How Teachers' Classroom Cases Express Their Pedagogical Beliefs

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1991 42: 281Journal of Teacher EducationDona M. Kagan and Deborah J. Tippins

How Teachers' Classroom Cases Express Their Pedagogical Beliefs

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How Teachers’ Classroom Cases Express TheirPedagogical Beliefs

Dona M. KaganUniversity of Alabama

Deborah J. TippinsUniversity of Georgia

This study documents an attempt to develop a system of analysis to evaluate teachers’classroom cases based on the hypothesis that the way a teacher defines and ordersthe standard components of a narrative would reflect the teacher’s pedagogical beliefs.Twenty-four inservice and 22 preservice teachers wrote four case narratives. Self-evident differences emerged between preservice and inservice teachers in the structuraland content features of cases. More subtle differences appeared in terms of three themes:a feeling for the internal conflicts that a problem provokes in a teacher, the long-term and evolutionary nature of problems, and their ethical undertones. Althoughwriting a response or a solution to a peer’s case appeared to constrain teachers fromexpressing their own pedagogical beliefs, they did reflect and illustrate these beliefswhen they wrote their own cases.

Over the past few years researchers have de-veloped a number of qualitative methods forinferring teacher belief, including asking teachersto describe and interpret classroom incidents (Clark& Peterson, 1986; Kagan, 1990b). From a teacher’snarrative, researchers have inferred underlyingbelief through a number of different approaches:(a) categorizing and computing the incidence ofdifferent kinds of perceptions (Zeichner, Tabach-nick, & Densmore, 1987) or judgments (Thomas,1990) about students and classrooms, (b) compar-ing a teacher’s problem-solving strategy to an idealmodel (Gliessman, Grillo, & Archer, 1989; Man-ning & Payne, 1989; Pugach & Johnson, 1989),(c) classifying statements in terms of levels ofreflective thought (Sparks-Langer et al., 1990),(d) categorizing a case as descriptive, problemsetting, or problem solving (Laboskey & Wilson,1987), and (e) examining the metaphors used in

a narrative (Munby, 1987; Russell, 1987; Tobin,1990).Connelly and Clandinin (1988, 1990) have

shown how teachers’ narratives can be analyzedas stories to make sense of individual and collec-tive experiences and to infer craft knowledge. Ina comprehensive summary of research on teachers’narrative discourse, Elbaz (1991) reviewed thevariety of forms teachers’ narratives can take (e.g.,interviews, journals, structured written tasks) andthe ways they can be used to explicate teachers’professional knowledge and beliefs. Our researchon teachers’ narratives follows in this traditionbut can be distinguished from it in three ways.First, we sought a standardized system for ana-lyzing teachers’ narratives that could yield keynarrative characteristics that are associated withclassroom experience and that might be used asgauges of teachers’ professional growth. Second,we sought a system of analysis that would allowresearchers to infer generalizations about the waysnovice and experienced teachers may differ in theirdefinitions of &dquo;classroom problem.&dquo; Finally, wefocused on how the structure and content ofteachers’ narratives expressed underlying peda-gogical beliefs.The purpose of this study was to develop and

evaluate a system of analyzing teachers’ classroom

Dona M. Kagan, Associate Professor of Education, 207 GravesHall, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487. Special-izations : teacher education, teacher cognition.

Deborah J. Tippins, Assistant Professor of Education, ScienceEducation Department, 212 Aderhold Hall, University of Georgia,Athens, GA 30602. Specializations: teacher education, teacherand student cognition.

Our thanks to Thomas R. Koballa (Associate Professor,Department of Science Education, University of Georgia) forcritiquing an earlier version of this article.

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cases that is based on theory and research on thenarrative mode. We began with two fundamen-tal assumptions derived from research on narrativediscourse:

1. The way an author defines and orders nar-rative components contributes significantly to astory’s meaning. Like short stories or novels,classroom cases are stories, true or fictitious. Anarrative is not a simple chronicle of events. Itis a precise configuration of actors, goals, actions,descriptions, and intentions (Polkinghorne, 1988;Ricoeur, 1984). All forms of the Western narrativetend to follow a prototypical structure that includesbackground (an initial stable state), disturbanceby some power or force (problem), a resulting stateof disequilibrium, the eventual return to stabil-ity through the actions of the major players(solution), and (sometimes) a moral or lesson(Labov, 1972; Todorov, 1977; van Dijk, 1989).Psychological research on reading narratives hasshown that this blueprint constitutes a sort ofgrammar, a set of macrostructures that guidescomprehension (Mandler, 1984; Stein, 1978).

