Being Explicit about Modeling: A First Person Study in India.

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine the work involved in teacher educator modeling. In particular, the study is concerned with modeling that aims to explicitly make teaching practices visible, learnable, and that does so in particularly demonstrative ways. One form of this type of modeling is what I term “dialogic modeling.” The study examines what is involved in carrying out dialogic modeling, including how teacher-learners take it up during enactment, and how their uptake and learning shape the effort to model. The study’s central goal is to explore what it takes to enact this and similar types of explicit modeling in teacher education. In order to study this specific form of explicit modeling, I carried out my investigation in the context of my own efforts to model specific instructional practices in a professional development context in India.

The study does not seek to make generalizations, or causal claims about the effectiveness of dialogic modeling on teachers’ ability to enact the modeled practices. Instead, I focus on the enactment of the modeling itself, and what it takes to leverage productive dialogue and systematic analysis about the modeled practices. A set of what I call “principled practices” comprise the curriculum.

Two main research questions orient this dissertation: (1) What is the work involved in enacting explicit modeling of teaching practices?; and (2) What kinds of opportunities to learn might dialogic modeling present for teacher-learners? I explore these questions by investigating the enactment of 29 cases of dialogic modeling at four higher primary schools in India. I carried out two analyses: the first was a customary qualitative analysis to characterize the work involved in dialogic modeling, which provided a micro-analytic view. For the second, I drew on literary theory to explicate a synoptic view of the opportunities to learn that dialogic modeling provided. Through both of these views I show how teacher-learners and the teacher educator worked together to study instructional practices, and how that study consisted of coordinating specific teaching tasks with broader intellectual aims and social responsibilities, as well as considering whether what was modeled was exportable or not.