Teaching and Teacher Education 16 (2000) 21}32

What does the teacher do? Constructivist pedagogies and prospective teachers' beliefs about the role of a teacher
Diane Holt-Reynolds*
School of Education, Michigan State University, 329 Erickson Hall, East Lausing, MI 48824, USA Received 23 February 1998; received in revised form 16 December 1998; accepted 17 February 1999

Abstract The constructivist pedagogies that are increasingly part of teacher education course work and expectations emerge from an intellectual world where knowledge is seen as created rather than received, mediated by discourse rather than transferred by teacher talk, explored and transformed rather than remembered as a uniform set of positivistic ideas. Increasingly, teacher educators ask new teachers to learn how to elicit and then use students' existing ideas as a basis for helping them construct new, more reasoned, more accurate or more disciplined understandings. While the role a teacher plays in developing or shaping students' thinking via constructivist pedagogies is obvious to teacher educators who advocate such strategies, the case of Taylor, a prospective English teacher, suggests that the role a teacher plays when using these strategies may not be at all clear to prospective teachers. Rather than understanding constructivist pedagogies as techniques for thinking with learners, for teaching them, Tayor saw these strategies as ends in themselves. Faced with models of constructivist pedagogies, Taylor concluded that the teacher's role ends when she has activated learners, invited them to talk, successfully engaged their participation. This article describes how she reached this conclusion and explores the ways in which constructivist pedagogies can lead prospective teachers to project a thin vision of their role as a teacher. 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Responsible programs of teacher education serve multiple clients. We see in our university classrooms our primary clients, prospective teachers. And in their eyes we can also see the images of our secondary clients, the school students these prospective teachers will one day teach. National standards in mathematics, science and the language arts

* Tel.: #517-355-1725; fax: #517-432-5092. E-mail address: holtreyn@pilot.msu.edu (D. Holt-Reynolds)

have helped map professional ideals about the kind of learning opportunities schools should o!er to children. These national standards assume classrooms where inquiry and coconstruction as well as other forms of student-centered, discourse-based interactions dominate. They call for problem-based instruction, for liberal use of classroom talk as a medium within which students will learn and as a forum students will use to demonstrate their learning. They prefer peer interactions, consultations and deliberations. Since theories of socially mediated knowledge are foundational to these kinds of classroom communities, many programs of teacher education

0742-051X/99/$ - see front matter 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 7 4 2 - 0 5 1 X ( 9 9 ) 0 0 0 3 2 - 3

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implicitly, explicitly and often exclusively urge prospective teachers to adopt some form of social constructivist epistemology. The case study presented here is not o!ered as a vehicle for exploring the soundness of current constructivist trends. Nor is this report intended to parse or evaluate the distinctions and variations in ways teacher educators think about constructivist pedagogies (see Phillips, 1995). Rather, I will argue here that learning to envision classrooms as discourse-based and student-centered is a complex task and particularly vulnerable to prospective teacher misinterpretation of role.

2. What are we asking of today's teachers? The constructivist pedagogies that are increasingly part of teacher education course work and expectations emerge from an intellectual world where knowledge is seen as created rather than received (von Glasersfeld, 1991), mediated by discourse rather than transferred by teacher talk (Vygotsky, 1962), explored and transformed rather than remembered as a uniform set of positivistic ideas (Dewey, 1969; Rorty, 1979). Consequently, we no longer educate teachers solely for a role as a dispenser of knowledge. Some teacher educators may, in fact, actively work to bias prospective teachers against such a role. Increasingly, we ask new teachers to learn how to elicit student participation and then use students' existing ideas as a basis for helping them construct new, more reasoned, more accurate or more disciplined understandings. We ask them to learn how to actively engage students' participation and then use that participation as a context within which to do this thing we call `teachinga. Sfard (1998) notes the emergence of participation metaphors in the discourse we currently use for talking about teaching and learning. Participation metaphors subtly equate learning with activity and with doing. They suggest to us that students who are actively doing things in classrooms are learning while students who are passive in classrooms are not learning. Pedagogies of coconstruction have given rise to these participation metaphors with their emphasis

on re#ecting, building, inquiring, talking, writing and project-centered learning. These pedagogies project a teacher who is able to use personal expertise and authority as the teacher to develop a classroom culture that invites and values student participation in intellectual tasks. Teacher educators who advocate such pedagogical strategies assume that teachers will use them as contexts within which to guide, shape and expand students' thinking (Ball, 1989; McDiarmid, 1989). This focus on engaging students in participation may be misleading for prospective teachers. Teacher educators know and fully understand that constructivist pedagogies are used by teachers to help students grow, change and learn. Teacher educators know that student participation is not an end in itself but is a means, a context within which teachers work to help students think, question, revise understandings and learn something about a concept the teacher set out to teach. As the following data will suggest, there is every reason to wonder whether prospective teachers get this full picture. Might they see only that good teaching means engaging students actively but overlook the fundamentally instructional role inherent within constructivist pedagogies?