2. The structure and content of a story reflectits author’s cognition. The narrative mode is alsoa way of perceiving and organizing experience(Bruner, 1985, 1986). Some have suggested it isthe primary way human beings assign meaning tothe events they experience (Grumet, 1987; Polking-horne, 1988). We live immersed in narrative,recounting and evaluating our actions in terms ofplots completed or in progress. In this sense,narrative represents a hermeneutical knowledgeof reality. Thus, the way a teacher constructs aclassroom case could reflect aspects of the teach-er’s cognition about classrooms (that is, theteacher’s pedagogical beliefs).We wanted to develop a system of analysis that

could be used to examine both the content andstructure of a case that could be used to reveal (a)significant relationships between a case and itsauthor’s teacher beliefs and (b) differences be-tween cases written by novice and experiencedteachers. We realized that the system would dependon the instructions and materials we presented toteachers when asking them to write cases. Thatis, different writing tasks might elicit different

kinds of narratives. Thus, we asked the partici-pants in this study to write four different kindsof narratives. We were interested in identifyingthe kind of narrative that would most clearly reflectunderlying teacher beliefs. As we explained to ourparticipants, we defined a case as the completedescription of a classroom problem or dilemma.It is realistic (although not necessarily real) andincludes all the facts needed to clarify and solvethe target problem(s) (Barnett & Cwirko-Godyicki,1988). The case is not necessarily typical ornormative in any sense.

Pilot StudyOur attempt to develop a standardized system

of analysis began with a pilot study in the springof 1990. We began by using the theory on narrativemode to infer four structural qualities of narra-tive discourse that might (a) contribute to over-all meaning and (b) reflect significant aspects ofthe author’s underlying cognition:

1. Logical structures. Because of the schematic(part-whole) organization inherent in narratives,the logical relationships that an author uses to bringtogether principal elements are probably signifi-cant : that is, whether characters, intentions,feelings, descriptions, or actions are relatedthrough parallelism, contrast, identity, likeness,or opposition (Holloway, 1979; Todorov, 1977).This amounts to the author’s selection of connec-

tives, prepositional phrases, dependent clauses,and verb forms.

2. Order of narrative components. Because anarrative is a temporal ordering of experience, timeand sequence are important dimensions. Indeed,Ricoeur (1984) suggested that the narrative modemay be a psychological response to the humanexperience of fragmentation of time. Throughnarratives, we give shape to experience initiallyperceived as chaos. Some critics (e.g., Chatman,1981) have suggested that the salient property ofthe narrative mode is a double time structure: theactual chronology of events versus the order inwhich the events are presented in text. By exten-sion, one might assume that the order in whichan author presents the fundamental components



283

of a narrative (e.g., setting, characters, problemresolution) makes an implicit and meaningfulstatement about the author’s beliefs.

3. Point of view. Because a narrative is a versionof reality, who tells the story is an important partof the overall meaning. Whose view of the eventsdoes the story represent? To which characters’thoughts does the author give the reader access?

4. Focus. Narratives traditionally contain twokinds of episodes: static ones, which describesteady states, and iterative ones, which describestates of disequilibrium or flux (Todorov, 1977).One could generalize this dichotomy to includeother narrative components, distinguishing descrip-tive/static elements like setting, character descrip-tion, and covert thoughts and feelings from be-havioral/action components. One could add athird category of components that extend meaningbeyond the limit of a narrative, like generalizedmorals or lessons. The frequency with which eachof these kinds of components appears in a narrativecould be construed as the author’s focus, whichcontributes implicitly to overall meaning.These qualities were then operationalized in

terms of four structural features that could be usedto evaluate a piece of narrative discourse. Thespecific nature of these features was based on ourexamination of 92 narratives written by preserviceand inservice teachers (Kagan, 1990a).

