendency but, if anything, counteract it in some way. Teaching is a socially
complex phenomena and this research aims to represent the multiplicity of its participants’
voices and their lived experience.
The practical implications of this concept of ethics (that absolute respect for participants
underpins all activity) are that what could be described as a data gathering exercise
becomes reframed as an attempt to come to a deeper understanding of practice, and that
the ‘methods’ employed are instruments which uphold, preserve and encourage the agency
and Otherness (whatever that might be and however it may manifest itself) of the
participants and do not undermine it. In other words, the means of finding out in this study
should not inhibit or discredit the object of its gaze – personal agency. My ‘position’
(Thomas, 2009) in the study is therefore not just an ontological question, but also an ethical
27
one, and has to do with where power (Scott & Morrison, 2007) resides within the evaluative
process.
In attempting to define postmodernism, Hebdige (1988:226) speaks favourably of the
‘erosion of triangular formations of power and knowledge’ which place the expert at the
apex and the ‘masses’ at the base. There are parallels with Marxism here, however this also
provides a useful analogy for thinking about the ethics of qualitative evaluation in the postpositivist paradigm. To conduct observations of the participants in the classroom, to watch
and analyse the videos of them teaching and make my own judgements about their
improvisations would be to place myself at the apex and keep them firmly at the base. They
provide the footage, I provide the analysis; thus I become an accomplice in stripping them of
their agency and self-efficacy. In doing so it would also perpetuate one of the key
hypotheses of this study; that surveillance, assessment, judgements, performance targets
and other technologies of power, limit improvisatory and intuitive professional practice. By
asking participants to evaluate themselves through reflection, observation and discussion I
tried to avoid replicating the architecture (surveillance, accountability, prescription) of the
system within which they practice.
If a radical respect for the Other in research demands less focus on measurable and useable
recommendations is it of any use? It seems legitimate to ask how one argues for the
authoritativeness or usefulness of epistemologies and research methodologies which are
unlikely to influence politicians or inform policy. Stronach and Maclure (1997:6) advocate
not trying. Their argument rejects any
‘attempt to claim authority for educational research by ‘getting our
message across’ more clearly to policy-makers, press and public; or...
imposing a unanimity of voice; or...offering simple solutions to intractable
problems such as ‘school effectiveness’.
The argument here is that the issues which occupy time, energy and column inches of those
engaged in mainstream educational debate are in themselves trivialities and misnomers and
can therefore only be discussed using ‘populist rhetoric’ and positivist vocabulary.
Postmodern or poststructuralist evaluation of practice on the other hand views the
28
limitations of its own interpretations as its strength, presenting complexity, contradiction
and uncertainty as indicators of authenticity and perturbing the relationships between
causes and effects, and reality and impression. This suggests that far from ‘usefulness’ and
‘application’ being the unfortunate victims of respectful research practices, they may in fact
not be desired outcomes in the first place.
The teachers in this study evaluated their own practice by identifying and analysing
instances in which they seized and capitalised upon Teachable Moments, reflecting on the
circumstances from which their improvisations arose (TMs), strategies and intuitions they
employed in the moment (TMBs) and their ‘professional feelings’ about this. This selfevaluative approach places them firmly in the driving seat (Treleaven, 1994; Reason, 1994)
of the process, but does also raise questions of validity. Reflections and initial conclusions
are from the teachers own perspectives and, as such, subject to their interpretation of
situations, of TMs and TMBs, and to their professional identity and self-efficacy. This
emphasis on self-evaluation is an important aspect of the research as it acknowledges the
inevitability of subjectivity in qualitative evaluation and places the teachers themselves in
the role of co-researchers and co-interpreters (engineers of research, not consumers of it);
radically respected. This feature of the research however, marginalises objectivity and any
notion that there is an ‘independent reality’ (Ratner, 2002:10) that can be grasped and
analysed.
This poses a problem for the post-structuralist researcher. Documenting and disseminating
data about an independent reality is considerably less demanding than negotiating the
maelstrom of uncertainty that post-structuralist and postmodernist paradigms can be.
Hargeaves (1994) argues that adopting postmodernism as a research position is inadvisable
due to its relativistic nature. Stronach and Maclure (1997:9) speak of the desire, apparent in
educational texts, to ‘contain’ postmodernism. The implication here is that by embracing
the relativist position with open arms, research activity may glean little or nothing of any
disseminatable value. They cite Lather (1991) who prefers a divide and rule strategy over
containment. Here the desirable characteristics of postmodernist research (democratic,
progressive, critical, emancipatory) are siphoned away from the less desirable (reactionary,
fascistic, acquiescent, nihilistic). In this research relativism is actively encouraged, however
it is tempered by my own evaluations of the teachers’ self-evaluation. The intention here is
29
to be ‘open’ Stronach and Maclure (1997) without opening up to the ‘abyss’. To resist
closure (looking for absolutes) but not completely. If, as Giddens (1986) believes,
objectivism and subjectivism are not mutually exclusive, it should be possible to hold both
lenses in balance with one another; finding something of disseminatable value within an
interpretive process. In this case, the object of value might be a question rather than a
conclusion, or a tool for refining discussion and debate, rather than new knowledge. It is
hoped that this research will contribute towards a wider discussion about teacher autonomy
and professional judgement.
One feature of this research which epitomises the democratic approach is that the list of
behaviours against which the teachers evaluated their practice was drawn up collectively in
the initial meeting. In order to clarify what is and is not considered a TM or TMB for the
purposes of the research, the teachers gave examples of typical classroom practices and
asked if these would fall under one or other of the TMB categories on the checklist. During
discussion about these typical practices and about behaviours which might fall under the
‘other’ category on the checklist, the teachers themselves suggested alternatives. In this
way the process of identifying the behaviours to be highlighted and evaluated was collegiate
and the categories of evaluation developed collaboratively. The principle benefit here
according to Schensul and Schensul (1992) is that participants bring expert knowledge of the
field. In this case, by identifying and articulating some of the categories of behaviours under
evaluation, the teachers actually began to think in an evaluative way about their practice
before the reflective process had formally begun.
The issues of reliability and validity, whilst always an important consideration, are perhaps
less dominant in a post-modern interpretive research context. Since this study sets out to
interpret insights and experiences rather than to prove anything, questions about the
validity of the ‘data’ are less pertinent perhaps than questions about the interpretations. As
Punch (2009:244) notes, ‘reliability is a central concept in measurement’, however, this
study aims to gauge, or get a sense of teachers’ actions and reflections; not measure them.
Nevertheless, there were certain factors to be mindful of which may have influenced the
teachers’ practice and reflections.
30
Firstly, something similar to the Hawthorn effect was possible in the TMB checklist,
reflective log and videoed lesson. Rufus commented on this in the focus group discussion,
suggesting that when monitoring a particular aspect of one’s own practice, it is difficult to
know whether one’s actions are entirely natural.
“I don’t know whether I was doing this or that because that’s what I would
naturally have done, or because I was looking out for those things.”
Two things mitigated against this being problematic. The teachers were all aware of this
phenomenon and cognisant of it during the various stages of the research. In addition, their
specific actions in practice represented a relatively small part of the overall data, and was of
comparatively little importance compared to their reflections on the concepts of TMs and
TMBs, their feelings whilst teaching and analysis of their own professional autonomy.
Documenting their everyday practice was a means to initiate reflection, evaluation and
analysis, not an end in itself.
Secondly, the issue of researcher influence and power relationships. Every effort was made
to redistribute power (Ebbs, 1996) in this qualitative process. The teachers’ voices were
encouraged in all stages of the research, however relational dynamics exist in all
interpersonal exchanges and the focus group discussion was no exception to this. Although
it was made clear to all three teachers that there were no set or expected answers to any of
the questions and that they could reflect freely on their experiences, potential always exists
for participants to feel inhibited about saying certain things and perhaps to want to present
themselves to each other in a particular way. My epistemological position was
characterised by what Karnieli-Miller et al.(2009) refer to as the co-production of
knowledge, in which ‘the division between researcher and subject is blurred, and control
over representation is increasingly shared’ (Gergen & Gergen, 2000, p. 1035). There were
one or two small indicators of inhibition at the beginning of the focus group as might be
expected, however these did not appear to impact on the quality of the discussion.
During the focus group interview all three teachers commented that the process of
evaluating their own professional behaviour was useful to them. In the case of Rufus, it
brought a significant living contradiction (Whitehead, 1988) into relief, but also reassured
31
him about aspects of his own practice. For Robert, the process refocused his attention on
his educational values and encouraged him to think in depth about why he does certain
things when teaching. Amy reported that the self-evaluation had convinced her of the
importance of improvisation in teaching and helped her realise that this was an area of
strength for her.
Insights and analysis:
Significant themes which arise from the focus group discussion, the group tasks, the selfevaluation and the video reflection exercise and which were common to all three teachers’
experiences are presented and reviewed in this section. These are risk-taking, creativity,
confidence and permission. The first part relates to the nature of these Teachable
Moments, factors which trigger them, the conditions in which they arise and how the
teachers responded to them. The second part relates to factors which influence teachers’
TM Behaviour and explores recurring concepts such as autonomy, permission and
professional trust, to which all evaluation and discussion of TMs and TMBs in this study
regularly returned. I have drawn on quotations from the teachers’ checklists, reflective
journals, group tasks and the focus group discussion throughout to illustrate and comment
on their perspectives.