3. Developing a role as a teacher: the case of Taylor Taylor was a traditional undergraduate, 19 years old, in her sophomore year majoring in English at a large, mid-western institution when I "rst met her. She was one of a group of prospective English teachers who volunteered to participate in an 18 month study where I functioned as a member of a research team. Her case is a dramatic one. It highlights the challenges that prospective teachers face as they struggle to develop a sense for what role they might play in the learning of others.

4. How we found Taylor: a study design At The National Center for Research on Teacher Learning, we wanted to learn how successful literature majors, undergraduates able to maintain a 3.0 standing or better in their major,

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transfer their own disciplinary expertise } their abilities as readers } into an understanding of the school subject `literaturea and project a subject-speci"c pedagogical role for themselves as teachers. Drawing speci"cally on the work of Grossman (1990,1991) we were speci"cally curious about how these prospective literature teachers saw and understood the purposes and actions of reading and how they imagined that literature teachers would support those purposes and actions. We wanted to explore their beliefs about their role as a teacher just as they were completing a bachelor's degree and prior to experience with a teacher education program or real classrooms as student teachers or interns. We isolated this point in prospective teachers' careers because we wanted to understand more perfectly who prospective teachers are intellectually when they enter programs of teacher education. Our most fundamental question was: What are prospective English teachers likely to believe about the role of teachers of literature when they "rst begin teacher education course work? We were engaged at the time in restructuring our secondary teacher certi"cation proram. We wanted data upon which to base decisions about how to adapt teacher education course work given that prospective English teachers encounter these courses near the end of completion of their undergraduate major. 4.1. Data collection Taylor was one of 16 English majors we selected from a pool of potential volunteers drawn from the entire group of students enrolled in any one of their English department's 300-level courses. We took our volunteers from a pool of sophomores or juniors rather than freshmen so that we could be more certain of their selection of English as a stable major and of their ability to earn a 3.0 or better in English department courses; and, we avoided seniors because prospective teachers in this certi"cation program spend signi"cant numbers of hours in schools early in the senior year. We wanted ample opportunities to talk with participants before they had already modi"ed their positions to accommodate teacher education course work and accompanying "eld experiences (see Tighe, 1991).

A team of researchers conducted entrance and exit interviews as well as brief interviews at the end of each of the three semesters we were in contact with participants. The most extensive of these interviews was the entrance interview, a 119 question protocol broken into four 2 hour sittings. Part One solicited participants' histories as readers by asking them to recall early experiences as readers both at home and at school; Part Two invited participants to attempt to de"ne `literaturea and to talk about their values for genre and text types; Part Three elicited participants' current theories about critical perspectives widely recognized within the discipline; and Part Four moved into participants' projections about the role of a literature teacher. During this part of the interview, we asked participants to select books for an imaginary class and to talk about the rationales guiding their selections; we asked them to read Poe's `The Ravena and to talk about what they did as a reader to understand the poem. Finally, interviewers asked participants to construct a test on Romeo and Juliet for 10th graders by choosing test items from among a set of 25 questions we had written. While the fourth part of the interview most directly elicited participants' current beliefs about the role of a literature teacher, all parts of the interview yielded useful and illuminating data about what these prospective teachers thought literature teachers should do. All interviews were both audio and video taped. Participants answered all questions and talked their way through interview tasks spontaneously with the interviewer present and free to supplement the protocol with additional clarifying and probing questions. In the case of Taylor, I was the interviewer. A more complete description of these interview protocols is available in Appendix A. We concluded our study with an exit interview that repeated many items from parts Two, Three and Four of the entrance interview protocol. Interviewers explicitly probed for shifts in perspective and inquired about apparent changes in participants' views. End-of-semester interviews served primarily as vehicles for maintaining contact, discovering whether study participants continued to anticipate a career in teaching and to establish rapport between participants and interviewers.