Procedures

Sixty teachers enrolled in one of three sectionsof an entry-level educational psychology coursetaught by the first author participated in the study.In each section a unit on behavioral learning theorywas taught. The teachers were provided with sixopen-ended case studies from Kowalski, Weaver,and Henson’s (1990) book of cases. Each casefocused on a specific classroom problem and in-cluded some or all of the following kinds of infor-mation : descriptions of relevant parties, backgroundabout the school and community, details of precipi-tating events, dialogue, and covert thoughts of theteacher. The six cases were divided equally interms of elementary versus secondary grades anddisciplinary versus instructional problems. Each

case ended before the teacher reached a decisionabout how to resolve the problem.Each participant was required to select two of

the six cases and write solutions, explaining howknowledge of behavioral learning theory could helpthe teachers depicted in the cases solve the targetproblems. Participants were given a list of the stan-dard components of Western narratives (setting,problem resolution, consequences, moral) and toldto select and order them in any way they desired.A total of 92 narratives was generated.

In addition to obtaining the narratives describedabove, we also evaluated each teacher’s pedagogi-cal beliefs. This evaluation was done by a briefpeer interview containing the following questions:What are the elements of good teaching? What arethe elements of poor teaching? What role(s) shouldthe teacher play in the classroom? What are [willbe] your strengths/weaknesses as a teacher? Whatis the most important thing a teacher can give tohis/her students? These questions were chosen toelicit teachers’ fundamental assumptions aboutpupils, teachers, and classrooms.We read a set of 52 narratives through twice

before attempting to evaluate them. During thethird reading, we kept a running list of characteris-tics that described the differences in meaning andstructure that appeared both within and betweennarratives. The final version of this list was com-

pared to the four structural features derived fromtheory on narrative discourse and described earlier:logical structures, order of components, point ofview, and focus. Using examples from the narra-tives, we then described the differences in eachstructural feature in terms of a set of mutuallyexclusive options that an author might elect.We then classified each narrative by assigning

it one category from each of the structural fea-tures. When we were unable to distinguish betweentwo categories, we modified the scheme. Thisresulted in reducing two structural features (fromfour to two categories each) and the creation ofa fifth feature originally included under focus:scope, an author’s tendency to draw conclusionsstrictly within the boundaries of a case or, alterna-tively, to generalize beyond the case to classroomsin general.



284

We tallied the number of narratives classifiedin each category under each structural feature, ex-pressing the total as a percentage of the entire setof 52 narratives. After an orientation, two graduateassistants independently categorized the same setof narratives. Discrepancies between their evalua-tions and our own were identified and resolved.The system of structural features that emerged fromthis initial analysis was then used to evaluate theremaining 40 narratives written by the teachers.The features included (a) order of narrative com-

ponents (the solution to the case is presented first;description of setting appears first); (b) logicalstructures (the case contains cause-effect, prescrip-tive language that suggests predictable relation-ships between teacher and student behaviors; thecase is written in a speculative, problem-solvingtone with tentative language); (c) point of view(the case is narrated in the third person; it is nar-rated in the first person as if the author were the

teacher); (d) focus (most of the narrative focuseson the teacher’s behavior; most focuses on theteacher’s feelings or perceptions; most focuses onstudents’ feelings or behaviors); and (e) scope (theauthor does not generalize beyond the case; the authorinfers a moral or extrapolates to all classrooms).The narratives written by the preservice teachers

differed from those written by the inserviceteachers in terms of each of the structural features.The nature of the differences suggested that theinservice teachers tended to identify more withthe teacher, to focus on a teacher’s thoughts andperceptions rather than on teacher or student be-havior, to begin cases with complete descriptionsof background and context, and to avoid generaliz-ing beyond the boundary of a case (Kagan, 1990a).We did not find differences in the way preservice

and inservice teachers applied behavioral learningtheory to the problems depicted in the cases. Wesearched for relationships between the cases andtheir authors’ pedagogical beliefs by reading thetext of a peer interview alongside the interviewee’scase, but we could find no clear relationships.