Understanding Teachable Moments:
TMs identified by the teachers fell broadly into two categories, expected and unexpected;
the latter being by far the most commonly occurring. Expected TMs are those which arise in
lessons in which planning is minimal and improvisation is expected or encouraged. These
were described by Robert as moments “designated” for responsiveness to children’s ideas,
questions and concerns. The most common context for this was pastoral, in sessions such
as Circle Time, in which the whole class discuss social, emotional and moral questions
relating to the children’s experience. It is interesting to note that all three teachers felt
significantly more permission from Head teachers and line managers to improvise in the
context of children’s social and emotional development than in the context of their
32
academic development. Robert described how he began each Circle Time with one or two
set questions, after which he improvised the rest of the session, following the children’s
lead:
“I have these set questions like ‘how are you feeling?’ and ‘what are
you looking forward to?’ but these are really just a plinth from which
I can gauge the emotional temperature of the children. After that, it’s
all Teachable Moments because I haven’t got a clue in advance what
they’re going to bring up.”
The issue of trust came up several times during the focus group discussion and group tasks,
and it is interesting to note the contexts in which the teachers felt trusted by their line
managers to improvise and those in which they did not. Though circle time is structured
differently in the three schools, there was unanimous agreement that pastoral care whether
in structured or unstructured moments, was considered a suitable site for improvisation and
following intuitions. Rufus described these as occasions when “the box (referring to boxes
on planning sheets) is left deliberately blank.” Other contexts in which this was deemed to
be permitted were early morning work (during registration) and small group reading. One
interpretation of the apparent permissiveness here is that when measured against national
priorities and the standards agenda, these are relatively low stakes activities. This raises the
possibility that one could tell what a head teacher valued by examining when and where
they permit or encourage teachers to improvise.
The majority of TMs described by the teachers were unexpected. These moments are
unplanned for and arise incidentally or tangentially out of classroom discourse and the
trigger could come either from pupils or teachers, or from neither. Pupil prompted TMs
tended to arise from children’s questions, anecdotes, changes in emotional state and
misunderstandings, to which teachers respond; as in the following example from Rufus’
journal:
“DT lesson. It was meant to be a straight forward introduction about
forces, but became a discussion/demonstration of gravity as it was clear
that this was something the children had not encountered or discussed before.”
33
Here, according to Rufus the TM arose from a realisation that there was a mismatch
between assumed and actual understanding. It could be argued that better knowledge of
the children’s understandings would have pre-empted this, nevertheless, the moment was
seized and capitalised upon. Amy gave a similar example in her journal:
“Literacy: I wanted the children to make their own instructions to make
a Chinese lantern. I pointed to the lanterns the children had made the
previous week, hanging from the ceiling and asked them to talk to the
person next to them about how they were made. I soon realised they
had forgotten and some were talking about Florence Nightingale lanterns.
I quickly got a piece of paper, some glue, scissors and tissue paper, laid
them on a table and asked the children the same question. This time it
was much better.”
In this example the TM arose out of children’s misunderstandings. Again it could be argued
that better assessment of children’s learning or knowledge of their capacities would have
made the adjustments unnecessary. What this particular TM highlights though, is the
intersubjectivity between teacher and pupils, that pupil learning demands a match between
teacher assumed and pupil actual understanding.
In another example from Amy’s log she describes how she adapted a mathematics task to
match the understandings of certain groups of children in the class. In fact, an intervention
with one group led to Amy redesigning the plenary of the lesson for all the children.
“I did my plenary like this, instead of what was on the plan.”
These examples raise an interesting point linking the nature of TMs and the nature of the
teaching and learning process. In all cases, an unpredictable event was followed by
adjustment which provides a useful illustration of how unpredictability in the dynamics of
an environment demands improvisation from those managing that environment. If teaching
and learning is a set of dynamic processes and children’s understandings and capabilities are
also dynamic then one might expect lessons to be an ongoing series of judgements,
misjudgements and adjustments on the part of the teacher (and indeed the learner).
Interestingly however, the prevailing feeling among the teachers in this study was that
34
misjudging children’s understandings and capabilities whilst being observed was a sign of
poor teacher assessment and poor knowledge of pupils. Far from being considered a skill,
these inevitable moments of dynamic judgement and adjustment are frowned upon. Rufus,
whose videoed lesson was also observed by his line manager as part of an ongoing internal
scrutiny process, summed it up this way in his journal,
“I felt a real pressure of expectations working against any spontaneity,
particularly the idea of pace inhibiting my confidence in going ‘off script’.”
For a teacher of so many years experience to express this decline in confidence struck me as
interesting. However, this is a stark illustration of the possibility for intuitional paralysis
which Claxton (2000) describes when professionals are forced to focus too much on the
detail of what they are doing in the moment.
Teacher initiated TMs, also unexpected, are those in which inspiration strikes resulting in a
new approach, a different style of presentation or additional content. These “epiphany
moments” as Rufus described them are not prompted by the children but by the teacher’s
experience and imagination, and these could be described as teacher realisations rather
than direct responses to the children. Rufus went on to describe an incident in which whilst
teaching about measurement in mathematics he was suddenly reminded about something
he had heard on the radio that morning about cubits and the equity of human arm span and
height. He wove this into his teaching of that lesson and a child came to him the following
morning excited about having discussed it at home with his parents. It is interesting to note
that during the focus group discussion Rufus seemed quite sure that there was little scope
for TMs and TMBs in his teaching due to the frequency of internal surveillance, pending an
Ofsted inspection. He described conscious attempts to improvise as,
“Squeezed in surreptitiously”
as though doing something subversive. His checklist of TMBs however, indicates that he
was engaged in most of the pre-identified TMBs throughout the week. This suggests that
some of these improvisatory behaviours can be sufficiently embedded in everyday practice,
or be subtle enough to go unnoticed by the teacher themselves. This sense of doing
35
something that would not be approved of was clear from all three teachers, and will be
discussed in more detail later.
There was agreement from all three teachers that holding back on these “epiphany”
moments, or even rejecting them outright was at times, just as important as making use of
them. Rufus again, explained how a
“grinding gear change”
arising from a sudden thought or idea from the teacher in the moment can disrupt the flow
of the lesson and be an impediment, rather than a support, to learning. These crossroads
moments seem pivotal to TMBs. The ability to make a quick judgement about embracing or
rejecting an idea may be just as important for teachers as the openness to ideas in the first
place. The conditions, including physical, emotional and psychological factors, in which TMs
arise will be discussed later.
The third category of unexpected TMs is that in which extrinsic events, for example sudden
snow, an unexpected visitor or an assembly which over runs, forces a change of plan, a
restructuring of timetable or a rethink of lesson content. These moments can add, or
remove urgency from the pace of classroom discourse, force teachers into periods of
improvisation and introduce novelty or disruption into the teaching and learning exchange.
Amy illustrated this using the example of a teacher’s judgements following a class assembly
or Christmas play performed to parents,
“You’re not expecting the next lesson to be brilliant, so you decide we
won’t do that, we’ll do something else. You know you’re not going to
get any work out of them so you talk about it (the performance), evaluate
it, ask how it went and how they feel about it before you can move on.”
In an instance such as this, the excitement of the event forces a slowing of the pace of
transition to the next lesson. Robert shared a similar example in which he cancelled a
literacy lesson on his first morning back after paternity leave to show pictures of his new
daughter to the class. His analysis of this decision was as follows,
“The children just had to know about the birth, the baby and how it was
36
all going and there was almost no point in doing anything else until we’d
got that out of the way. They couldn’t think about anything else at that point.”
Asked if he would describe that as a professional judgement, he replied,
“Yes! I would exactly describe that as a professional judgement.
I think it’s advanced teacher skills in fact.”
In both these examples, whilst neither Amy nor Robert regretted their decisions to deviate
from their timetables, the desire to justify their actions was apparent. This suggests two
things. Firstly, that the replacement activities were in some way subordinate to those
originally timetabled and that their legitimacy was therefore questionable, and secondly
that their line managers may not consider their deviations to be “advanced teacher skills”.
Conditions in which TMs arise:
A theme revisited several times throughout the focus group discussion was that of risk
taking. Amy illustrated this with an example from her own practice in which, with a few
minutes to go before a literacy lesson on writing eye-witness accounts, she decided to wrap
a piece of cloth around her waist and put an old curtain on her head and enter her
classroom in character as the maid of Samuel Pepys. After a few minutes of role play in
character she removed the costume and the lesson progressed more or less as initially
planned and the children produced their best writing of the year so far according to Mary.
Robert shared a similar example in which he was about to begin a lesson he had planned on
writing speeches.
“I started by thinking that I’d just tell them they had to write a speech,
but then just as I was about to begin I decided it would be much more
exciting for them to receive it like a secret mission. So, I explained that
Winston Churchill had a sore throat and that they would have to deliver
his Christmas address, meanwhile my LSA was busy putting this challenge
into ‘top secret’ envelopes for me to give out.’