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4.2. Data analysis Each participant's data were read as a whole text at the end of the study by the team of "ve researchers. While each researcher read the entire corpus of data from a participant, each researcher also focused on one piece of the larger research question, read the participant's data with that one sub-question in mind and prepared an issue paper re#ecting the participant's position on the question/issue. We chose issues to parallel the parts of the entrance/exit interview protocols: personal history and biography, de"nition of literature, theory of reading and perspective on the role of a teacher were the four issues for focus. The research team met together to build the case around each participant's data resolving discrepant views by rereading portions of the data and through conversation until consensus was reached. 4.3. Taylor All participants expressed ambivalence about what teachers should do in order to teach literature. All were enamored of class discussion as a primary teaching strategy. All were certain that getting kids to talk about the books was an important teaching role. None were clear about what the teacher might do, what role she/he might serve during these discussions other than to ask for students' opinions and attempt to include all class members. One believed that teachers should follow a class discussion by telling students the right ideas if they failed to locate them through the discussion process. Taylor's data are not outstanding because they reveal a point of view unique within the larger study; they are outstanding because they are very explicit. This is likely due to the fact that Taylor was the only study participant to change her mind about what a teacher should do during the time we were interviewing her. More than anyone else in the study, Taylor spent the 18 months we were interviewing her worrying this very question. Consequently, her data illustrate a dilemma we saw in varying degrees in each participant's data, but Taylor's transcripts o!er particularly clean, direct commentary on the question.

5. `I can't do what a teacher should doa. Taylor's dilemma Taylor came to our university, the second of three children from a home where both parents were professional educators. Teaching was a role Taylor expected to step into. Her K-12 apprenticeship of observation (Lortie, 1976) had been augmented by daily life with parents who were teachers. Taylor believed her parents were her models for the career she had chosen for herself. `I was always working with my mom. She taught journalism, and I'd help out with thata. Taylor explained that her projected career as an English teacher was `just naturala given her parents' careers. Taylor's mother taught high school public speaking and supervised the journalism extra-curricular activities; her father was the assistant superintendent of her district. I think seeing [my parents' careers] and growing up with them maybe in#uenced me and has directed me [to teaching]. And then being with teachers that I liked. That has a lot to do with [my choice], I think. At the time of my "rst interview with her, Taylor was eager to talk about her experiences with university literature instructors. She particularly admired one professor, whom I will call Dr. Jensen, because of what she perceived to be his knowledge of literature. He not only shows you the point of view of the people [in a text], he gives you the issues and the background. Who the author was, where he was born, where he [im]migrated to, the issues that were surrounding his life. Professor Jensen knows a lot of background. That really impresses me. Taylor consistently showed herself to be sensitive to the processes her professors used when they generated meaning from literary texts. She told me about her conscious e!ort to learn these processes from Professor Jensen and enact them on her own.

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[He] draws things out of the reading. He knows the works, and he knows the style and what the people are thinking. He'll say, `Look at it like thisa, and all of a sudden, things start clicking. Taylor's ability to articulate with some precision the mental processes/actions she perceived her professor to take was the one way in which her data were unusual in our participant group. We agreed that her attention to the ways her professors used their expertize signaled her own preoccupation with her search for models she could adopt or adapt for her own use as an emerging teacher. Our hypothesis was supported by her statement below. I'm kind of struggling with the literature. I like the reading. I have a hard time interpreting the reading. And I know that I'm going to need to be able to understand it and interpret it in order to teach it. I've had two excellent professors, and they are wonderful in terms of interpreting, and that's what I want to learn to do. I can read the book and go to class, and they'll interpret it for me. I can see where they're coming from in that instance, in that specixc book (emphasis is Taylor's). But I'm afraid I'm not learning how to go about interpreting all books and the steps and the processes and how to read a book for the interpretations. And that's what I'm hoping to get out [of my education] the most. Here Taylor explicated her sense that there is a particular role for a teacher and that she needs to learn it. As a teacher, she anticipated showing others how to do this particular mental work. I agree with requiring close reading. Not just surface reading. Seeing the symbolism, seeing the metaphors2. You pick up on the technique2. That's what I've been saying; the reader learns to interpret. You pick up on the technique. There's some form of basic outline that a critic follows when he's critiquing something. You emphasize the good and the bad. Then you make comparisons to the [author's] life and to the background and to the time [period]2. They go o! on di!erent directions, but that's a very basic outline