In addition to the differences between preserviceand inservice narratives described above, we foundthat many of the inservice teachers’ narrativescontained ethical dilemmas, confirming the thesis

of Lyons (1990) and others (Jackson, 1986;Lampert, 1985; Lortie, 1975; Noddings, 1987;Strike & Soltis, 1985; Tom, 1984) that most ofthe problems experienced teachers face involveethical uncertainties. It was unclear, however, towhat degree the results of the pilot study wereartifacts of the writing task that was used. Thisquestion set the stage for our next inquiry, in whichparticipants were free to determine the content aswell as the structure of their cases.

Method

ParticipantsForty-six teachers participated in this study: 24

experienced inservice teachers and 22 preserviceteacher candidates. The inservice teachers wereenrolled either in a graduate course on ways toincorporate higher-level thinking skills in math-ematics and science instruction or in an introduc-

tory course in educational psychology that couldbe taken for graduate credit. The preserviceteachers were enrolled in an introductory coursein educational psychology.

In the inservice group there were 5 males and19 females; 15 were elementary/middle schoolteachers and 9 were high school teachers. Experi-ence ranged from 1 to 22 years, with a mean of6 years: 8 teachers had less than 5 years of experi-ence ; 9 had more than 10 years. None had received

special training in writing.The preservice group included 9 males and 13

females. Five held bachelor’s degrees; 1 held a

master’s, and 16 were undergraduates. Twelveintended to teach at the high school level, four atthe elementary or middle school, and two wereundecided. Although included in this group ofpreservice teachers, four students had no inten-tion of teaching: two were counselors; two werenurses. All of the preservice teachers were at thebeginning of their teacher education program andhad no special training in writing. None hadteaching experience with the following exceptions:One had completed a semester of student teaching;two had completed classroom practicums; one hadworked in schools as a speech therapist; one haddone long-term substitute teaching.



285

Procedures

At the beginning of each course, each participantwas required to write four narratives. The first wasa closed case describing a classroom problem, realor fictitious, that had to include at least a prob-lem and a solution. In addition, the case couldinclude any or all of the following components:setting, descriptions of major players, conse-quences, and moral. The second narrative was an

open case that was similar to the closed case,except that it was not to include a solution,consequences, or moral.

After completing these two cases, each partici-pant exchanged papers with a classmate and wrotea solution to the classmate’s open case and a re-

sponse to the classmate’s closed case. A solutioncould include any or all of the components of aclosed case. A response could include the partici-pant’s analysis of the closed case, his or her evalua-tion of the solution, and an explication of a moralor lesson. We used these procedures to elicit fourdifferent kinds of narratives from each participant.As explained earlier, we were interested in identi-fying the kind(s) of narrative that best reflectedan author’s beliefs about teaching.The participants were provided with examples

of open and closed cases and responses. Four opencases were taken from Case Studies on Teaching(Kowalski et al., 1990); three closed cases weretaken from The Intern Teacher Casebook (Shulman& Colbert, 1988); examples of responses werecomments by researchers and educators thatfollowed each of the cases in The Intern TeacherCasebook. These sample cases included instruc-tional and disciplinary problems, elementary andsecondary classrooms, first- and third-personnarratives, and various narrative structures. Toavoid biasing participants toward any particularstructural features, neither the samples nor anyother case studies were discussed in class beforethe completion of the writing assignments. Wewanted participants to define and order the nar-rative components in any way they desired.

In addition to the four writing tasks describedabove, each participant was required to interviewa classmate about his or her pedagogical beliefs,

using the same questions from the pilot study.Interviewers took notes and then wrote a profileof the classmate, which was attached to the fournarratives he or she had written to inform us aboutthat teacher’s beliefs.The experienced teachers produced 63 cases,

20 solutions, and 29 responses. The preserviceteachers wrote 42 cases, 21 solutions, and 21responses.

