Initiating pedagogies

The first important area of professional contextual grounds was found to be related to the pedagogical practices that the teachers “initiated” and “accom-plished” in order to foster the learning capacity of the students. In this way, even though teaching situations were running in a normal way, the teachers still wanted to improve the learning atmosphere in their classrooms. The initiating pedagogies aimed at different intentions, including following cases:

• Fostering the higher order thinking skills in students.

• Fostering the learning orientations of students.

• Improving active learning engagement in the classroom.

• Nurturing the character of the students.

Fostering the higher order thinking skills of students: As a significant base for their action, teachers tried to help students improve higher order thinking skills in a cognitive framework. This included strategies that could enable students to find reasons for their learning tasks and thus to judge and evaluate them; to think rationally and ask logical and sensible questions in the class-room; to answer the questions with evidence and good reasons; to enhance

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their thinking processes; and to construct knowledge on their own. From this point of view, improving higher order thinking skills was conceived as a valuable task, and thus teachers should provide an instructional environment such that students’ important skills in this category would be fostered:

(Q: You asked the students to analyze and make a logical report on the movie when they watched it; could you please explain more about it if the students really can provide a sensible report on movie?) Some of them can do it and with some is very, very latent, but I think to be able to do such a task also deals with language skills; some of them, I think, do not have sufficient language skills to get these ideas across. They might have some ideas, they might be thinking about them, but I mean this is not the first time they have been exposed to the idea; they have been exposed to it gradually where they have had to substantiate and give reasons for answers; because I think a lot of the students I saw used to provide the answers without having any form of motivation as to why they are giving such answers.

And what I have tried to do in school was to get them to have some sorts of rea-soning behind what they are doing and thinking; it is an important skill (T1, 9 years experience).

Whether the teachers could realize this task, they claimed that they took a particular action on the basis of its helping to foster the higher order thinking skills of the students.

Fostering the learning orientations of students: In many of their practical arguments, the teachers stated that they followed a particular course of action because they intended to help the students strengthen their ways of learning.

Improving meta-cognitive skills in learning (i.e., learn how to learn), and improving social skills in interaction with others were two significant exam-ples of the teachers’ intentions for fostering the learning orientations of the students. On the one hand, in the former case, the main idea was to encourage the students and to provide a learning environment such that the students could initiate learning tasks; to persuade solving problems in different ways if the students kept to one particular solution (problem-solving skill); and to relate their existing knowledge of the lessons to the previous knowledge in order to develop their cognitive structure more deeply:

(Q: When you divided students to work in groups, you no longer interfered with their activities; specifically you did not give explanations to some students who were laughing and moving around classroom too much, Why?) Well!! As a teacher, I sometimes need to take a kind of pedagogical risk and provide an in-structional setting in which pupils can freely talk, discuss, and move around the classroom, and even misbehave a little. This, I believe, can motivate students to initiate learning tasks on their own. I cannot always keep them in the same fixed structure; they should be encouraged to go behind the structure and improve their

learning skills in divergent ways. And, of course, I expect some sorts of drains in this situation (T2, 4 years experience).

On the other hand, in the latter case (social skills improvement), the teachers’

intentions were found to revolve around the help they could provide students to exchange knowledge (e.g., by group-work strategy); the insight the stu-dents could gain into the lessons and learning materials through communica-tion with classmates; and the students’ ability to be able to express them-selves freely in front of others:

(Q: What was the idea behind the work-group strategy in the math lesson?) In the work groups, they can communicate and they sometimes might know where the problems are, and they understand it when the others make mistakes or also they explain how they have learned a task. It is also very effective in helping students to learn how to cooperate with other classmates in solving problems and other important issues. Because if one member of a group does not know how to do an exercise, then the others need to explain how they did the exercise until they got the right answers (T4, 10 years experience).

Improving active engagement in the classroom: In this area of concern, the teachers indicated the importance of encouraging and confirming students to participate in the classroom activities (e.g., answering the teacher’s questions or asking relevant questions); keeping the learning motivation alive; accom-modating individual differences (e.g., designing more challenging learning tasks for capable and gifted students, and normal tasks for other students);

and encouraging the passive or less-motivated students to be more engage-ment in classroom learning activities. The following example shows how active engagement represents the “initiating character” of the teachers’ peda-gogy. The teacher has decided to start and “accomplish” a risky action (ask-ing more questions may interrupt the classroom flow) in order to enhance the learning engagement of students:

…even though it sometimes might interrupt the flow of my teaching, I try to call on students to answer my questions many times in a single lesson because it pro-vides a good means for them to engage in and to think about the concepts in the lesson. I know this encourages most of the students to take the risk to answer my question or ask their questions (T2, 4 years experience).

The data indicated that active engagement was of the most significant in the initiating pedagogies that teachers relied on to justify the goodness of their practical knowledge. Teachers supposed that through active engagement, they would be able to accomplish many other intentions that they had for the

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students (e.g., such as enhance social and problem-solving skills by active engagement in learning tasks).

Nurturing the character of students: Along with the academic and learn-ing-based intentions that the teachers expressed in their practical arguments, they argued that nurturing the personal character of students is important to consider in the classroom. Here, the teachers’ practical arguments aimed at cultivating the idea in (e.g., a particular persona) the students by which they could grasp ideal behavioral norms for interacting with others in different social contexts, including the classroom and society as a whole. At the class-room level, the teachers justified their practical knowledge on the grounds that their associated actions could teach students to learn how to respect, be fair, cooperate, be polite, and take turns in classroom activities vis-á-vis their classmates:

(Q: So, based on your beliefs teaching is not just transmitting the knowledge and information in textbooks; could you explain more about it?) One of the things that I have told the parents in this classroom is that I want to focus more on getting the students to behave well, to be polite, to be empathetic, to be friendly, and, and nice to each other, before I start working with academics. I have told them if I need to sit the whole day and talk about how you talk to your classmates, then I will do it. And, you know, we can work with the academics easier if the students have the basic skills. But, if they do not have the basic skills what I see as basic human skills, then it is impossible to work. If there is somebody all pushing and puking, and you know, using put downs, and everything, how is a rest of group go to be work? Because, they are either constantly worrying that they are going to be the next target, or they are worrying whether they will be able work with this per-son (T6, 17 years experience).

At the social level, the teachers argued that their actions and supporting knowledge were good, since they could teach students to learn how to cope with their social problems, to participate in social events (e.g., how to attend a concert), to be ready for the future by shouldering social responsibilities (e.g., career), and to be tolerant of others in social encounters:

(Q: There are some ideas that say students, specifically the younger ones, should not be given very much homework; instead most of exercises should be done in class and at the school. How do you think about your strategy of giving the dents a lot of homework?) I do not think that it is a healthy thing not to give stu-dents homework. Because, being transparent, we are preparing them first of all for junior high school, for college, for university, and for life. What kind of job you are going to get in the future needs some sort of preparation that has to be taught in the schools. For example, if you want to be a teacher, you always have some job to be done at home. If the students do not get into working mood right now,

then they cannot have that working savvy when one day they become adults (T3, 9 years experience).

From this point of view, teachers conceived of classroom life as a virtual community and a bridge to real society, and students need to practice the necessary behavioral norms in order to live in society. Therefore, from a practical argument point of view, any kind of action and belief was supposed to be good and reasonable in light of accomplishing and nurturing the in-tended ideal student character and persona pictured in the minds of teachers.