Strategies and Tactics in Junior School Classrooms

Abstract

During the 1970s there has been a rapid growth in the use of systematic observation to study teaching. Whereas the 1970 edition of Mirrorsfor Behaviour (Simon & Boyer, 1970) listed only two British instruments, a recently published anthology now shows that the number of home produced ones stands at 40 of which a sizeable number are designed for use at primary school level (Galton, 1978). One use of these techniques has been to describe styles of teaching (Eggleston, Galton & Jones, 1976; Galton, Simon & Croll, 1980). Teachers are sorted into groups whose characteristics are defined in terms of the relative frequency with which their members use the categories of the observation schedule. Used in this way the definition of teaching style differs from that used by other authors, notably in the report of the findings of the Lancaster study (Bennett, 1976). The purpose of this article is therefore to attempt a more precise definition of the term and to contrast the use of interaction analysis and questionnaires in providing descriptions of various teaching styles. To illustrate points in the discussion, data from the ORACLE study (Simon & Galton, 1975) will be used, particularly data from the Teacher Record, an observation instrument developed in an earlier study (Boydell, 1974). This instrument clearly bears certain similarities to the Science Teacher Observation Schedule (STOS) which was developed to provide information about the range of teaching styles used in the new secondary science curricula (Eggleston, Galton & Jones, 1975). In developing their notion of teaching style these researchers laid stress on the distinction between teaching strategy and teaching tactics first put forward by Taba & Elzey (1964) and subsequently elaborated by Strasser (1967) in advancing a conceptual model of instruction. For Taba a strategy consists of a teacher's attempt to translate her aims into practice while tactics according to Strasser are the 'minute by minute exchanges' between a teacher and her pupils through which such strategies are implemented.