Data AnalysisFor each of the participants we assembled a data

packet containing the four narratives and theprofile written by a classmate. We divided thepackets between the second author and a graduateassistant, who read and analyzed each packet bycompleting a chart with columns for the set ofstructural features that emerged from the pilotstudy (e.g., order of narrative components, logicalstructures, point of view, focus, and scope). Thechart also included columns for noting severalcontent features: type of problem (e.g., instruc-tional, disciplinary/motivational), number of newsolutions suggested, nature of the resolution, howthe problem affected the author/teacher, andsummary of teacher belief (taken from the profile).Wherever relevant, exact quotations from narra-tives were entered in the chart. The first author

completed a holistic evaluation of the packets,writing descriptive summaries about the tone ofeach narrative and about relationships between thenarratives and the author’s pedagogical beliefs.Once the summaries and charts were completed,

the analysis proceeded in two parts. First, weanalyzed the narratives in terms of the structuralfeatures. That is, using the completed data chartsand the narratives, we assigned each narrative acategory for each of the structural features. Thenwe analyzed the cases for content features (asindicated by the charts and summaries). No a prioriset of content features was used; instead featureswere derived from the narratives. In the second

part of the analysis, we reread each narrative inrelation to its author’s profile of beliefs. Our resultsare presented below in terms of this generalprogression of activities.



286

Results ’

. .

’

The structural features revealed mostly self-evident differences between the preservice andinservice teachers or differences that may havebeen artifacts of the constraints inherent in writingsolutions and responses. This conclusion was basedon our analysis of the frequency counts (Table 1)obtained for each category of the structural andcontent features. A brief summary of specificfindings follows:

1. Order of narrative components. This structuralfeature did not appear to be relevant to the taskof writing a solution, a response, or a closed case.When writing these kinds of narratives, partici-pants consistently began with the context orbackground; then they described the problem and(where appropriate) the solution. This prototypicalorder appeared to be so well learned that it wasfollowed automatically. How can one explain theresults of the pilot study, in which 60% of thepreservice teachers ignored background and began

their narratives by proposing solutions? Even whenthe participants in the present study wrote solutionsto peers’ cases, they began with background. Onepossibility is that the task of answering a specificquestion in the pilot study overshadowed theconstruction of a narrative, leading many of theparticipants to present their solutions first.

2. Type of case. (Table 1 a). The content of mostcases could be described in terms of three catego-ries : (a) instructional, (b) disciplinary/motivational,and (c) administrative. Administrative cases dealtwith problems of general policy rather than thoseassociated with a particular incident or group ofstudents (e.g., should an entire class be penalizedfor the misbehaviors of a handful of students?).Experienced teachers most frequently wrote in-structional cases (46%) followed by disciplinary/motivational (38%) cases. Among preserviceteachers the order was reversed. This finding isconsistent with research suggesting that preserviceand beginning teachers are preoccupied with

Table 1 ’

Number and Percentages of Narratives Manifesting Structural and Content Features



287

concerns about class control (e.g., Veenman,1984). Experienced teachers, confident that theycan control classes, may be able to focus theirconcerns on instruction.

3. Focus of the case. (Table lb). For bothpreservice and inservice teachers, the majority ofopen and closed cases focused on student behavior.Inservice teachers tended to describe teachers’

thoughts and feelings more than did preserviceteachers, indicating that the experienced teach-ers were privy to emic (internal) views of class-room life.

4. Point of view. This variable appeared to revealonly the self-evident insight that inservice teachersidentified with the role of teacher more than did

preservice teachers. Virtually all (92%) of the caseswritten by experienced teachers were told in thefirst person, whereas only 24% of cases writtenby preservice teachers were in the first person.

5. Number of new solutions suggested. (Table1 c). In general, experienced teachers were moreadept at generating alternative solutions to class-room problems. The ability to brainstorm alter-native strategies would seem to be a logical re-sult of teaching experience.

6. Logical structures and scope. (Table 1 d and1 e). There were two group differences in thesevariables. When writing solutions to cases, thepreservice teachers tended to use prescriptive,cause/effect language more frequently than theirinservice counterparts, suggesting that novices mayhave perceived a classroom problem as having aparticular, &dquo;correct&dquo; solution. In writing responsesto cases, the inservice teachers employed moregeneralizations than the novices, perhaps indi-cating confidence in their knowledge of class-rooms. These differences, however, were over-shadowed by the homogeneity of the responsesand solutions. Indeed, these two structural fea-tures may have revealed more about the writingtasks than about the participants. None of the openor closed cases contained generalizations or cause/effect language. The task of writing a solution ora response to an existing case may be too constrain-ing to allow preservice or inservice teachers toexpress fundamental aspects of their teacherbeliefs.