I'm sure that they kind of follow. And by following that, we see the things [the critics] are emphasizing. Taylor expected to become pro"cient at what she saw her professors doing, what she understood literary critics to be doing. But she also confessed her belief that she was currently unable to read in this way by herself. Taylor explained, `That's what I need. I need someone to get me going and just lead me in the direction, and I can interpret things2. I see a theme, but I don't see a pointa. However, Taylor believed she could not currently enact the role she believed literature teachers need to "ll. She believed she could not personally interpret text. I'm not oblivious to the idea that I will have to teach literature. I do have a fear of it right now. Like I said, I can't interpret it. And I know that fear will go away when I learn how to interpret. That's what I want to learn the most. Taylor reported that she read for pleasure books that are not especially demanding } Dr. Suess as allegory and young adult literature typically selected by preteens and early adolescents. She told me she read Stephen King and Danielle Steele because, `They're just enjoyment books to get away from the literature and the hard core booksa. Across the initial interview series, Taylor o!ered little evidence to suggest that she was a strong reader or that she "t the common pro"le of English majors who read complex or sophisticated books for the sheer pleasure of it. Rather, she used leisure reading `to get away from the literature and the hard core booksa. As early as her sophomore year, Taylor was projecting toward the time when she would be the literature teacher working with a classroom of adolescent learners. It is important to understand the task she had set for herself } to become someone who knows literature in those ways that will qualify her to teach it to others. Taylor expected that someone who knows literature would follow a known, dependable process in order to arrive at an interpretation. She anticipated a teaching role

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for herself that included an ability to teach this known, dependable process to others. But Taylor seriously questioned her ability to "ll the teacher's role as she saw it. I will not engage here in an evaluation or critique of the particular role she envisioned; the point is, she believed that literature teachers need to interpret texts and then show students how to interpret them. Curiously, during this same time period Taylor objected to all of my questions about what she might teach and why. She preferred to talk about `exposinga students to texts, not `teachinga those texts. I don't think we're taught literature. I think we're exposed to it. We're allowed to get into it as much as we want2. If [my students] know it the way that I'm learning it in college, they will be able to decide for themselves if they like it. I'm being exposed in college. Of all Taylor's entrance interview statements, this is one of the most di$cult to really understand. I can make sense of it only if I imagine that in Taylor's mind, `teachinga meant telling students something while `exposinga meant showing students her own uses of this predictable process she saw her professors utilize. My reading of Taylor in this way is supported by her response to my questions about what she might do if her future students failed to understand a poem she had taught. Taylor asserted, Some students aren't very interested in literature, and they probably won't use it in their lifetime anyway. So [not understanding] isn't hurting them; it's just not bene"ting them. If we didn't have literature in school, it wouldn't hurt them. It just would not bene"t them. Taylor was only just beginning her university course work in literature. As an outsider watching her case unfold, I assumed Taylor would talk about her skills as an interpreter quite di!erently by the time our conversations would be completed. My assumptions proved fundamentally false. Across the entrance interviews and then across three sets of end-of-semester interviews and concluding with

a "nal round of exit interviews, Taylor failed to reach a point where she believed that she functioned as an independent maker of meaning around a text. She eventually abandoned the goal altogether. I cannot put her self-reports down as an issue of poor self-esteem or self-e!acement. In general, Taylor talked about herself quite positively. She called herself `aggressivea and `a real leadera. She recounted with pride events from a freshman education class where she had noticed her unique ability to look at educational issues across `a full range of schoola to include administrative positions. She saw this ability as positive and useful. As time passed, she worked on campus as a residence hall advisor and often shared stories of her decisive actions in that role. And in our "nal conversation together, she explained, again with pleasure, that she had `grown regarding multi-cultural issuesa. Taylor typically spoke about herself with pride and gave every indication of high selfesteem. Only on the subject of her ability to interpret literature was she less than positive. The fact that she believed the ability in question was critical to her success as a teacher, that she saw it as central to the task of teaching and that it represented her only instance of serious self-doubt leads me to represent her inability to interpret literature as an important and very likely an accurate assessment.