37
A risk inherent in these scenarios seems less to do with the actual activities and more to do
with the practice of leaving decisions to the last minute. The risk is not just whether the
activity will succeed or fail to inspire the children, but also whether an idea for an activity
will come at all. Analysis by the teachers of their own and each other’s TMs led Robert to
declare that,
“There is a fine line between my best and worst lessons.”
The implication here was that these quick ideas do not always work, but when they do they
make the risk worth taking. This highlights the dynamic nature of teaching and learning and
raises an interesting question about the mental and emotional composure of teachers in
which they are most likely to have moments of inspiration. Amy and Robert’s evaluation of
these instances suggested that fear and adrenaline were important factors. Commenting on
Amy dressing up, Robert said:
“I bet you wouldn’t have thought of doing that whilst sitting in front
of a computer (alluding to planning by filling in boxes on a proforma)
and I wouldn’t have thought of my thing (mission in envelopes) had
the pressure not been on with only five minutes to go.”
According to the experiences of these teachers, leaving certain things deliberately
unplanned (leaving the box empty) is one way of setting the conditions in which TMBs may
arise. The risk here is that no useful idea will emerge, but also that the inverse may be true;
that being thoroughly planned for teaching and knowing each step of the lesson in advance
could stifle moments of inspiration. Pollard (2008) is not alone in suggesting that planning
should be organic, not static. In both cases, Amy and Robert were not however, completely
unplanned. They had plans, but modified them at the last minute in favour of new ideas. It
is possible that the security which comes from having a plan, in fact sets the conditions for
new ideas to arise. There was agreement between the teachers that this is where
experience plays a part. As Amy pointed out,
“The more of this type of lesson (lively/spontaneous) you’ve taught,
the more likely you are to have a good idea.”
38
This correlates with one response in the group task describing the attributes of the TM
teacher for which Rufus, Amy and Robert agreed that a broad range of interests and life
experience would be essential. In addition to life and teaching experience, it could also be
argued that experience of the sensation of needing a quick idea is a crucial factor. The
deliberate act of being unplanned, the necessity to have a plan, the emotional state of fear
and the psychological state of openness which accompany unpreparedness may also require
rehearsal.
So far insights from the research activities about the nature of TMs point to a few key
hypotheses. Firstly, TMs and TMBs are an organic response to the dynamics of the
classroom, and TMs rely on what both teachers and pupils do. Secondly, that whilst TMs are
often unexpected, they can also be encouraged by risk taking and deliberate or strategic
unpreparedness on the part of teachers. Thirdly, this is considered to be subversive teacher
behaviour. With this in mind, it appears that one factor either encouraging or inhibiting
TMBs is teachers themselves; another is expectations from line management. These two
factors will be discussed at length in the next sections.
Experiencing the Teachable Moment: Creativity and Confidence
Drawing on the engagement and experiences of the participating teachers, a definition of
the Teachable Moment has evolved to include moments of spontaneity, improvisation,
creativity and adjustment. These moments involve responding to events outside of
teachers’ control, as well as deliberate attempts to instigate unpreparedness in an attempt
to remain open to inspiration. In group task one (appendix C), Rufus, Amy and Robert
identified creativity and confidence among five characteristics a teacher would need to
improvise effectively in the classroom. Exactly how these attributes contribute to a state of
openness and how they can be experienced and harnessed by teachers, warrants further
analysis. This section will explore how they relate to TMs and TMBs.
One suggestion from Herbert (2010:79) is that any teacher prepared to take a risk should be
able to tap into what she calls ‘the creativity of the unconscious’, one explanation for the
source of unplanned and unexpected ideas which arise. Research by Runco (2004; 2006;
39
2007), Griffin & McDermott (1998) and Sternberg & Lubart (1996) suggests that some
people are more naturally predisposed to improvisation than others. Risk taking, originality,
playfulness, sensitivity and a preference for complexity are cited, along with autonomy,
independence, non-conformity and openness as characteristics of creative individuals. This
hypothesis presents a problem for attempts to theorise about TMB and make
recommendations for its development. If teacher behaviour is directly linked to disposition,
then attempts to encourage the development of particular behaviours may result in slow or
negligible outcomes. Nickerson (1999) contends however that creativity is a product of
both nature and nurture and agrees that, whilst tenuous, there is evidence to suggest that
creative capacities can be improved.
An interesting suggestion emerging from research into creativity by Barron (1963:157) is
that
‘The creative individual is one who has learned to prefer irregularities
and apparent disorder and to trust himself to make new order.’
A correlation can be drawn here between the creative individual who is comfortable with
uncertainty, and the teacher who has chosen to leave the introduction to their lesson partly
to chance, as in the examples from Amy and Robert. Both are taking risks, both are relying
on certainty coming out of uncertainty and both are trusting that ideas will follow. This
moment of uncertainty, described by Amy and Robert as characterised by fear and
adrenaline, is a form of adversity. Albert (1978) claimed that creativity arises from
adversity. In the case of a TM, the adversity may be no more than an awareness that a
planned activity is not resonating with the learners, or that there is no planned activity as
yet. In this situation a temporary withdrawal from the problem at hand (Ward & Saunders,
2003) often results in a sudden realisation or insight, as with Archimedes recognising the
principle of water displacement or Kekule’s realisation about the structure of Benzene.
Whilst not pedagogic in context, these examples do illustrate a psychological framework
concerning the way the conscious and unconscious minds work. A hypothesis presented by
Ward and Saunders (2003) suggests that creative insights and ideas are often not available
to the conscious mind at all and that only by ceasing conscious effort can they be accessed.
40
This is consistent with Robert’s description of how and when ideas come to him in the
moment.
“For me it’s a bit like Bob Monkhouse on, what was it, Celebrity Squares?
He used to have this banter with the audience, they would call out and he
would do this improvisation with them and he could only do it live, they
tried to rehearse it but he could only do it in the moment. When they
asked people to call specific things out he simply couldn’t do it, but in the
moment he could always get that old joke out of his head and deliver it.”
In this example, the conscious effort which limits creativity is the deliberate attempt to be
creative. Robert aligns his experience with that of a comedian; when he tries to be
spontaneous he rarely is, but when he operates unconsciously in the moment spontaneity
flows. Here an interesting point arises about the reflective journal and video reflection
activities. Did the teachers’ deliberate, conscious evaluation of their own TMBs prevent
them from accessing creative potential in any given moment? Rufus posed this very
question in his reflective journal.
Amy described a similar instance in her reflective log, in which she changed her mind about
an approach to teaching addition:
“Changed the plan before I even started. Thought having a 100 square
would help them. On the spot I made up a rhyme about adding 11
(across one, down one...) Thought it might help!”
There is a similarity here with the concept of optimal experience. The experience, described
explicitly by Csikszentmihalyi and implicitly by Robert and Amy is one in which ideas flow
without obstruction. Csikszentmihalyi’s contention that individuals can deliberately
organise their consciousness to experience Flow as and when they choose bears some
relation to Robert’s assertion that we put ourselves in the position where inspiration can
come. Interestingly, the position Robert described was characterised primarily by fear due
to the imperative to be inspired, whereas the position in which one experiences Flow is
described as a more positive ‘can do’ state of mind.
41
Ward and Saunders’ (2003) definition of creativity is useful to this discussion due to its
inclusion of behaviour and contextually appropriateness:
‘Creativity is the result of the convergence of basic cognitive processes,
core domain knowledge and environmental, personal and motivational
factors which allow an individual to produce an object or behaviour that
is considered both novel and appropriate in a particular context.’
(electronic journal – no page number given)
A creative teacher based on this definition would not only have original ideas and develop
original approaches suitable for the classroom and the particular children they teach, but
also behave in creative ways; this could include deliberately leaving space for inspiration in
the moment. Attempts to identify types of creativity have led to some interesting
distinctions that are helpful in examining the psychology of the TM. Boden’s (1990)
conception of psychological creativity, in which creative ideas are novel in the mind of the
individual, though not necessarily historically new, describes much of the creativity
employed by these teachers in TMs. A particular idea may be tried and tested, perhaps
even by the teacher in question, the creativity in the TM therefore becomes knowing exactly
when and how to use and adapt it in the current context. This is the role of experience, as
identified by Rufus, Amy and Robert, and is similar to Czikszentmihalyi’s (1988) classification
of personally creative people who adopt original ideas and perspectives, but whose ideas do
not radically alter domains of endeavour.
Whilst spontaneity is not essential to creativity, it is characteristic of some creative activity.
Johnson-Laird (1988:209) describes creative improvisation as occurring when it is necessary
to ‘work rapidly within a framework.’ In the classroom that framework might be the
timetable or the lesson plan. He goes on to hypothesize that even within rigid frameworks
gaps may appear which can be filled with a rapid choice from the creative individual. This
raises an interesting question about the will of the teacher to improvise. According to
Johnson-Laird’s suggestion, teachers who choose to remain open to TMs may find
opportunities to work around, or perhaps subvert the frameworks within which they
operate. This relationship between framework and improvisation is reminiscent of the
Giddens’ position on structure and agency. I will pick up this in the next section.
