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Time to learn: Pacing and the external framing of teachers' work 1
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Time to learn: Pacing and the external framing of teachers' work
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Article in Journal of Education for Teaching: International Research and Pedagogy · November 2003 DOI: 10/
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Journal of Education for Teaching, Vol. 29, No. 3, November 2003
Time to Learn: pacing and the
external framing of teachers’
work
1
URSULA HOADLEY
School of Education, University of Cape Town, South Africa
ABSTRACT The article reports research in two South African grade 3 classrooms, one located within a disadvantaged school and one in an affluent suburban school. The research examines the pacing rules of different transmission practices: weak pacing (a slower rate of transmission) is associated with pedagogy in the working-class school, and strong pacing (a faster rate of transmission) in the middle-class school. A further dimension to pacing, that of differentiating (between different student learning rates and different learning contexts), is identified. The discussion is developed through an analysis of how time use differs in different socio-economic contexts and points to possible relations between the internal control of the pace of learning in classrooms, and the external control of teachers’ pedagogic practices. The article examines the social relations within which the different transmission practices are embedded and points to a possible relationship between teachers’ transmission practices and the social relations that consti- tute teachers’ work.
Opportunity to learn is much dependent upon pacing. Pacing may be broadly defined as ‘the rate at which new instructional material is introduced to students’ (Barr & Dreeben, 1983, p. 33). Ensor et al. , 2002, p. 15) associate slow pacing with the treatment of students by the teacher as a ‘relatively homogenous group rather than as a collection of individuals with different interests and pedagogic careers’ and the lack of individualised evaluation.
Three distinctions emerge with respect to time as a research variable within the school effectiveness tradition: research focused on the allocation of time (which is focused on time scheduling); research considering academically engaged time (which looks at oppor- tunities for learning and student engagement); and research on pacing. Here our broad concern is within the academically engaged time framework.
The discussion that follows draws on Bernstein’s (1971) concept of framing. Framing refers to the degree of control teacher and pupil possess over the selection, organisation, pacing and timing of the knowledge transmitted and received in the pedagogical relation-
ISSN 0260-7476 print; ISSN 1360-0540 online/03/030265- 2003 Journal of Education for Teaching DOI: 10/
Time to Learn 267
former Model C school, where the medium of instruction is English. The school imple- ments a strict admission policy and the majority of students come from the surrounding middle class suburb. A few students travel from townships by car or taxi; however, they are in the vast minority. The school fees at School B are approximately R5000 per annum, and the school is able to afford to employ additional staff members through fees paid by parents. These appointments are termed ‘governing body posts’. Fifty percent of the staff at School B is employed in these posts. Teacher B has been teaching for 25 years, and this is her 21st year at School B. She has been teaching grade 3 for the same length of time. Teacher B is one of four grade 3 teachers, and she is a head of department (HOD) (for curriculum development and the orientation of new teachers) and grade head (for grade 3). There are 30 students in Teacher B’s class. The classroom is extremely well resourced.
Time for Teaching
School A perforce operates a two-shift system for teachers and pupils. Each shift, in effect, constitutes a school on its own. Of this about 3 12 hours a day are available for actual teaching.
In School B the time available is 6 hours and 15 minutes each day with 5 hours and 5 minutes on Friday and no shift system. Analysis of the nature of usage of time indicates that instruction involving teacher–pupil interaction in School B is three times that of School A. In School A pupils spent about one-fifth of the time just waiting for the teacher. In School B pupils spend very little time waiting for the teacher.
In School A the teacher spends much time in such things as handing out work books and interacting with a parent who has appeared while the pupils wait. In Teacher B’s class the children are self-managed with activities ready for them to get on with while the teacher is seeing pupils individually for specific activities.
Through an analysis of the pedagogy, Teacher A’s practice was characterised as predom- inantly engaged instruction, and Teacher B’s practice as consisting of predominantly disengaged instruction. Engaged instruction refers to time spent by the teacher in making the criteria for the production of the appropriate pedagogic text available explicitly. This instruction may take the form of demonstrating, showing or talking to the whole class, or mediating small group activity or working with individual learners. Crucially, in her transmission practices the teacher makes the evaluative criteria explicit. [2] Disengaged instruction is when learners work on their own, and when the teacher is occupied with work or activities other than what she has set for the learners.
Pacing
Bernstein (1990), discussing the rules of transmission, or ‘pedagogic relay’, refers to ‘pacing’ which he defines as ‘the expected rate of acquisition, that is, the rate at which learning is expected to occur ... Pacing rules, then, regulate the rhythm of the trans- mission, and this rhythm may vary in speed’.
268 U. Hoadley
In dealing with mixed ability and differential learner pace, Teacher B constructs parallel activity sequences, so that when learners have completed one activity they have another with which to engage. At no point during the three days were learners observed to be waiting for others to complete tasks. Through an analysis of the use of pedagogic time Teacher B’s transmission comprised predominantly engaged instruction.
Two aspects of pacing arise from these descriptions. The first relates to weak or strong pacing, the rate of transmission, and the second relates to the variation of pacing, i. what we can talk about in terms of the strength of differentiating pacing. Strong differentiating pacing occurs where there is variation in pace according to the teachers’ assessment of the demands of the pedagogical situation—the content of the lesson and the individual rate of learning of learners in the class. With strong differentiating pacing individual learner needs and specific contents are identified and the pace is varied accordingly. This is evidenced in Teacher B’s transmission practices.
