Studying relations in the classroom

The research design comprised four steps.

(1)To study the attitudes of the teachers and of the learners, we identified empirical indexes, that is, observable types of behaviours that the respective counterpart in the classroom (or the researcher) may use as cues of the underlying attitudes.

(2) Then we observed and scored the occurrence of such behaviours in real classrooms.

(3) We used factor analysis to understand how a teacher's underlying interpersonal attitudes may result from a composition of the minimal behaviours that she enacts.

(4) We used analysis of variance (ANOVA) test to study how the educators' attitudes may influence the learners' indexes; here we also explored differences between expert and novice teachers.

The behaviours of the educators

To study empirically the interpersonal attitudes of the educators' and how they may affect learning in the audience, it was first necessary to identify suitable observable indexes thereof.

Among the several observational and assessment methods available (Angelo and Cross 1993; Black and Wiliam 1998; Cotton, Stokes, and Cotton 2010; Slimani 1992; Wragg 1994), the best known is the Flanders Interaction Analysis Categories (FIAC) (1970). Focused on teacher–student interaction, it requires the coding of the events every few seconds according to a predefined repertoire (e.g. teacher lectures, asks questions, gives directions, and accepts ideas, praises, etc.; student initiates, responds to teacher, etc.; silence). However, the FIAC method has seldom been employed in contexts other than schools.

The next step was to collect the views of expert practitioners within the field of adult education. We undertook semi-structured interviews with individual teachers, aimed at discovering how they manage interactions in the classroom with reference to the goal of fostering learning. For example, we asked the interviewees how they tend to react when a participant poses a question, makes an intervention which is not relevant to the topic, etc. Then we listed an array, as wide as sensible, of possible relevant behaviours that educators may enact during classroom interactions. A tentative beta version of the coding sheet was tested in several focus groups of adult educators (Nassar-McMillan and Dianne-Borders 2002). This led to further integrations and modifications.

The final version consisted of a list of 31 behaviours that appear to be commonly enacted by educators during a lesson. These items were listed on a coding sheet where the frequency of each could be scored on a Likert scale ranging from 0 (the behaviour has never occurred) to 5 (the behaviour has continuingly occurred). The list is reported in Table 1. Most items should be self-explanatory; a few examples are:

Reformulates question: the educator does not answer a question from the audience, but reformulates it so that (at least some of) the participants become able to find an answer by themselves.

Returns question: the educator redirects a question posed by a participant to the audience, in the attempt to elicit an answer from the group.

Interrupts intervention: the educator interrupts a discussion, relevant to the topic, that has been started by one of the participants or has arisen between them.

Makes decision: the educator makes a decision concerning the classroom's activities and proceedings independently from the desires and opinions emerging from the group.

 

The manifest attitudes of the learners

Learners need to entertain appropriate mental attitudes that favour the construction of knowledge. A large body of literature has tried to identify them with the aim of understanding, and therefore becoming able to recreate, the conditions that facilitate learning in the classroom. However, objective evaluations of learning are difficult, in particular when soft skills like leadership or conflict mediation are concerned. Consequently, the actual outcomes of training are seldom assessed in adults, apart from testing practice when possible (Driel, Beijaard, and Verloop 2001), and we were unable to find reliable instruments in the literature.

Wanting to investigate adult education in ecological settings, rather than in the laboratory, we focused on mental states that (1) may be considered preconditions of actual knowledge construction and (2) may have an observable behavioural counterpart. Analytically, those that immediately come to mind are at least:

Attention. To understand the contents of a lesson one needs to keep one's attention on the topics that are discussed or the actions that are or have to be performed. The attentional level is therefore a manifestation and an indicator of the general attitude of a learner or group of learners.

Participation. The idea that knowledge and experience are systematically mingled is widely diffused (e.g. Boud and Walker 1990; Brown, Collins, and Duguid 1989; Clancey 1997; Dewey 1916; Fenwick 2001, 2003; Luria 1979; Piaget 1936; Revans 1982; Vygotsky 1978; Wenger 2000). The level of participation in group interactions, discussion and material practices was thus the second indicator that we chose.

Understanding. Learners have to understand the relevant conceptual and practical issues if they are to change their frames of reference, knowledge, and ways of thinking and acting. Understanding thus is a third indicator of the mental attitudes that favour the construction of new personal knowledge.

To obtain a shared and uniform score of the learners' levels of attention, participation and understanding, during the interviews we asked the teachers how they usually evaluated them. We compared their answers to the literature about classroom assessment (Popham 2004) and the assessment of attention (Gordon and Mettelman 1988; Robertson et al. 1996), participation and understanding (Stiggins 1997). To score participation, for example, the observers took notice of how many questions were posed by the participants, of their willingness to take part in exercises like role-play, group games and activities, etc. The participants' capability to reorganise and reframe concepts in their own words was one of the indexes of understanding; their keeping their gaze on the educator or on the slides was an index of the group’s attention, and so on.

Scales of the learners’ attention, participation and understanding were also present on the scoring sheet. They are reported in Table 2. The level with which each attitude was manifest could be marked on a Likert scale ranging from 0 (the attitude is not manifest in the audience - for example, the learners do not pay attention to the teacher, they are unwilling to participate in discussions or group games, the questions that they pose show lack of comprehension, etc.) to 5 (the audience is manifestly interested, willing to participate in discussion, posing relevant questions, etc.). Of course, what was observed here is collective attitudes as they may emerge from many individual streams of behaviours, and hardly resembles how attention or understanding is defined or assessed in an experimental psychology laboratory. Yet, it appears to more closely resemble what teachers may actually do in a classroom.