The Grounded Theory
of Teaching
Umberto Margiotta
Vilnius 2010
Wath is happen wen we teaching?
We generate knowledge
• To teach all students according to today’s
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standards, teachers need to understand subject
matter deeply and flexibly so they can help
students create useful cognitive maps, relate
one idea to another, and address
misconceptions.
Teachers need to see how ideas connect across
fields and to everyday life. This kind of
understanding provides a foundation for
pedagogical content knowledge that enables
teachers to generate big ideas
The pedagogical
content knowledge
• In Shulman's theoretical framework
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(1986,1987), teachers need to master two types
of knowledge:
(a) content, also known as "deep" knowledge of
the subject itself, and
(b) knowledge of the curricular development.
Content knowledge encompasses what Bruner
(as cited in Shulman, 1992) called the
"structure of knowledge"–the theories,
principles, and concepts of a particular
discipline.
A model of pedagogical reasoning
A P.R. (Shulman 1986, 1987, 1992) comprises a
cycle of several activities that a teacher should
complete for good teaching:
• comprehension,
• transformation,
• instruction,
• evaluation,
• reflection,
• and new comprehension.
Comprehension
To teach is to first understand purposes,
subject matter structures, and ideas within
and outside the discipline. Teachers need
to understand what they teach and, when
possible, to understand it in several ways.
Comprehension of purpose is very
important.
Purpose’s Comprehension
• We engage in teaching to achieve the following educational
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purposes:
To help students gain literacy
To enable students to use and enjoy their learning experiences
To enhance students’ responsibility to become caring people
To teach students to believe and respect others, to contribute to
the well-being of their community
To give students the opportunity to learn how to inquire and
discover new information
To help students develop broader understandings of new
information
To help students develop the skills and values they will need to
function in a free and just society (Shulman, 1992, A. Sen, 2009)
Transformation
The key to distinguishing the knowledge base of
teaching lies at the intersection of content and
pedagogy.
It’s decisive the teacher’s capacity to transform
content knowledge into forms that are
pedagogically powerful and yet adaptive to the
variety of student abilities and backgrounds.
Comprehended ideas must be transformed in
some manner if they are to be taught.
Transformation of knowledge
• Transformations require some combination to govern the
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following processes:
Preparation (of the knowledge’s contents), which
includes the process of critical interpretation and
reorganization
Representation of the big ideas in the form of
new analogies and metaphors
Content selections from among an array of
teaching methods and experience models
Adaptation of student materials and activities, to
promote critic and growth of knowledge in
experience and learning styles of students
Managing the adaptations to the specific
experience of students
Instruction
Instruction includes many of the most
crucial aspects of pedagogy:
management, presentations, interactions,
group work, discipline, humor,
questioning, and discovery and inquiry
instruction.
Evaluation
• Teachers need to think about testing and
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evaluation as an extension of instruction, not as
separate from the formative process.
The evaluation process includes checking for
reflecting during interactive teaching
as well as testing students’ understanding at the
end of lessons or units.
It also involves evaluating one’s own
performance and adjusting outcomes for
different circumstances.
Reflection
• This process includes reviewing, reconstructing,
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reenacting, and critically analyzing one’s own teaching
abilities
and then grouping these reflected explanations into
evidence of changes that need to be made to become a
better teacher.
learning that has occurred–reconstructs, reenacts, and
recaptures the events, the emotions, and the
accomplishments.
All teachers must learn to observe outcomes and
determine the reasons for success or failure.
Through reflective practices in a group setting, teachers
learn to listen carefully to each other, which also gives
them insight into their own work (Ornstein et al., 2000).
New Comprehension
Through acts of teaching that are
"reasoned" and "reasonable," the teacher
achieves new comprehension of the
educational purposes, the subjects taught,
the students, and the formative processes
themselves.
Problem 1
• A current major hypothesis, in arena of
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educational policies, is that teachers have
difficulty teaching certain areas
because they themselves lack sufficient
understanding about them.
Why?
What Kind or Amount of Subject Matter
Knowledge Do Teachers Need?
Master
the subject matter knowledge
• the content of the subject,
• the organization of the content,
• and the methods of inquiry used within
the subject
• are the core aspects of subject matter
knowledge.
The content of the subject
• The content of the subject includes the facts,
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concepts, principles or laws
that have been gathered through decades or centuries
of inquiry into the subject.
Content is usually presumed both to increase in volume
and to change in character over time.