42
One aspect of creativity which is commonly identified and which differs from the
spontaneous action of the TM is that of process taking precedence over product. In the TM
the quality and effectiveness of teachers’ ideas matter because the creativity is not an end
in itself, learning and development is the end and creativity may just be the means. In this
sense, there is a degree of objectivity about the TM, as Robert pointed out in the focus
group discussion:
“Sometimes it just doesn’t work, you have an idea but it turns out to
be no more effective than it might have been if you’d done what you
originally planned. Or, it could be worse.”
The divergence here between creativity as an end and creativity as a tool is an important
one. For an artist, the process may be as important, if not more so, as the product itself.
The psychology of the TM, as already demonstrated by comments and analysis from Rufus,
Amy and Robert, is based on one key imperative: to have ideas that are ultimately useful to
children’s learning and development. Parents for example, who are increasingly
constructed as consumers of education (Harris & Bijsterveld, 1993; Cizek, 2000; Wilkins,
2011), are unlikely to care that their child’s teacher has been through a creative process if
the resulting activity or lesson was uninspiring or contributed little to their child’s learning.
Here lies a second risk for the teacher in the TM, that thoughts and ideas which come to
them in the moment while they teach may not be inspiring or effective.
Hennessey and Amabile (1988) suggest that the state which most readily characterises
creative moments is one of intrinsic motivation. Crutchfield (1962) in fact indicated that the
work of notably creative people is accompanied by high levels of intrinsic motivation. The
idea that an individual will be most open to inspiration and perhaps spontaneity when doing
something that they love seems logical. Here again, the work of Czikszentmihalyi comes
into focus. The state of Flow is characterised similarly as one in which individuals
experience high levels of enjoyment in a given activity. Crucially, Lepper and Greene
(1978) have suggested that intrinsically motivated people are more likely to feel freer to
take risks. Mcgraw (1978) focussed attention on tasks rather than individuals, and
suggested that performance on creative tasks would be adversely affected by extrinsic
motivations, but performance on algorithmic tasks would not. There are several important
43
points to note here in relation to TMs. Firstly, teaching requires both creative and
methodical activity and requires teachers to think and act both creatively and logically,
sometimes simultaneously. Based on Magraw’s work, it may be safe to assume that the
many extrinsic drivers which exert themselves on teachers do enhance performance on
logical activity. It may also be fair to assume however, that these drivers do little to
enhance teachers’ creativity, and in fact may damage it. Robert illustrated this in the focus
group when he stated that
“Observation (by others) naturally leads to being conservative.”
The implication here is that surveillance and scrutiny, as extrinsic drivers, discourages risk
taking, prompting more, rather than less, reliance on a script.
One aspect of professionalism which the teachers described as damaged by external
motivators was their confidence. The confidence to go off script or follow one’s instincts
was highlighted as an important trait for an improvising teacher, and damage to that
confidence surfaced several times during the focus group discussion, mostly from the two
more experienced teachers Rufus and Robert. They described how their confidence had
diminished over recent years.
Rufus: ”Confidence is what I’ve lost; the confidence to do it (improvise).
And lost the confidence that I’m allowed to do it.”
Robert: “I’ve lost a lot of confidence in my teaching over the last few
years and I just think it’s because of the constant criticism of it. It’s like
a downward spiral.”
There are two aspects to Rufus’ comment; the loss of confidence in his own judgement and
in his sense of not being permitted to exercise that judgement. These two are closely
related; individuals’ self-confidence comes in part from the confidence which others invest
in them. The influence which others within, and outside of, the school community can have
on teacher confidence will be discussed in the next section.
44
Judgement in professional contexts is described by Atkinson (2000:53) as a trust in one’s
own ‘ability to come up with an appropriate response to the shifting, unpredictable
experiences of life.’ Instances in which individuals show unwillingness to exercise their own
judgement are often characterised by ill-defined or understood expectations or incomplete
information. One might expect this to be the experience of the novice, and it appears to fit
with Dreyfus’(1981) conception of novices as reluctant to exercise discretionary judgement.
The difference here is that this lack of confidence was expressed by two experienced
professionals, experts in their field. One of the questions which this research raises is
whether novice teachers are capable of behaving like expert teachers; whether there are
strategies or dispositions which can be developed or adopted by novice teachers which
would facilitate the sort of intuitions and spontaneity that expert teachers display. Here
though, we see the reverse, expert teachers somehow disabused of their expert capacity for
exercising judgement.
Atkinson (2000) provides a useful model for analysing why this might be. She suggests three
factors which can either enable or disable confidence in one’s judgement: support, direction
and structure. Though her model refers to early infant environmental experience and its
affect on adult judgement, the model is also useful for examining what adults experience in
the present. Support is conceived as ‘positive interest’ from relevant persons, which in the
teacher’s case might mean fellow colleagues, line managers and the head teacher. Support
is inappropriate when trusting one’s judgement always results in criticism or sanctions.
Direction is the extent to which one is supported to be autonomous. It is considered
inappropriate when one is never encouraged towards autonomy. Structure is the secure
and consistent framework within which one can reflect safely on one’s actions.
Environments in which expectations are constantly shifting exert a negative effect on
judgment. It is interesting to note that all three components of this model are extrinsic
factors which exert themselves intrinsically. This is to be expected when describing infant
development, however I believe that in the same way that infants develop dispositions and
characteristics through inter-subjectivity and engagement with their environment,
interpersonal, inter-professional and environmental engagement can relieve individuals,
including experienced adult professionals, of confidences. Of the three components in
Atkinson’s model, structure is of particular interest. Rufus and Robert spoke of losing
45
confidence which suggests that they are aware of not having something that they previously
had. They also both referred to times in their career when they had felt more confident to
exercise judgement than they do currently. This suggests one of three things; either they
have changed, the structures and expectations within which they work have shifted, or
both. The second of these suggestions is congruous with the ongoing shifts in the political
landscape which drives constant change in expectations on the teaching profession, and
may go some way to explain why Amy, the least experienced of the three teachers, did not
mention diminishing confidence at all. The less time one has spent in the profession, the
less changes one has had to adapt to.
In the next section I will focus attention on the concept of permission and analyse the
teachers’ experiences in light of my earlier exploration of the relationship between structure
and agency.
Permission to act: structure and agency in Teachable Moments.
In the focus group discussion the teachers were asked to identify factors which supported or
inhibited them in responding to TMs. In the last section I analysed some of the factors
particular to the individual teachers which influenced their behaviour, creativity, risk taking
and confidence. It is however, difficult to isolate these elements of agency and examine
them separately from the structure within which they may occur. There is no doubt that
Rufus, Amy and Robert saw direct links between the structures within which they teach and
the way they behave in the classroom, and the issue of perceived permission to exercise
judgement and follow their instincts permeated the entire discussion, resurfacing in almost
every response. Whilst there are many practices which structure the professional
experience of teachers, planning, timetabling and policies for example, Rufus, Amy and
Robert focussed predominantly on internal and external surveillance in their responses.
Gidden’s conception of structure and agency as described earlier, places them in a
relationship in which one facilitates the other. When asked to identify factors which
encouraged or discouraged action in the TM, the teachers focussed almost exclusively on
46
those which inhibited them. For Rufus, observation of his classroom practice was the most
significant factor, as demonstrated in the following exchange:
Rufus: “For me at the moment it’s the word ‘pace’, that’s the current
buzz word. I had to go and observe my partner teacher who’s only in
her second year of teaching, to look at her pace. For me, it was too fast.
Some of them (the children) might have got it, but lots hadn’t, and then
she was on to the next thing (clicking fingers to indicate rushing). If you’re
doing something on the board and you think to yourself ‘have they all got
that? I’m not sure, do I just move onto the next thing or do I pause and
make sure? This is where I am very much feeling the pressure.”
Researcher: “That’s an interesting point. Is pace class or child specific or
is it an absolute?”
Rufus: “At the moment for me it has to be an absolute. My line manager
said, ‘I came to see pace in this lesson but I didn’t really see any. Next time,
I want to see lots of quick questions bang bang bang bang bang!’ This is
where I’m losing autonomy, and becoming an automaton.”
Here Rufus explains how he is being required to suppress his professional instincts about
what children most need in the moment and comply with a school-wide agenda. He went
on to explain that pace had been a key area for development highlighted by the Ofsted
inspection earlier in the year. As a result, all teachers were now expected to plan and teach
lessons using Smart Board software. With this resource the teacher creates slides
containing information, examples and tasks in advance and presents them one at a time to
the children throughout the lesson. This approach is intended to maintain pace in lessons
by limiting opportunities for pausing, recapping or deviating from the planned content. The
following exchange explains the rationale for this strategy and illustrates how the
environment around Rufus is shifting:
Rufus: “There’s a nearby school that is ‘Outstanding’ and that’s what
they do. Personally, I feel that we’re spoon-feeding the children. Twenty
47
years ago, I just wrote things on my blackboard during the lesson and I tend
to use my interactive whiteboard in the same way, just writing notes and
prompts for children. So this is a complete paradigm shift for me.”