6. `But, I can do this!a Taylor's solution By the beginning of her senior year, Taylor had stopped talking about processes for generating interpretations; she had stopped talking about her fear that she might not be prepared to teach. She had taken an English department adolescent literature course designed especially for prospective teachers. Again, she was impressed with her professor. This professor treated the course as a context for modeling strategies classroom teachers could use to invite readers to develop personal meanings. If Taylor knew that this professor, whom I will call Dr. Woods, was operating from an entirely di!erent critical perspective than Dr. Jensen whom she had previously admired, she did not tell me. Taylor

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simply stopped raising questions of authors' meanings. She began talking about the importance of personally valid interpretations. And she noted that these would certainly vary. By the time of the exit interviews, Taylor had decided that acting like a good reader did not involve generating independently one potentially valid meaning/interpretation but instead involved noticing and appreciating multiple ones. `I'm not searching for one meaning. I'm searching for possible meaningsa. She explained that readers would gain pleasure from the recognition that `[t]here is another interpretation. That there are othersa. This shift in focus may signal nothing more important than Taylor's intuitive ability to "nd the central, distinguishing feature of a favored professor's stance on the question of interpretation. Still, it is instructive to notice that Taylor began to place greater value on the ability to see the interpretations of others than on developing her own, publicly defensible interpretations. You talk in class; you hear three more meanings. And then your understanding is how you kind of choose to handle all of these meanings and how you put them together, take parts, delete some. So, that's your understanding. And you gain a greater pleasure if you are open as a reader. You just listen to them all. Accept or don't accept. And you just bring it all together into an understanding. It's very individual2. I don't necessarily think that, after you've heard everything and recognized everything, that you need to say, `O.K. This is understanding for mea. I think you just gain understanding by the openmindedness part of it, of just recognizing all the di!erent [interpretations]. That's what I think understanding is. By the time I last saw her, Taylor had decided that people know literature when they can listen in open-minded fashion to the personal interpretations of others. They might reach a personal understanding themselves. If so, "ne. But they might not. Understanding the meanings made by others, `recognizing all the di!erent interpretationsa, would be enough. And it was something she believed she could do herself.

7. Participation equals learning Taylor's exposure to an English educator's modeling of constructivist, participation-centered pedagogies had made a new impression. Knowing that she believed she had never mastered the intellectual work Dr. Jensen modeled, I wanted to understand more about her rejection of a reading and interpreting process she had previously admired. I reminded Taylor of her admiration for Dr. Jensen's methods, read her a portion of her own entrance interview data and asked her how she thought about generating interpretations of text at that moment. I've learned di!erent ways to attempt to interpret or to begin to interpret. I don't think there is one interpretation. I don't think there is one way to interpret. I think I have an ability to do it because my idea of interpretation is so individual. Everyone's individual interpretation has value. I've built up my own con"dence that I can interpret. I think everyone can interpret2 I still think that some evidence for an idea is stronger and some is weaker, but I think all evidence has validity2. I'll look at a student's passion. If he is adamant and real passionate, I don't want to sti#e him and say, `No, you're wronga. Taylor's response evades questions of what makes an interpretation good, better or really excellent by emphasizing and valuing instead individuality and con"dence or passion as the characterizing elements for critique. Taylor appeared open to the relativistic notion that all ideas are equally good and no one can evaluate the ideas of another except by understanding the thinking behind those ideas. Adopting this intellectual position appeared to have allowed her to set aside questions of how to develop a good interpretation as unimportant. At the same time, it let her set aside questions of how to teach others to do this puzzling and elusive act. And it freed her to look instead at how to get kids involved with literature minus the need to evaluate, scrutinize, coach or direct the quality of that involvement. It resonated with what she believed she was hearing from her adolescent literature professor: `Let students' ideas frame your