In history, it evolves with the discovery of new details
about events and with the development of new
interpretations of events;
in science it grows and changes with new research
findings as well as new theoretical developments,
and in literature it expands with new pieces of literature
and it changes with new interpretations of existing
pieces.
The organization
and structure of the content
• The organization and structure of the content
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refers to the network of relationships
among facts and ideas which students of the discipline
have developed.
Though a subject may contain numerous particular facts
or ideas, these are not important in their discrete,
isolated forms.
Instead, they are rendered important through the
patterns of relationships that are constructed among
them.
It is the patterns, the networks, the interstices among
these facts and ideas that form a body of knowledge,
such that the significance of any one idea or fact is
ascertained by its apparent relation to other ideas and
facts.
The methods of inquiry
• The methods of inquiry include a set of assumptions,
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rules of evidence, or forms of argument that are or can
be employed by those who contribute to the
development of the discipline.
Some of these rules of practice are tacit (a novelist may
"use" rules of sentence structure or story structure
routinely, but not be able to describe these rules to
someone else).
Others are explicit (the historian who challenges
another's findings must be able to articulate the rules of
evidence he uses in his challenge).
Whether tacit or explicit, though, these methods of
inquiry provide practitioners in the field with a way to
evaluate new ideas, challenge or defend them, interact
with one another and with the content.
The Questions
• First, teachers need to know less about their subjects
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than do others who major in the subjects, for they need
to know merely what the curriculum or textbook
provides to students?.
Second, teachers need to know more than do others
who major in the same subject? (teachers also need to
know three other aspects of subject matter: its social
norms, the relationship between the subject and various
social issues, and the utility and relevance of the subject
to everyday life).
Finally, teachers' knowledge of their subjects must be
different ? In wich way?
The Answers
• Less: teacher is a practicioner
• More: teacher is a special researcher
• Different: teacher is a reflective
practicioner
• But, in the knowledge society?
Less mastery
of subject matter knowledge
• Teachers of virtually all grade levels and
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subjects may need to understand fundamental
concepts and values within the subjects they
teach.
Moreover, teachers rarely teach precisely what is
in their texts, but instead make numerous
decisions of their own about what to teach, in
what sequence to teach it, and how much time
to devote to it.
Finally to make such decisions, teachers need an
analytic understanding of the subject, for it
cannot be presented as a whole.
More mastery
of subject matter knowledge
• Teaching a subject consists not only of teaching
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its content and methods, but also of teaching
about the subject—its cultural, social, and
pragmatic relationship to our lives.
The culture of a subject is closely related to its
method of inquiry, but extends into norms of
interpersonal relations.
Even if practitioners within a discipline can
function without awareness that their field has a
separate culture, students may shun certain
fields because they feel alienated from them.
Different mastery
of subject matter knowledge
• Teachers' knowledge must differ in its character,
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rather than its content, from the knowledge of
other baccalaureates. It distinguishes teachers'
subject matter knowledge by suggesting that it
must be explicit and self-conscious, rather than
tacit.
The key to pedagogical subject matter
knowledge is the word blend. A blend of
knowledge is different from a sum of two kinds
of knowledge--on one side subject matter and
on the other side students.
Special researcher
& reflective practitioner
• The teachers' curricular decisions are
closely related to their perception of the
subject matter they are teaching.
• For some, subject matter means a
particular set of skills; for others it means
a set of ideas or concepts; for still others
it may mean a way of reasoning about
certain kinds of problems.
Researchs’evidence
• Evidence is accumulating to suggest that
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teachers' beliefs can have a substantial impact
on their practices
Teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning
were associated not only with how they taught
but also with what their students learned.
The possession of a H.E. degree, and even a
major in a particular subject, do not assure that
a person can explain the structure and
organization of subject matter that teach.
One way Pedagogy
• One method for teaching the scientific method is to
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transform it into a list of facts and ideas: to tell students
what the scientific method is and how it is done and to
provide some illustrations, perhaps describing some
famous critical experiments. That is, students are taught
how scientists have conducted their work in the past,
and the body of facts and ideas they have generated
through their efforts.
This pedagogy does not allow students to experience of
the method themselves; they learn to define the
scientific method but not to reason like a scientist, to
develop clear arguments or to design critical
experiments to test competing ideas.
Emulative Pedagogy
• Another approach to teaching is to have students re-enact particular
critical events, perhaps the same experiments they learned about in
the class above, so that students can re-live the experience that the
original scientists experienced.