This is a clear example of how a loss of confidence in one’s own judgement and in one’s
sense of permission to be spontaneous can come from the changing expectations of line
managers as they look for solutions to the problem of not being considered ‘outstanding’ by
Ofsted. When asked to identify the key characteristics of the Teachable Moment School in
group task 2, the teachers put Trust at number two out of five, saying:
Rufus: “You would feel trusted to do what you do.”
Roberts: “Yeah, absolutely.”
The insistence on teachers teaching from Smart Board slides in every lesson appears at odds
with this idea. What constitutes appropriate practice to Head teachers appears to be as
much governed by expectations outside of the school community as from within it, and in
some cases perhaps more so. What all three teachers described, to varying degrees and in
different ways, was a difficulty reinventing themselves professionally to suit evolving
expectations. It could be argued that internalising the practices of the school community as
in Bourdieu’s Habitus theory, becomes difficult when the practices change regularly to meet
external performance indicators. If Habitus, as conceived by Calhoun, is the structure which
facilitates improvisation (1995:304), then regular shifting of that structure might render
such improvisation difficult.
For Amy, the issue of external scrutiny was also an important one.
“We’ve just had Ofsted last week, and the inspector talked to me
about pace. My top table are real thinkers and can be so slow, but given
time they will write something really good. They’ll talk about it for five or
ten minutes before they start writing, they have to take the atmosphere in,
but they will finish it and it’ll be really good. But he (the inspector) said,
‘I would like to have seen you pushing the pace more with them, bang bang
bang (claps to indicate speed). If I had done that, I would have got half of
48
those children in a right tiz, probably three of them would have cried.
He wanted me to bring them back to the carpet for a plenary, but that
group actually benefitted from having a slower pace.”
Here again, expectations of someone from outside the school and class community are
imposed. What comes across clearly here is the role that Amy’s knowledge of the children
plays. The potential for undermining teacher confidence and willingness to make
professional judgements based on curriculum knowledge and knowledge of the children
needs little explanation. This leads to an interesting question raised by Robert about the
validity of external scrutiny.
“There is an essential flaw with lesson observations, and that is that it
is not possible to say for certain, when an observer says ‘you ought to
have done this or that, that their suggestion would have been any more
effective than what you actually did. The only way to prove this would
be to go back in time and re-teach that lesson. No one can actually say
‘it would have been better if...’”
Robert introduces a useful point of discussion here about the legitimacy of external
judgements. If, as in the case of Amy’s example, teachers’ knowledge of the children
influences their judgement regarding factors such as pace, pitch, suitable environments or
questions to ask, for example, then the question arises of whether a set of ‘universal’
criteria can be meaningfully employed as a point of reference for labelling practice
(Outstanding, Good, Satisfactory etc) or dispensing retrospective advice?
The process of disabusing teachers of their confidence to judge appropriate professional
action does not however, begin with line managers, head teachers or even Ofsted
inspectors observing lessons. Before the process of surveillance commences in a classroom,
the apparatus defining criteria for success or failure has been decided and published; these
performance descriptors and performance categories drawn up by those outside the
profession serve to undermine those in it. The teacher’s task could therefore be seen as
fitting their practice to the criteria, possibly at the expense of their instincts, as in the case
of Rufus.
49
Sustaining intrinsic motivation in a culture dominated by extrinsic drivers is, according to
Deci and Ryan (1985), Deci et al. (1999) challenging. Performance indicators, such as
descriptors from Ofsted describing the features of lessons ranging from ‘Excellent’ down to
‘Unsatisfactory’, though revised periodically, until recently have been essentially inert, in
that they apply to all schools across the board and rarely change. The difficulty here for the
teacher is that responding to an inert rubric may come at the expense of dynamic
professional judgements, and this raises the question of whether an inert tool can be used
effectively to judge a dynamic process? Robert’s description of his thinking about a lesson
on rivers illustrates this:
“We were doing rivers, sea to source, and I was going to get them to
draw a diagram of the river Severn, talk about and label the features
of the river, very boring lesson, but it was going to get something in
the books that was going to look good. I was honestly thinking in those
terms about the lesson, you know, they would understand the key things
(about rivers). But then I thought, the children are going to hate this;
the computer suite next door was free so we dived onto Google Earth
and all followed the river Severn from sea to source. The children loved it,
and they couldn’t believe when they reached the source and zoomed out
that they were in the middle of North Wales.”
Of particular interest here is Robert’s shift in motivation. The first idea for the lesson could
be described as extrinsically motivated, by the need to show evidence of learning in
children’s books. The adjustment to the activity the children actually did appeared to be
motivated by an intrinsic desire to enthuse the children.
Assuming however, that accountability in the teaching profession is necessary, the question
becomes, not whether external scrutiny should take place at all, but whether it can take a
form which serves the purposes of accountability without damaging teacher confidence,
removing teacher agency or undermining teachers’ professionalism. In the next section I
will elaborate further on possible forms such a process might take; however one
characteristic, that of including teacher judgement as a key assessment criteria, is already
50
partially represented in new Ofsted literature. An examination of some of this literature will
further support this discussion.
The following criteria are taken from the new Ofsted Framework (2012) and are of particular
relevance to teacher action in the moment:
‘Observation of teaching will judge.....

the extent to which well judged teaching strategies, including setting challenging
tasks matched to pupils’ learning needs, successfully engage all pupils in their
learning

the extent to which teachers enthuse, engage and motivate pupils to learn and
foster their curiosity and enthusiasm for learning

the extent to which teachers’ questioning and use of discussion promote learning’
Whilst there is only one direct reference to teacher judgement, and that reference is not
explicitly referring to judgement in the moment, all three of these criteria could be
interpreted as teacher action based on spontaneous decision making. Drawing on the
evidence from their own practice, the sort of adjustments described by Rufus, Amy and
Robert just before or during their lessons were integral to ensuring the matching of tasks to
individuals and increasing enthusiasm and motivation. It could also be argued that
questioning and discussion cannot be a scripted process, since pupil responses are often
unpredictable. There is therefore, an implied permission here to exercise professional
judgement in the moment.
A recent Ofsted publication, Moving English Forward: Action to raise standards in English
(2012:13) goes a step further. In describing common myths about good teaching it states
the following about pace and flexibility:
‘Pace. There seems to be a belief that the faster the lesson, the better
the learning. While pace is important – a slow lesson is likely to lose
pupils’ concentration – teachers too often concentrate on the pace of
their planned activities rather than the pace of learning. For example,
a teacher told an inspector that they had been advised that a starter
51
activity should never last longer than 10 minutes. While this may be a
sensible starting point for discussion, the inspector’s view was that a starter
activity, like any other activity, needs to last only as long as is needed to
ensure effective learning. ‘
And about sticking rigidly to lesson plans:
‘An inflexible approach to planning lessons. School policies sometimes
insist that all lesson plans should always follow the same structure, no
matter what is being taught. In addition, evidence from the survey suggests
that teachers often feel that they should not alter their plans during the
lesson. The notion of a three- or four-part structure to lessons with certain
key elements, such as a lively starter activity and an opportunity to review
learning at the end, is helpful to teachers. However, teachers need to have
the confidence to depart from their plans if early indications are, for example,
that the pupils know more or less than the teacher had anticipated. The key
consideration should be the development of pupils learning rather than sticking
rigidly to a plan.’
These two extracts clearly align the exercising of professional judgement in the moment
with good professional practice. In doing so, the inert rubric of this assessment tool takes
on dynamic features, and not only for the teacher being observed; the observer is equally
required to exercise dynamic judgement about the practice they are assessing. The
recentness of this revised framework may explain the apparent conception of pace as an
absolute expressed in Rufus’ school. The recent inspection in Amy’s school however was
carried out using these guidelines which highlights the subjective nature of the assessment
process.
There is an interesting relationship between structure and agency, and extrinsic and intrinsic
motivation. On a simple level, structure can be seen as producing extrinsic motivation and
agency intrinsic. Structure and agency however, are not mutually exclusive, they exist, not
even simply side by side, but in a complex inter-relatedness and the balance between them
seems to be a crucial factor in how, or whether, they complement each other. A similar
balance is required of teachers between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The expectation
52
of politicians, inspectors, head teachers and others who scrutinise professional practice
seems to be that teachers will make use of the best of that which motivates them
intrinsically (children’s learning, enthusiasm, enjoyment, interest according to Rufus, Amy
and Robert) whilst also meeting certain extrinsic standards. Or, perhaps the expectation is
simpler than that; that teachers’ intrinsic motivations should be the same as the extrinsic
drivers. If this were the case, a teacher who reads the current iteration of performance
level descriptors against which their teaching is to be judged would see nothing for which
they are not already intrinsically motivated, and nothing which conflicts with their own
professional practice.
As we have seen, the most recent Ofsted literature includes emerging acknowledgement of
the importance of teachers’ professional judgements, and here lies an incongruity. The
instrument used to assess teacher capability now requires teachers to exercise their
judgement, both before and during lessons; but the apparatus of surveillance, of which that
instrument is a tool, discourages them from doing this. Or, to express it in terms of this
research, spotting and responding to TMs is a criteria for success in teaching observations,
but the process of being observed has the potential to obviate TMB.
