Teacher Decision-Making in the Classroom

Abstract

After the idealist 1960s and early 1970s we are lurching into the more materialistic mid and late 1970s; and schools and teachers are experiencing this shift at structural, organisational and individual levels (Hunter). This quotation appears in one paper in a collection concerning teacher decisionmaking in the classroom. The papers are revisions of those presented to a working group funded by the British Social Service Science Research Council. In his editorial introduction to the papers, Professor Eggleston characterises the work of the group as . . preliminary explorations of initiatives that can illuminate the continuous but often latent processes of decision-making in the classroom-processes that have consequences for all participants. Summarising previous research on teacher behaviour in the classroom, Eggleston points out that this decade's research has followed two broad courses; on one hand the descriptive/interpretative analysing teacher's activity; on the other, curriculum development/evaluation, concerned with behavioural consequences for children. The area between, the decision making process itself, has not however been the object of much examination. The papers in the volume attempt to fill in this gap by raising such questions as: How and why do teachers make decisions in the classroom for instance about the use of new and existing curricula, about progress, resource usage, selection of information? Teacher decisions are analysed from psychological, economic and sociological perspectives. The papers range widely in coverage, methodology and theory. A psychologist's view is presented by Mervin Taylor. He looks at the teachers' implicit personality systems by using a 'repertory grid technique', and finds they have more articulated 'probability systems' than previous research has indicated. The ideology of the teacher and its consequences for the teacher's decision-making is the object of Finlayson and Quirk's paper. They stress the justificatory role that ideological formulations plays in interactions between teachers and individuals and members of groups whom they regard as threatening. The authors question whether the raising level of awareness (negative as well as positive) of ideology among administrators and teachers not bridge the gulf between normative assumptions made about schools in the ideologies and the realities of the classrooms. A phenomenological approach is presented by David Hargreaves, who believes that explication of the interrelationship between teachers' values and professional skills, revealed in decision-making, could provide the experienced teacher with the tools to uncover and reconstruct his own common sense knowledge, skills and values and thus to change more thoroughly and with self-awareness.