• This method is common in science education, where "lab" classes
often accompany lecture classes, so that students can try
experiments for themselves.
• Through this pedagogy, students learn how to conduct experiments
and they see the connection between particular experiments and
particular content.
• But these experiments are emulations of experiments already done,
whose outcomes are already known, so that students are still not
learning to reason as scientists do, but instead are learning the
procedures of particular, known experiments.
Critical Pedagogy
• A third way to teach the scientific method is to define the
components of the scientific method--things like observation,
measurement, hypothesis generation, and so forth, and give
students practice in these components.
• Unlike the first pedagogy, which emphasizes the relationship
between scientific reasoning and the accumulation of new content,
and unlike the second, which emphasizes particular procedures
associated with particular experiments, this pedagogy emphasizes
generic reasoning strategies.
• Students learn a particular way of reasoning, and perhaps some
rules of evidence, but do not learn the way in which arguments are
justified or challenged, nor the content that has derived from using
these procedures in the past.
Generative Pedagogy
• Finally, one could teach the scientific method by
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transforming the classroom into a miniature scientific
community in which students argue about particular
phenomena and then conduct experiments to ascertain
which of their hypotheses makes most sense.
Through this pedagogy, students develop their own body
of scientific content not only by applying the techniques
of the scientific method but by engaging in the
reasoning and debate that are part of the scientific
community.
But although students learn more about the culture and
norms of science, they may learn less about the
particular content that scientists have learned through
their application of the scientific method.
2. What is Grounded Theory?
Introductory Contestualisation
The big Ideas of Grounded Theory
• Orienting theory generated from experience vs Naive
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Baconian Induction
Abduction vs. Induction
Data vs. Phenomena
Comparative Problem-Centered Method vs intuictionist
learning:
By (1) comparing incidents applicable to each category
of analysis, (2) integrating categories and their
properties, (3) delimiting the theory, and (4) writing the
theory.
Theory Generation vs. Theory Appraisal
Grounded theory can help you
• Gather rich data through guiding your data
collection
• Get started in early data analysis
• Use flexible guidelines for managing your
research
• Keep focusing your analysis to make it
more original and useful
What is grounded theory?
A systematic method of conducting research
that:
• Begins with an observative approach
• Involves engaging in simultaneous data
collection and analysis
• Consists of several flexible guidelines
• Emphasizes constructing the analysis
• Aims to construct middle-range theories
What is grounded theory?
(cont.)
• A method that goes beyond induction
- Its strategies lead to making
conjectures and hypotheses and to
checking them
-Therefore, the researcher engages in
abductive reasoning as inquiry
proceeds.
What does grounded theory help you
to accomplish?
This method:
• Enables you to study processes
• Helps you explicate what is happening in
your field setting
• Keeps you focused on your data and
emerging analysis
• Supports you in developing an original
theoretical analysis
How do grounded theorists conduct
research? We engage in:
• Making systematic comparisons
throughout inquiry
• Interacting with our data, codes, and
categories
• Doing analytic writing from the start—
memo-writing
• Making early links between the empirical
world and theoretical ideas—and
checking them—theoretical
sampling
Wouldn’t it be helpful to have a few
questions to guide your research?
Grounded theory gives you general
questions—and points the way for you to
develop further questions specific to your
research problem and emerging analysis
Grounded theory helps you to keep your
research
• Manageable
• Efficient
• Exciting!
Which questions do grounded theorists
use when coding data?
• What is happening? (Glaser, 1978)
• “What is this data a study of?” (Glaser, 1978,
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p. 57; Glaser and Strauss, 1967)
What theoretical category does this datum
indicate? (Glaser, 1978)
What does the data suggest? Pronounce?
From whose point of view?
Wouldn’t it be helpful to have guidelines for
coding qualitative data?
• Use line-by-line coding as an initial tool for
opening up the data
• Ask what is happening in each bit of data
• Compare data with data
1. Statement with statement
2. Story with story
3. Incident with incident
• Then compare code with code
Coding for what is happening
So part of it has been good
because I can see that I'm not
the only one that has good days
and bad days, everybody does.
They might not be physical, as
much as psychological, but
everybody has kind of good days
and bad days, as moods and
things too.
Identifying a
positive
Recognizing other
people’s good
and bad days
Qualifying their good
and bad days
Viewing good and
bad days as
universal
Comparing Statements: Umberto
Taking a broader view beyond self
So part of it has been good because I
can see that I'm not the only one that
has good days and bad days,
everybody does.