53
Before drawing conclusions and making recommendations, and having devoted
considerable time to establishing what TMBs are, it is useful to pause for a moment and
consider what they are not.
Teachable Moment Behaviours are not:
A rejection of structures and protocols. A case for the legitimacy of spontaneity and
intuition in teaching is a case for professionalism, not laziness. The sensitive teacher, who is
aware of their pupils’ needs and responsive to their utterances, body language,
understandings or misunderstandings and open to their own inspiration in the moment,
works extremely hard in the moment. They may have come to rely on a particular set of
skills and dispositions which they make use of in action, but these are in addition to, not
instead of, the skills required to prepare for children’s learning in advance of lessons.
Capacity for openness and improvisation may lighten the burden of pre-lesson preparation,
but it does not replace it. As in Evans’ (2008) concept of Bounded Agency and JohnsonLaird’s (1988) suggestion that structure facilitates creative thinking, the expert teacher uses
structures and protocols such as planning and assessment rather like a ship’s captain uses a
light house when sailing near hazardous coastline at night; as a point of reference for
mapping a route, as a source of knowledge which facilitates judgements and as a safety net
to inspire confidence. Similarly, planning for TMB development is not a call to disregarding
structures, hierarchies, scrutiny or constructive advice from others. Neither is it part of a
liberal agenda. I would argue, as Robert did that
“It is advanced teacher skills.”
and that TMBs play as important a role in children’s progression, development and learning
as do the protocols which can facilitate it.
Legitimising laziness. TMBs are demanding. They call on teachers to be ever present and
constantly sensitive to the dynamics of the learning environment. TMBs require teachers to
know their pupils well, as individuals and as learners. They demand attention to detail and
expert knowledge of the curriculum. Openness to new ideas and willingness to improvise,
take risks, innovate and adapt plans depend on use of working memory, multi-tasking and
creative thinking.
54
Indiscipline. Responding to TMs is not and should not be laissez-faire. Intuitions have to be
monitored and tested rigorously (Eraut, 2000). As Rufus, Amy and Robert suggested, the
professionalism in judging the TM is a filtration process for ideas and adaptations which
arise. The intuitive teacher knows when strategies or approaches are not working and
reflects on how or whether to employ them in the future. They maintain a professional
inner monologue which helps them to scrutinise their own judgements and decisions in
action, as well as before and after lessons.
Meaning-making for teachers rather than pupils. During the focus group discussion, when
asked to reflect on the value of spontaneous action in lessons, Robert said the following:
“I wonder if it’s just good for us though. Is this just something that teachers
like to do so that they don’t have to sit a plan for hours?”
This is an important question because it sharpens focus on the teacher’s raison d’etre and
challenges thinking about the benefit to children of teachers following their instincts. Put
another way, the question here is whether teacher autonomy actually supports children’s
learning and development. There is little doubt, based on this research, that greater
autonomy would enrich the professional lives of Rufus, Amy and Robert; and one could
argue that their views on this are representative of teachers generally, but is it enriching for
children? I believe the key to this is intrinsic motivation. If, as this study has led me to
believe, an appropriate degree of autonomy can unlock intrinsic motivation, then the
permission to judge, adapt, improvise, take risks and reflect in action (Schon, 1983) can be
of direct benefit to pupil engagement, enthusiasm and consequently their learning.
Without discipline however, teacher autonomy could be detrimental to children’s learning,
and here the familiar sentiments of Eleanor Roosevelt (1960) resonate; that freedom
demands a great deal from human beings, and brings with it responsibility.
A risk here for Head teachers and indeed the government, is whether teachers, if granted
more autonomy, will also exercise their responsibility to remain disciplined. Without this
TMBs could be all of the above. It cannot be stated with any certainty that all teachers, if
offered greater autonomy and motivated less by extrinsic factors, would become more
intrinsically motivated; however, based on the literature and the experiences shared by
55
Rufus, Amy and Robert, it seems clear that the absence of autonomy in professional life is
likely to inhibit intrinsic motivation, and that this could adversely affect children’s school
experience. A key question here for head teachers is how teacher autonomy can most
effectively be facilitated and managed so as to encourage the best that TMBs have to offer
pupils and discourage the pitfalls described above.
56
Conclusions:
Validity of TMs and TMBs
Robert raised a pivotal point about TMs and TMBs during the focus group discussion.
“I can’t make my mind up whether there is such a thing as the teachable
moment or whether it’s just such an integral, normal part of teaching that
actually, it’s not anything particularly special.”
Robert’s thinking here about whether TMs are actually events of particular consequence, or
TMBs actions of pedagogic substance, is useful in that it provides a place from which to
evaluate the value of improvised, intuitive teacher action. His suspicion that TMs and TMBs
are simply a given in everyday practice could stem from the fact that these practices are
reasonably embedded in his everyday teaching. Perhaps a teacher more reliant on
adherence to lesson plans would view TMs and TMBs as a greater novelty.
The question is a valid one nevertheless. Are TMs actually significant enough to children’s
learning and development to warrant this degree of analysis? I believe they are, Robert
agrees, however improvisation does appear to be a dying art in teaching; as he joked when
asked to list the traits of improvising teachers for task 1:
“What does the teachable moment teacher look like? They look like a
dinosaur because they’re extinct!”
Beneath the humour here lies a key observation about what is valued in current everyday
practice.
Skills and Dispositions of the TM teacher
TM teachers:
are pedagogically sensitive
can think on their feet
have confidence to try new ideas
know their pupils well
57
excel under pressure
are comfortable with open-endedness and uncertainty
understand that learners do not all understand the world in the same way
trust their instincts
take risks
understand that a wide range of complex dynamics exist in classrooms
understand that learning involves many variables working together
know that they cannot control every variable
Teachable Moment Behaviour is expert teaching
The assertion made by Robert that exercising professional judgement is an advanced
teacher skill raises some interesting questions about the way expertise is conceived. His
conception is similar to that of Dreyfus, who also characterises expertise in terms of instinct
and judgement. This has certain implications for teacher professional development. Firstly,
if this is a key facet of expertise, then it is likely that teachers will develop towards this at
different rates. Secondly, teachers will develop this expertise to varying degrees. Thirdly,
some teachers may never achieve this level of expertise. Where my own conclusion
conflicts with Dreyfus’ rubric is in the suggestion that novices cannot possess this expertise.
I have met and worked with new teachers who rely comfortably on their instincts and
experienced teachers who are comparatively uncomfortable deviating from protocols and
plans. These are perhaps exceptions to the rule, however they point to the hypothesis that
experience is only one factor influencing teacher expertise. Amy, as a relative novice, acted
successfully in the moment to the clear benefit of her pupils.
Another conclusion relating to the expert nature of teacher improvisation is its suitability to
teaching and learning. Experiences shared by all three teachers point unequivocally to the
dynamism and unpredictability of the learning environment. An unpredictable system
requires dynamic, flexible and improvised responses. If children always acted and
responded to learning stimuli in expected or predictable ways, teachers would rarely, if
ever, need to adjust their plans or change tack. Judgements would largely be made in
58
advance and teaching would be a clockwork-like process in which lessons unfolded
according to a preordained path. The reflections of Rufus, Amy and Robert demonstrate
that a very small proportion of lessons proceed in this way. Dynamic environments require
dynamic management. The expertise of the teacher here lies in their ability to respond
appropriately to the unpredictability of the classroom.
Experience and the Teachable Moment
One interesting question raised in the literature on intuition, expertise and creativity is how
these capacities and dispositions correlate with experience. Rufus, Amy and Robert
suggested that the principle role which experience plays in the TM is providing a repertoire
of previous decisions, judgements, actions and activities upon which to call. This does not
relegate TMB to simply plucking out old ideas at opportune moments, though a judgement
to reuse an effective idea at a particular moment is just that, a judgement. The teachers
attributed equal importance to life experience as to teaching experience, therefore this
repertoire which experience builds is more than simply a bank of lessons or activities. It
may include these things, but it is also more nuanced, more subtle and much more complex.
It involves teachers’ ability to connect the present moment with previous moments; to
interweave understanding about the ways in which children learn and develop with
knowledge of self and relationships with children. It includes a certain comfort with
uncertainty and an appreciation that not all variables in the dynamic terrain of the
classroom can be controlled by the teacher; something many teachers I have worked with
find uncomfortable.
Whether TMBs are reliant on experience has implications for continuing professional
development and initial teacher education. If making professional judgements, improvising
and other associated capacities are experience dependent then recommendations for
developing them may prove futile for pre-service and novice teachers. I believe TMBs are to
an extent experience related, but not experience dependent, by which I mean that
experience is one of many factors influencing behaviour. Others include personality, degree
of risk aversion, relationships with pupils, confidence and sense of permission to name a
59
few. These variables, along with many others, form the repertoire into which teachers may
delve in TMs.
One aspect of experience however which I do believe to be more closely related to TMBs is
TMBs themselves. My fourteen years experience in teaching leads me to conclude that the
more opportunities teachers seize to rely on their instincts, judgements and intuitions, the
more confident they will become in exercising them.
Development of Teachable Moment Behaviours: implications for CPD and ITE
I have already suggested that an effective way to develop TMBs would be to rehearse them.