Themes

Although analyzing the cases in terms of thesestructural or content features revealed somewhat

equivocal patterns, an analysis by transcendentthemes revealed meaningful patterns and relation-ships. By transcendent theme we mean qualitiesof a narrative that combined aspects of contentand structure. That is, each of the three themesdiscussed below was expressed by both contentand structural aspects of a particular case.

1. A sensitivity to the internal struggles pro-voked by a classroom problem: the teacher’saffective reactions, including frustrations andconflicts. Thirty-one percent of the cases writtenby experienced teachers possessed this qualitycompared to only 25% written by preserviceteachers. This is a quality reminiscent of whatHelle (1991) called &dquo;connected knowing,&dquo; a voicethat reflects feeling and internal dialogue (p. 53).

2. An explicit moral or ethical concern. This wasalso noted in the pilot study in the narrativeswritten by experienced teachers. Twenty-onepercent of the cases written by experiencedteachers in this study could be described as dealingwith ethical issues; none of the cases written bypreservice teachers dealt with ethical concerns.Examples of what we meant by ethical are rep-resented by the following statements from thecases: &dquo;We don’t spend enough time and efforthelping students feel good about themselves. Webecome so content-oriented and obsessed withstandardized tests that we don’t see our studentsas individuals.&dquo; &dquo;Reflecting back, I would like tothink that had it been a normal year, I would have

picked up on Timmy’s problem long before hefailed the first test.&dquo; The second example illustratesthe tendency of some experienced teachers toreflect upon the ways their own behaviors mayhave contributed to problems.

3. A sense of history, the feeling that the teacherin a case had lived with a problem over time. Thisperception has been discussed by Lampert (1985).Twenty-four percent of the cases written byexperienced teachers charted the dynamics of aproblem as it evolved over time-only 14% of thecases written by preservice teachers possessed thisquality.



288

The presence of these themes did not appear tobe related to the open or closed format of the cases.Of all the cases written by inservice teachers, 75%possessed one of these themes. They appeared inonly 16% of the cases written by preserviceteachers and then only in narratives written bypreservice teachers who had completed some formof extended classroom practice (student teaching,a practicum, substitute teaching). One can onlyspeculate about why a greater proportion of caseswritten by experienced teachers did not possesseach (as opposed to at least one) of the threethemes. The most obvious explanation is that ateacher’s invocation of particular themes wasrelated to the kind of classroom problem describedin a narrative.

Relating Cases to Their Authors’Beliefs About TeachingThe solutions and responses were uniformly

packed with generalizations and cliches aboutstudents and classrooms. We saw no clear rela-

tionships between the solutions and responseswritten by a participant and his/her teacher beliefs.

Discussion ’

We found that a system of analysis for evalu-ating teachers’ narratives that separated contentand structural features revealed underlying cog-nition and group patterns that were somewhat self-evident or equivocal. It is important to stress thatthis finding does not invalidate one of the funda-mental assumptions underlying this study: Thestructure and content of a story reflect its author’scognition. Content and structure did, indeed, revealbeliefs, but only when they were examined togetherin terms of major themes. Perhaps any system ofnarrative analysis that attempts to separate struc-ture and content may be ineffective.We also found that the kind of narrative in-

fluenced the outcome. Writing a solution or aresponse to a peer’s case elicited impersonalnarratives containing overgeneralizations andprescriptions about teaching, students, and class-rooms. With a single exception, all of the partici-

pants structured solutions and responses in thesame way: They first restated and analyzed theproblem, relating it to background and context;then they related it to their own classroom experi-ences as teachers or students; finally, they pro-posed or evaluated a solution(s). We saw no clearrelationships between solutions or responses andtheir authors’ pedagogical beliefs. One mightattribute this finding to the relatively constrainingnature of responses and solutions, a circumstancethat would also explain our failure to find relation-ships between teachers’ beliefs and the constrainednarratives elicited in our pilot study.Only when teachers were free to write an en-

tire classroom case did significant patterns appear,not so much in terms of purely structural or contentfeatures, but in terms of three themes, amalgamsof content and structure: the internal conflict

provoked by a problem, a sense of history, andethical concerns. An analysis of cases in light ofthese three themes suggested that preservice andinservice teachers interpreted classroom problemsdifferently.The experienced teachers chose as problems

some of the most mundane interactions that canoccur between pupils and teachers. For theseteachers, the quotidian events of classroom lifeappear to constitute the dilemmas of teaching,becoming problems when they provoke internalconflict: frustration, ethical choices, a questioningof values. They are problems because they affectthe internal lives of teachers and because they aresituations with which teachers must live over time.As they persist from day to day, they evolve.