Seeing beyond self
They might not be physical, as much
as psychological, but everybody has
kind of good days and bad days, as
moods and things too
Discerning the content of
good and bad days
Comparing statements: Margaret dealing with her
illness on a bad day and her mother with
Alzheimer’s—Being caught in chaos
And if I’m trying to get dinner
ready and I’m already feeling
bad, she’s in front of the
refrigerator. Then she goes to
put her hand on the stove and I
got the fire on. And then she’s
in front of the microwave and
then she’s in front of the
silverware drawer. And-and if I
send her out she gets mad at
me. That’s when I have really
a really bad time.
Making a bad day
worse
Escalating chaos
See also,
Arthur Frank (1995):
“The Chaos Narrative
Comparing responses to bad days: Marco—
Dealing with bad days
We’re [a friend who has
multiple sclerosis] kind of like
mutual supporters for each
other. And when she has her
bad days or when we
particularly feel “poor me,”
you know, “Get off your
butt!” You know, we can be
really pushy to each other
and understand it.
Reciprocal
supporting
Having bad days
Disallowing self-pity
Issuing reciprocal
orders
Taking the criticism
Realizing that once bad days have
become good days—John
What used to be bad days
[laughing] now are good days
…but the quality of things, I
think, is declining, you know,
from , say a couple of years
ago when I didn’t think about it
that much. And there would be
isolated days when I had a lot
of congestion and things like
that. But that’s all.
Shifting criteria of
good and bad days
Defining declining
health
Comparing past and
present
What is constructivist grounded
theory?
It is a contemporary revision of Glaser and
Strauss’s (1967; Glaser 1978) classic grounded
theory that:
• Assumes a relativist approach
• Acknowledges multiple standpoints and
realities of both the grounded theorist and
the research participants
• Takes a reflexive stance toward our actions,
situations, and participants in the field
setting, and constructions of them in our
analyses.
How does constructivist grounded theory
advance data collection?
It fosters building explicit “what” and “how”
questions into the data collection
She said…,But, fortunately, I had the experience of
at some point surrendering, you know.
I asked, What does that mean to you,
surrendering?
She said, It means that I don't have, I can't
control it and to look at what it has to teach me.
Just, you know, let it tell me what it needs to tell
me. You know, that willingness and that
acceptance.
Data collection in constructivist grounded theory
And you don't always get, you know, I don't
always get that right away because here I
could have had a lot of "control" over my
life, and then I didn't have control
anymore, and so it didn't come instantly,
but I was willing to surrender and to look
at what was going on. But it did come, it
did happen. And I'm always much more at
peace after I'm able to do that anyway.
Where Does Constructivist GT Take Us?
This approach leads us to
• Assume that what we take as “real” is
problematic—and that our analyses
are interpretive
• Look for multiple definitions of reality
• Pay close attention to language—and
action
• Examine how experience is constituted
and structures are enacted
In sum, what is grounded theory?
• An abductive, comparative, and
interactive approach to inquiry that
offers several open-ended
strategies for conducting emergent
inquiry.
Lakatos’s Picture of Science
• The typical unit of science is not an isolated hypothesis,
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but rather a research programme, consisting in a hard
core (theory), protective belt (auxiliary assumptions)
and a heuristic.
A heuristic is a "powerful problem solving machinery,
which with the help of sophisticated mathematical
techniques, digests anomalies and events turns them
into positive evidence. For instance, if a planet does not
move exactly as it should, the Newtonian scientist
checks his conjectures concerning atmospheric
refraction, concerning propagation of light in magnetic
storms, and hundreds of other conjectures that are all
part of the programme. He may even invent a hitherto
unknown planet and calculate its position, mass and
velocity in order to explain the anomaly." (Lakatos,
1977, p. 5)
The Lakatos Methodology in
education
• As in all researches, all scientific curriculum research programs may
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be characterized by their ‘hard core’.
The negative heuristic of the program forbids us to direct the modus
tollens at this ‘hard core’.
Instead, we must use our ingenuity to articulate or even invent
auxiliary hypotheses, which form a protective belt around this core,
and we must redirect the modus tollens to these.
It is this protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses which has to bear
the brunt of tests and get adjusted and re-adjusted, or even
completely replaced, to defend the thus-hardened core.
A research program is successful if it leads to a progressive problem
shift, unsuccessful if it leads to a degenerating problem shift.
The final question
Could we teach by contents
or by metodology program’s
research?