By putting themselves in situations which require improvisation and judgement in the
moment, teachers will experience not only the judgements, intuitions and decisions
themselves but also the feelings and conditions associated with risk taking and uncertainty.
A key obstacle to this however, is risk aversion encouraged by the current culture of
surveillance in the profession. As Robert pointed out, observation and scrutiny brings out
conservatism in teachers.
In order to develop this expertise teachers need to feel permitted to make mistakes, to
make poor judgements and learn from them. The imperative for schools to be on a
constant upward improvement trajectory and for head teachers to demonstrate constant
pupil progress however, has resulted in the marginalisation of this permission. Newly
Qualified Teachers are required to be as proficient as their experienced colleagues on entry
to the profession, with little leeway given for taking risks, making mistakes or learning to
judge. This tendency, which negates the process of taking risks and learning from
experience and places the reflective process in potential jeopardy, also exists in Initial
Teacher Education; perhaps the very place where one might expect to find encouragement
for the practice of improvising or making and reflecting on judgements. The pressure on
students to demonstrate excellence against Professional Standards and increasing pressure
on ITE providers to increase their numbers of ‘Outstanding’ teacher training graduates have
resulted in further marginalisation of teacher expertise, as defined by Robert, even in the
training process.
60
Recommendations:
Teachers could be encouraged to research their own practice. The action researcher takes
ownership of his or her subject matter, looks for opportunities to improve praxis,
implements change and modifies elements within his or her control. As Pignatelli (1993)
suggests, if teachers become engineers of research, developing an evidence base for their
action, they can make a more significant contribution to the process of defining best
practice, if not drive the process. This encouragement could take the form of a compulsory
research sabbatical every five or six years (Barber 1994) and could prove to be a more
empowering and useful demonstration of expertise than current hoops through which
teachers leap to reach higher pay scales, senior management and advanced skills status. A
key question for the improvising teacher is how one argues for the value of practices whose
outcomes cannot be easily evidenced and which cannot be easily replicated. Teacher action
research may be a useful tool here.
School inspection could be reconceived as a collaborative process rather than a
judgemental one. Whilst emphasis in Ofsted inspections has shifted a little in recent years
towards school self-evaluation, the relationship between Her Majesty’s Inspectors and
schools remains characterised by audit and managerialism akin to ‘policing’ (Woods &
Jefferies, 1998:548), and largely punitive. The balance is still tipped significantly in favour of
extrinsic motivation of teachers. As previously discussed, balancing extrinsic and intrinsic
influences can be seen as crucial for teachers in sustaining confidence and professional
judgement. Over-bearing extrinsic motivators can marginalise, or even extinguish intrinsic
drive.
There is an apparent contradiction here. Teachers and inspectors have the same goal, the
effective education of young people, and yet, as the evidence from Rufus, Amy and Robert
indicates, the two are not in partnership. There appears to be a clash of values (Woods &
Jeffrey, 1998) and, on the part of the teachers in this study, a significant sense of being
distrusted. Reconceived as a partnership between schools and the inspectorate,
improvements in teachers’ practice could be secured through discussion, negotiation and
reflection rather than summative judgement. Woods and Jeffrey (1996) describe how
61
Ofsted inspections can lead to a gradual change in teacher self-identity, from professional to
technician; the professional being trusted to make professional judgements, the technician
expected to follow prescribed protocols and do as they are told. Densmore (1987) referred
to this as the proletarianization of the profession, from ‘blue collar’ to ‘white collar’.
Even a subtle shift in thinking about the purpose of school inspection, from ‘Quality Control’
to ‘Quality Assurance’ has the potential to positively change the dynamic between the
inspectorate and the profession. The former closed and suggestive of coercive power, the
latter more open. Since local authorities’ and head teachers’ in-house scrutiny approaches
tend to mirror those of Ofsted, a greater emphasis on partnership in pursuit of quality
teaching from Her Majesty’s Inspectors would be likely to have a knock-on effect on the
manner in which teachers are judged by their line managers.
Teacher education could do more to acknowledge the dynamic nature of teaching and
learning, offering support and guidance to students on how to improvise and make
confident professional judgements. Whilst acknowledging that it would be impossible to
directly teach ITE students how to think on their feet and make judgements, outside of the
classroom context, steps can be taken in university ITE programmes to encourage these
behaviours.
Firstly, ITE providers could do more to resist the urge to remodel their programmes in the
image of the current inspection regime with an over-emphasis on competence-based
approaches in which students are required to meet easily-measureable, tick box standards.
Pedagogical discourse could be favoured over coverage of assessment criteria and current
‘buzz word’ topics such as ‘pace.’ Secondly, teaching and learning could be discussed as a
process of dynamic interaction and exchange, not a series of fixed actions with fixed
outcomes. Thirdly, ITE students should be required to teach unplanned lessons and
encouraged to engage in reflective evaluation of their own spontaneous judgement and
TMBs in the classroom. The balance here between workplace learning and critical
reflection, between the affective and social domains, and the cognitive domain Beckett and
Hager (2010) is important. Fourthly, providers should offer workshops in developing
62
classroom presence, verbal and non-verbal communication, vocal techniques, interpersonal
skills and improvisation to support the development of teacher confidence.
63
References:
Albert, R. (1978). Obervations and suggestions regarding giftedness, familial influence and
the achievement of eminence. Gifted Child Quarterly. Vol. 22, pp.201-211.
Alexander, R. (2004). Still no pedagogy? Principle, pragmatism and compliance in primary
education. Cambridge Journal of Education. Vol. 34(1), pp. 7-33.
Atkinson, L. (2000). Trusting your own judgement: Or, allowing yourself to eat the pudding.
In, Atkinson & Claxton (Eds) The intuitive practitioner: On the value of not always knowing
what one is doing. Maidenhead: OUP.
Atkinson & Claxton (Eds) (2000). Intuitive practice: On the value of not always knowing what
one is doing. Buckingham: OUP.
Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy in changing societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Barber, M (1994). Power and Control in Education: 1944-2004. British Journal of Educational
Studies. Vol. 42(4) pp. 348-362.
Barkham, J. and Miller, J. (2008). Support or straitjacket: a tale of three strategies. In
Harnett, P (Ed) Understanding primary education London: Routledge.
Barron, F. (1963). The need for order and for disorder as motives in creative activity. In,
Taylor, C. & Barron, F. (Eds) Scientific enquiry: its recognition and development. New York:
Wiley.
Beckett, D and Hager, P. (2000) Making judgments as the basis for workplace learning:
towards an epistemology of practice. International Journal of Lifelong Education. Vol.
19(4), pp.300-311.
BERA (2011). Ethical guidelines for educational research. London: BERA.
Blaikie, N. (2000). Designing social research. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Boden, M. (1990). The creative mind: Myths and mechanisms. London: Routledge.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1986) The Forms of Capital. In, Richardson, J. (Ed.) Handbook of Theory and
Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood Press.
Brown, M. (1998) The tyranny of the international horse race. In, R. Slee, G . Weiner & S,
Tomlinson. (Eds) School Effectiveness for Whom? Challenges to the school effectiveness and
school improvement movements. London: Falmer Press.
Burrell, G and Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological paradigms and organisational analysis.
Aldershot: Asgate.
64
Calhoun, C. (1995). Critical Social Theory. Blackwell: Oxford
Camus, A. (1953). The Rebel. London: Penguin.
Cizek, G. (2000). School Politics 101: It’s not really about the children. Education Week. Vol.
20(14), p35.
Claxton, G. (2000). The anatomy of intuition. In, Atkinson & Claxton (Eds) The intuitive
practitioner: On the value of not always knowing what one is doing. Maidenhead: OUP.
Cohen, L., Manion, L. & Morrison, K. (2011). Research methods in education. London:
Routledge.
Connelly, M. (1972). The functions of curriculum development. Interchange. Vol.3 Nos.2&3.
Pp 161-177
Crutchfield, R. (1962). Conformity and creative thinking. In Gruber, H., Terrell, G. &
Wertheimer, M. (Eds) Contemporary approaches to creative thinking. New York: Atherton.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1988). The Flow experience and its significance for human psychology.
In Csikszentmihalyi, M. Optimal experience: psychological studies of flow in consciousness,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Csíkszentmihályi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper
and Row.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Finding Flow. Psychology Today. Vol. 30(4), pp.46-71.
De Bot, K. (2007). A Dynamic Systems Theory approach to second language acquisition.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. Vol. 10(1), pp. 7-21.
Deci, E. & Ryan, R. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behaviour.
New York: Plenum.
Deci, E., Koestner, R. & Ryan, R. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining
the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psycho-logical Bulletin. Vol. 125(6),
pp. 627-668.
Densmore, K. (1987). Professionalism, Proletarianization and Teacher Work. In, Popkewitz,
T. (Ed) Critical studies in teacher education. London: The Falmer Press.
Dreyfus, S. E. (1981). Four models v human situational understanding: Inherent limitations
on the modelling of business expertise USAF. Office of Scientific Research.
Durkheim, E. (1933). The division of labour in society. New York: The Free Press
Ebbs, C. (1996). Qualitative research inquiry: Issues of power and ethics. Education. Vol.