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teachinga. Encountering constructivist pedagogies at a time when she was vulnerable intellectually to doubts about whether she could ever become the teacher she believed she would need to be may well have preempted Taylor's sense of a con#ict and hence her energy for resolving it. Taylor had made powerful revisions in what she envisioned as her role as a teacher. By the time of the exit interviews, Taylor imagined scrupulously avoiding a moment when, as the teacher, she would o!er an interpretation. Taylor-as-Teacher now imagined encouraging students to o!er and tolerate multiple possible answers. Hers would be a classroom where a teacher would on principle do little more than manage students' active responses to literature, their projects and their class discussions. I don't believe that literature is taught2. `Teachinga is where someone has information to relay. It's like, `This is weather in clouds. Rain comes from cloudsa. That's teaching it; you're telling them. But I don't think you can do that [with literature]. You can't tell them the meaning because I don't believe there is only one meaning or that teachers' meaning are the right meaning2. I want to play the role of what society labels a teacher, but I see my responsibilities in the classroom di!erent than what a lot of people think. I pressed her speci"cally about whether that role included anything like showing students what she once imagined a teacher would do } show students how to interpret text. She recalled: I think what happened to me is one of the most powerful ways [to help students become better interpreters]. That is the idea of building con"dence that all interpretations are valid. Just this idea of constantly saying, `Okay, let's read this poem. What do you think it means? Oh, great idea! Good idea! That's totally di!erent, but I see where you're getting thisa. You know, just constantly having people talk about their interpretations and never saying, `Wrong, wrong, wronga. Not being the judge of interpretations. You already know how to interpret. Your interpreta-

tion is what you got out of it. All you need to do is build up their con"dence. I pursued Taylor's new vision of teaching by asking her to imagine a tenth-grade classroom where she might want students to read `The Ravena. I asked Taylor what her role would be. What would I do? I really believe in this. Let the kids get out of it what they get out of it. Don't let them slack o! and say, `I don't get ita. I could see myself having a reading of this in class. Have students brainstorm meanings or discuss questions or what they don't understand2. [I'd ask]. `What meaning did you get out of this? Bring me in something that represents that meaning and kind of create a booklet. Poems or song lyrics. It can be pictures or cut-outs or whatevera2. Then, they can stand up in front of class and say, `Well, this is very depressing. So I went to the library and I made the "rst page of my booklet obituaries because I hear death in this poema. I'd have them create something tangible that represents their meaning physically and require a presentation to really emphasize that what everyone got out of this is di!erent. Taylor said, `I really believe thisa. I wanted to test her resolve. So, I pretended to be a student attempting her assignment. I said: Suppose I bring you in a picture of an automobile accident because in `The Ravena, this guy was in an auto accident and his wife died and now he's in a wheelchair with a canary a friend brought over. His wife is a ghost. He is real depressed, on drugs because he is in pain and he thinks the canary is a raven. Within `The Ravena there is no textual support for imagining it as a story about an automobile accident. My imaginary answer was calculated to tempt Taylor to adjust my literal level of reading for this poem. But Taylor responded to my booklet's length, not to its content. `I would realize that my assignment } I was anticipating maybe a booklet of poems or maybe some song lyrics, not just one picture with a two second explanationa. She

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seemed either undisturbed by or unaware of the mismatch between my ideas about the poem and its literal-level content. So, I expanded my imaginary booklet to include a few newspaper clippings about auto accidents resulting from drunk driving, a personal story of my uncle who lost a child due to a drunk driver and a request that we start a SADD group in our school. Taylor liked my expanded project. `I like how you interpreted or created a story. I like how you brought in personal re#ections. But I still need your re#ection on the poem. Why is he writing it? Is he trying to tell people something?a Still playing my role as imaginary student, still using the interview as an occasion to learn how Taylor imagined her role as a teacher, I explained that Poe was trying to warn people about the evils of drunk driving. Taylor accepted that but wanted `morea. She attempted to improve my attention to the poem without negating anything I had said about my understanding of it. She concluded by noting, `You're not too far o!. It's just that I need a connectora, between the ideas I had presented and the poem. Taylor was never satis"ed with my imaginary persona's attempts to link an interpretation to the poem, but neither did she challenge my reading or imagine informing it in any way. Playing her role as my teacher, she coached my project, not my reading.

debate about texts. If Taylor knew that her role could include shaping students' ideas, informing the bases on which they made judgments or o!ered rationales or any other sort of intellectual exchange, she did not demonstrate this belief in our interviews together. Our exchange ended with Taylor's outline of the kinds of activities she imagined would fall to her as a teacher. My job would be to kind of be the prober in a class discussion. I would just kind of be the one asking questions for the class to talk about}real general questions. Or I'll play devil's advocate to what they do say and have them think about it or provide evidence for it and just get the class discussion going. My job is to probe the rationales [students have] for believing what they do about a poem2. When the discussion starts, those that don't have an idea what's going on listen. Then they pick up on what everyone is talking about. I just let ideas come out.