In contrast, the preservice teachers appeared todefine a classroom problem as external, an eventthat causes a disruption in classroom routine butdoes not impinge upon a teacher’s internal life.In this sense, a classroom problem is superficialand without moral significance: void of emotionand neatly solved.The cases written by the five preservice teachers

who had completed some extended classroompractice were important exceptions to this dichot-omy. Their cases resembled those written by theinservice teachers, in that they possessed a senseof history or internal conflict. This suggested that



289

the three themes found here may be associated with

teaching experience and might even be used togauge teacher growth.

Since completing this study we have examinedthe ability of these themes to reflect professionalgrowth among a group of elementary and second-ary student teachers. We found that the appear-ance of these themes in cases written at intervals

during student teaching was associated with re-ports of significant growth or change (Kagan &

Tippins, in press).Like the cases written by those student teachers,

those written by the participants in this studyemphasized the prominence of the student-teacherrelationship, a theme that has emerged in severalempirical studies of teaching. For example, in astudy comparing theories of learning found ineducational psychology textbooks with those ofexperienced teachers, Pinnegar and Carter (1990)discovered that the teachers’ theories focused onthe student-teacher relationship: the establishmentof respect, trust, and confidence. Teachers believedthat classroom learning is based on these relation-ships as they develop and evolve. Similarly, Lyons(1990), who characterized the classroom problemsteachers face as ethical dilemmas, described thestudent-teacher relationship as the heart of teach-ing. Our studies of teachers’ classroom cases andtheir narrative descriptions of pupils (Kagan &

Tippins, in press) suggest that, in part, learningto teach may involve becoming personally invested-intellectually and affectively-in the evolution ofthose relationships.

Implications for Researchon Teachers’ Narratives

Our findings suggest several implications forresearchers who are interested in using teachers’classroom cases to infer underlying cognition orto assess professional growth. The nature of thewriting task and the instructions one employs areclearly important variables that can affect the kindsof narratives teachers produce. Results discussedhere suggested that constraints inherent in the taskmay limit the chance that teachers will expresstheir own beliefs in the cases they write. Asking

preservice or inservice teachers to write a solu-tion or a response to an existing case is likely toelicit a homogeneous set of narratives packed withovergeneralizations and prescriptions about class-rooms and teachers. On the other hand, allowingteachers to write entire cases, open or closed,appears to give them the freedom to express theirpersonal beliefs.The set of five structural features that emerged

from our pilot study was useful in analyzing ahighly constrained writing task: Teachers not onlyhad to write solutions to existing cases but hadto answer a specific question in the process. Whenteachers were allowed to write their own cases,the same set of structural features revealed mostlyself-evident differences related to experience. Wehope that researchers will examine this issue moreclosely, perhaps using our system of structuralfeatures to analyze narratives generated by othersorts of writing tasks and instructions. With somewriting tasks and under some conditions thestructural features may be useful in revealingpatterns and insights about teachers’ beliefs. Onthe other hand, any system of analysis that arti-ficially separates narrative structure from contentmay prove ineffective.

Finally, we hope that researchers will pursuethe significance of the three themes that emergedfrom this study: the internal conflicts that aproblem provokes in a teacher, the long-term andevolutionary nature of problems, and their ethicalundertones. Our continuing research with teachers’narratives suggests that these themes are centralto the experience of becoming a teacher.

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Bruner, J. (1985). Narrative and paradigmatic modesof thought. In E. Eisner (Ed.), Learning and teach-ing the ways of knowing (84th Yearbook of theNational Society for the Study of Education, pp. 97-



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How Teachers' Classroom Cases Express Their Pedagogical Beliefs