117(2), pp.217-222.
65
Eisner, E. (1985). The Art of Educational Evaluation. London: The Falmer Press
Elder, G.H. (1995). Life trajectories in changing societies. In, Bandura, A. (Ed) Self-efficacy in
changing societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Engel, U. & Strausser, H. (1998). Global risks and social inequality: Critical remarks on the
risk society hypothesis. Canadian Journal of Sociology, Vol.23 pp962-1023.
Eraut, M. (2000). The intuitive practitioner: A critical overview. In, Atkinson & Claxton (Eds)
The intuitive practitioner: On the value of not always knowing what one is doing.
Maidenhead: OUP.
Evans, K. (2007). Concepts of bounded agency in education, work, and the personal lives of
young adults. International Journal of Psychology. Vol.42(2), pp85-93.
Fisher, R. (2004). Embedding the literacy strategy: snapshots of change. Literacy. Vol. 38
(3), pp. 134-140.
Flammer, A. (1997). Developmental analysis of control beliefs. In, Bandura, A. (Ed) Selfefficacy in changing societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Penguin
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Seelcted interviews and other writings 1972-1977.
Hemel Hempstead: Harvestor Press
Foucault, Michel (1991). Questions of Method. In, Burchell, G.; Gordon, C. & Miller, P. (Eds.)
The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Furlong, A. & Cartmel, F. (1997). Young people and social change: Individualisation and risk
in late modernity. Buckingham: OUP.
Garner, R. (2010). Gove promises teachers the right to inspire pupils. The Independent
[online]. Available from: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/educationnews/gove-promises-teachers-the-right-to-inspire-pupils-2139731.html [Accessed 12th
February 2011].
Gergen, M. & Gergen, K. (2000). Qualitative inquiry: Tensions and transformations. In
Denzin, N. & Lincoln, Y. (Eds.) The handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed) Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Giddens, A. (1981). A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. London: Macmillan
Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and contradiction in
social analysis. London: Macmillan
Giddens, A. & Pierson, C. (1998). Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making sense of
modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press
Giddens, A. (1998). The third way: The renewal of social democracy. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
66
Giddens, A. (1986). Action, subjectivity and the constitution of meaning. Social Research.
Vol. 53, pp 529-545.
Gorard, S. (2001). International comparisons of school effectiveness: the second component
of the ‘crisis account’ in England. Comparative Education. Vol. 37(3), pp. 279-296.
Grenfell, M. & James, D. (1998). Bourdieu and education: Acts of practical theory. Guilford:
Falmer Press
Griffin, M. & McDermott, M. (1998). Exploring a tripart relationship between rebelliousness,
openness to experience and creativity. Social Behaviour and personality Vol. 26, pp. 347356.
Hand, S. (Ed) (1989). The Levinas reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hargreaves, A. (1994). Restructuring restructuring: postmodernity and the prospects for
educational change. Journal of educational Policy. Vol. 9(1), pp. 47-65.
Harris, N. & Van Bijsterveld, S. (1993). Parents as consumers of education in England and
Wales and the Netherlands: A comparative analysis. International Journal of Law and the
Family. Vol. 7, pp178-204.
Hartley, D. (1994). Mixed messages in education policy: Sign of the times? British Journal of
Educational Studies. Vol. 42, No.3 pp 230-244
Hebdige, D. (1988). Hiding in the light. London: Routledge.
Hennessey, B. & Amabile, T. (1998). The role of the environment in creativity. In, Sternberg,
R. (Ed) The nature of creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Heron, J. and Reason, P. (1997). A participatory inquiry paradigm. Qualitative Inquiry Vol.
3(3), pp. 274-294.
HMI. (2012). Moving English Forward: Action to raise standards in English. Ofsted:
Manchester. Crown Copyright.
HMI. (2012). The framework for school inspection: Guidance and grade descriptors for
inspecting schools in England under section 5 of the Education Act 2005, from January 2012.
Ofsted: Manchester. Crown Copyright.
Jeffrey, B. & Woods, P. (1996). Feeling deprofessionalised: The social construction of
emotions during an Ofsted inspection. Cambridge Journal of Education. Vol. 26(3) pp.325343.
Johnson-Laird, P. (1998). Freedom and constraint in creativity. In, Sternberg, R. (Ed) The
nature of creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
67
Karnieli-Miller, O., Strier, R. & Pessach, L. (2009). Power Relations in Qualitative Research.
Quaitative Health Research. Vol.19(2), pp.279-289.
Lacan, J. (1973). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis. London: Karnac
LeCompte, M., Millroy, W & Preissle, J. (Eds) (1992). The handbook of qualitative research in
education. San Diego: Academic Press Inc.
Lepper, M. & Greene, D. (1978). The hidden costs of reward. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Lindley, R. (1986). Autonomy: Issues in political theory. Basingstoke: Macmillan
Mcgraw, K. (1987). The detrimental effects of reward on performance. A literature review
and prediction model. In, Lepper, M. & Greene, D. (Eds) The hidden costs of reward.
Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Murphy, J.W. (1988). Computerization, postmodern epistemology and reading in the
postmodern era. Educational Theory Vol. 38, No.2 pp 175-182
Newby, P. (2010). Research methods in education. Harlow: Pearson.
Nickerson, R. (1999). Enhancing creativity. In, Sternberg, R. (Ed) Handbook of creativity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ozga, J.T. & Lawn, M.A. (1981). Teachers professionalism and class. Basingstoke: Falmer
Press
Peters, M. (2001). Poststructuralism, Marxism, and Neoliberalism: Between Theory and
Politics. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
Pollard, A. (2008). Reflective teaching. London: Continuum.
Ratner, C. (2002). Subjectivity and Objectivity in Qualitative Methodology. Qualitative Social
Research. Vol. 3(3), article 16.
Reason, P. (Ed). (1994). Participation in human inquiry. London: Sage.
Roosevelt, E. (1960). You learn by living: eleven keys to a more fulfilling life. Harper & Row:
London.
Runco, M. (2004). Creativity. Annual Review of Psychology. Vol.55, pp.657–87.
Runco, M. (2006). Reasoning and personal creativity. In, Kaufman, J. & Baer, J. (Eds)
Creativity and reasoning in cognitive development. Cambrdige: Cambridge University Press.
Runco, M. (2007). Creativity: Theories and themes: Research, development and practice.
Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Schon, D. A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action.
London: Temple Smith.
68
Scott, D. & Morrison, M. (2007). Key ideas in educational research. London: Continuum.
Simmel, G. (1971). On individuality and social forms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Simons, H. & Usher, R. (Eds) (2000). Situated ethics in educational research. London:
Routledge Falmer.
Sternberg, R. & Lubart, T. (1996). Investing in creativity. American Psychologist, Vol. 51(7),
pp.677-688.
Stonach, I. & Maclure, M. (1997). Educational research undone: The postmodern embrace.
Buckingham: OUP.
Thomas, G. (2009). How to do your research project. London: Sage.
Treleaven, L. (1994). Making a space: A collaborative inquiry with women as staff
development. In Reason, P. (Ed) Participation in human inquiry. London: Sage.
Van Lier, L. (2007). Action-based teaching, autonomy and identity. Innovation in Language
Learning & Teaching. Vol. 1(1), pp.46-65
Ward, T. & Saunders, K. (2003) Creativity. In Encyclopaedia of Cognitive Science. Nadel, L.
(Ed) London: Nature Publishing Group.
Whitehead, J. (1988). Creating a living educational theory from questions of the kind: ‘How
do I improve my practice?’ Cambridge Journal of Education. Vol. 19(1), pp.41-52.
Wilkins, A. (2011). School choice, consumerism and the ethical strand in talk. Studies in the
Cultural Politics of Education. Vol. 32(3), pp.357-370.
Woods, P. (1990). Teacher skills and strategies. London: Falmer Press
Woods, P. & Jeffrey, B. (1998). Choosing Positions: Living the Contradictions of Ofsted.
British Journal of Sociology of Education. Vol. 19(4) pp. 547-570.
69
Appendix A
Teachable Moment Checklists and Professional Logs
Rufus
Amy
Robert
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
Appendix B
Focus Group Discussion Questions:
What were the most common TMs in your experience of this process?
Are there any factors which enabled or inhibited you in responding to TMs?
What, if anything, is the value of noticing and responding to TMs?
How did it feel to watch your back your videoed lesson?
What did you notice about yourself?
Task 1:
Compile a list together of 5 key attributes a teacher would need in order to make the most of TMs.
Task 2:
What characteristics would the TM school have?
Some definitions of what it means to be professional place autonomy at the top of the list. What do
you think about this?
Have you learned anything about yourselves as teachers through this process?
What were the strengths and weaknesses of the process?
Appendix C
93
Responses to Task 1:
5 key attributes a teacher would need in order to make the most of TMs.
1. Confidence
2. Creativity
3. Flexibility
4. Broad interests and knowledge
5. Uniqueness
94
Appendix D
Responses to Task 2:
What characteristics would the TM school have?
1. Allows autonomy
2. Trusts teachers
3. High level of quality resources
4. Environment constantly changing
5. Children learning throughout the environment
95