9. What I learn from Taylor Taylor's case warns me that for some prospective literature teachers, apparent commitment to constructivist pedagogies may be nothing more than a means for avoiding a confrontation with perceived personal inability as a knower. A prospective teacher like Taylor could agree to teach Romeo and Juliet, engage students in a personal project loosely tied to the story line, grade those projects holistically or as portfolio contributions and everyone watching might be delighted with her e!orts while dismissing the rough spots as tied to the di$culties any beginner would experience the "rst time through Shakespeare with adolescent readers. A Taylor could easily pass through a teacher education program and none of us be the wiser or make a conscious, professionally based move to help. Therefore, Taylor's case reminds me of the importance of the teacher education knowledge base. Prospective teachers need to understand the theoretical underpinnings of the practical, useful teaching strategies we are eager to see them adopt. Yet, prospective teachers are typically impatient with

8. Teacher education and Taylor - thinking Taylor shared her "rst take on aligning participation-centered teaching strategies with a teaching role. It was not an alignment I'd want to support. She imagined that teaching is about getting students to talk, engaging them in a project loosely focused on a piece of curriculum. Prior to overt teacher education interventions, Taylor was enamored of participatory, constructivist pedagogies. She eagerly embraced them. But her reason, however out of awareness, had more to do with "nding a role that required little intellectual interaction between herself-as-Teacher and her students and less to do with her emerging sense that adolescents learn something through engagement in inquiry or

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and intolerant of `theorya. Taylor attended a land grant university. It is possible that other types of universities attract prospective teachers who revel in theory and eagerly connect theories of epistemology to teacher practice. In my institution, prospective teachers are more like Taylor. They expect teacher education courses to be practical, to model pedagogies and provide opportunities to practice strategies and techniques. But, if they are indeed like Taylor, responding to their urgent desire for practical strategies } even modeling the full, best implementation of those strategies } may actually serve them poorly. How can we as teacher educators act responsibly toward our eager, impatient and vulnerable clients? If Taylor represents more than one isolated case, then those of us who teach teachers need to work to help prospective teachers see constructivist pedagogies as techniques for teaching, not merely as strategies for activating kids. We need to guard against the possibility that prospective teachers will conclude, `My job is to generate discussion } any discussion. Talk is itself the goala. We need to reexamine our own roles and our own goals. In our eagerness to challenge the acquisition model biases we believe most prospective secondary teachers bring to education course work, to present to these prospective teachers images of teaching as something other than telling, we need to remember to also show them how to use these new strategies as methods for building new learning. These means are not ends. Participation is not necessarily learning. Prospective English teachers who are forming thin visions of themselves as teachers may be di$cult to identify. Their eagerness to learn how to host class conversations would very likely sound like a commitment to solid, student-centered teaching } something we would be disposed to support. Their enthusiasm for teaching as a career and pleasure in the ideas students bring to class discussions might serve to reassure us that we've made our case for the importance of listening to students' ideas. We will need to develop habits of friendly skepticism. Our lives as researchers have taught us to look for discon"rming evidence. We will need to develop a similar discipline in our lives as teachers.

Doing responsible teacher education means acknowledging that we must help our clients discover the power of a role as a teacher. Teacher educators need to do what good teachers anywhere need to do } help our students learn to think. We will need to consciously create opportunities to hear in the midst of prospective teachers' noisy enthusiasm for constructivist practices their silence in response to critical questions about what students should learn through the activities and how teachers work to ensure that learning. Taylor is not the story of how someone failed to develop as a teacher. Taylor shows us something more about the kinds of beliefs and constructions prospective teachers might carry inside as we look at them seated in our teacher education courses. Her case invites us to develop strategies for helping all prospective teachers evolve rich, full visions of their roles as practitioners of constructivist pedagogies. Appendix A. Description of understanding literature interview protocol Part one solicited participants' histories as readers by asking them to recall early experiences as readers both at home and at school, favorite books, school experiences as readers, and memories of family events where stories } oral or textual } "gured prominently. Examples: E Tell me about how your interest in reading and literature developed? E Tell me what you remember about reading and literature in elementary school. E When you think back to your high school English classes, what stands out for you? E Tell me about why you decided to major in English2. E What's the best English or literature course you've taken? E What made it so good? E What about the #ip side } What's the worst English or literature course you've taken? E What made it bad? Part two invited participants to attempt to de"ne `literaturea and to talk about their values for genre

D. Holt-Reynolds / Teaching and Teacher Education 16 (2000) 21}32

31

and text types. This portion of the protocol included asking participants to examine 25 di!erent `textsa and to decide whether to classify each as literature. Sample texts were presented one at a time beginning with texts like The Complete Shakespeare and moving toward more potentially controversial texts } for example: a romance novel complete with steamy front cover; non-"ction, non-story texts like Darwin's Origins Of The Species; newspapers and magazines; rap lyrics; instructions for operating a co!ee maker; and "nally, a child's wordless picture book. Interviewers presented the samples one at a time in e!ect allowing participants to progressively develop a categorization system. As interviewers pointed out internal inconsistencies in participants' emerging arguments, participants alternative `decisionsa about whether a text might be literature and super-ordinate theories about literature were recorded. Part three elicited participants' current theories about critical perspectives widely recognized within the discipline. Interviewers gave participants four di!erent one-page position papers written from each of four critical perspectives } New Criticism, Humanism, Deconstructionism, and Readers Response theory. Participants read, evaluated and talked about elements with which they either agreed or disagreed within each position paper and then made comparisons and contrasts across the four papers. Examples: E When you think about what it means to know or understand literature, what sort of ideas come to mind? What do you think of when you hear the phrase `to know literature?a How did you come to think that way? E As you probably know, we are trying to "nd out more about how people think about literature and what it means to say someone knows literature. Can you think of someone who you would say knows literature? E How did you come to believe this person knows literature? Part four moved into participants' projections about the role of a literature teacher. Participants were asked to select books for an imaginary class

and to talk about the rationales guiding their selections; they were asked to read Poe's `The Ravena and to talk about what they did as a reader to understand the poem. Finally, interviewers asked participants to construct a test on Romeo and Juliet for 10th graders by choosing test items from among a set of 25 questions we had written. Examples: E Here is a copy of `The Ravena. Read it, and when you're "nished we'll talk a little about what you think is going on in this poem. E What do you know about Poe's life? The reason I'm asking this is because sometimes what we know about an author's life in#uences how we read and think about his or her work. Is that important for you when you're reading `The Ravena? E `The Ravena is a poem you could "nd yourself teaching one day. Would you choose to teach it if you found it in the anthology your students had been assigned? Could you explain what factors might a!ect your decision? E Let's assume for a moment that this poem is important to teach in a high school curriculum. Think about grades 9 } 12. Where do you think this poem could best be included? Would this be a di$cult poem for students? What helps you decide? How do you predict students will react to this poem? E Imagine that you were going to `teach this poema: What would you focus on? E If I were a visitor in your classroom when you were teaching this poem, what would I likely see you doing? How about the students } what would they likely be doing? From the "rst moment that students see the poem through to the last time they talk, think or write about it, what might be going on in your classroom? E Why do you think we teach literature in college? How about in high schools? And in elementary schools? References
Ball, D. L. (1989). Breaking with experience in learning to teach mathematics: The role of a preservice methods course. Research Report 89-10, East Lansing, MI: National Center for Research on Teacher Education.

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D. Holt-Reynolds / Teaching and Teacher Education 16 (2000) 21}32 Phillips, D. C. (1995). The good, the bad, and the ugly: The many faces of constructivism. Educational Researcher, 24(7), 5}12. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27(2), 4}13. Tighe, M. A. (1991). In#uencing students teacher attitudes: Who, what, and how. English Education, 225}243. von Glasersfeld, E. (1991). Cognition, construction of knowledge and teaching. In M. R. Matthews, History, philosophy and science teaching (pp. 117}132). New York: Teachers College Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: The M. I. T. Press.

Dewey, J. (1969). The school and society. (reprinted as a joint edition with The child and the curriculum). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1899). Grossman, P. L. (1990). The making of a teacher: Teacher knowledge and teacher education. New York: Teachers College Press. Grossman, P. L. (1991). The selection and organization of content for secondary English: Sources for teachers' knowledge. English Education, 39}53. Lortie, D. (1976). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mc Diarmid, W. G. (1989). Tilting at webs of belief: Field experiences as a means of breaking with experience. Research Report 89-8, East Lansing, MI: National Center for Research on Teacher Education.