Weak differentiating pacing occurs where the teacher makes little or no distinction between different learners’ rate of learning; learner needs and learning contents are treated as the same and the pace is held constant. Teacher A’s transmission is characterised by weak differentiating pacing.
At School B, there is strong pacing, and strong differentiating pacing. The teacher sets parallel activities, time is made available for ‘catch up’ on a Friday, and for individual learners who may lag behind in the long term, there is the provision of ‘enrichment’ classes. The teacher determines the norm according to the average child, and through strong differentiating pacing allows ‘quicker’ and ‘slower’ learners to vary the pace accordingly. ‘Repairers’, i. ‘special’ classes, are held for the slowest learners who may weaken the pacing too much.
EXTERNAL FRAMING AND THE REGULATION OF THE TEACHERS’ PRAC-
TICES
The teachers’ practices described above are embedded in different social class contexts with very different associated social relations. In this part of the article I describe this context of the teachers’ work in terms of three sets of relationships: the teacher and her peer group, the teacher and the school management, and the teacher and parents. I want to suggest a relationship between different forms of external control and internalised teacher group ethos which constitute the context of the two teachers’ work, and the different instructional practices apparent in the two classrooms.
The Teachers and their Peer Groups
In discussing weak pacing in Chicago primary schools, Smith et al. (1998, p. 13) claim that one of the salient features of these schools was the fact that teachers lacked ‘a shared conception of the instructional program overall, and of their own particular set of responsibilities for advancing it’. Generally, in the development of professional communi-
270 U. Hoadley
individual learners occurs. Collectivised orientation is not incompatible with disengaged instruction.
The Teachers and the School Management
At School A, the head of department, present in the classroom during an exercise where learners had spent 37 minutes drawing ‘their favourite animal’, remarked in reference to the length of the activity that ‘the subject advisor says that they must take as long as they need to learn. Some have had no pre-school, so they can’t move on until they know’. Earlier, Teacher A had remarked, ‘Some (of the learners) are very slow, we must wait for them’. A tenet of outcomes-based education, flowing from ‘learner-centredness’, is the principle that the learner should determine the amount of content to be covered within a given period of time and should not necessarily be subjected to external regulation. This tenet, in Teacher A’s classroom is translated into waiting until everyone has finished. So, a particular understanding of a curricular principle is taken up and shared by the HOD and teacher, and it would seem from their perspective, the subject advisor as well. Thus pedagogical consensus and a communalised peer group ethos is established. These beliefs and practices concerning teaching are unlikely to be disrupted as they are beliefs that are shared in the chain of accountability from the teacher and two rungs up (i. the HOD and the subject advisor).
Teachers and Parents
When asked about the induction of new teachers into the school, one of the primary tasks of Teacher B was to help new teachers understand how to deal with parents. ‘I tell them to know why they are teaching something, because the parents will ask. If you teach maths in a certain way, then know why you do it like that.’ Teacher B articulates the strong external framing relation between teachers and parents at School B, and how this needs to be managed.
Parents are able to exert control over what goes on in the classroom largely because they are well informed about what happens there. Communication between the home and the classroom is frequent and informative. It occurs through regular meetings, circulars and, crucially, through homework books. Teacher B mentioned repeatedly that a large part of her job was managing parents, and at times ‘fending them off’. The flip side of this, from the perspective of the teacher, is that parents are involved in the learning process. The parents learn of the expectations of them as parents (for example, listening to the child read), making sure that things are brought to school and that they are generally supportive of the children and the school ethos.
The contrasting relation between teacher and parent, or home and school, at School A is exemplified in the following episode. During the course of the morning on the second day of observation, a parent stood at the door with a baby for approximately 20 minutes before being addressed by the teacher. Later the teacher recounted the substance of the exchange:
Time to Learn 271
That mother’s child (points to girl sitting in class) has not been to school for 2 weeks. (The mother) says (the child) had tonsillitis but I know she is lying ... the children (in the class) told me that they saw her playing in the streets and that she was looking after the baby. The mother was having to go to work. So I asked her, and then I told her I knew and then she says she is so sorry, she is so sorry. I tell her that she must take the baby to relatives. She says she doesn’t have relatives, but I know she is lying. This child is not going to pass.. smell (the mother) she is drinking. The mother is the problem. I told her she must come back another day so that we can talk about this more.
Teacher A speaks repeatedly about the ‘kinds of homes’ that the children come from. The relationship is antagonistic—she states at a later stage ‘I don’t get on with these children’. Although teachers at both schools emphasise the importance of parental involvement and the home context in children’s learning, in the case of School B parents are perceived as crucial to successful learning, whereas for Teacher A parents are construed largely as a hindrance to learning. What becomes clear are the ways in which the relationship between teachers and parents at the two schools are framed. The external framing relations between teachers and parents at School A are weak, and at School B these relations are strong with respect to the home.
Much of the educational sociology literature emphasises the home as a second site of acquisition (Bernstein, 1990). Both Teacher A and B view pedagogic activity in, and support from, the home as crucial to student’s success in school. When asked what a pupil’s success or failure can be attributed to, both cite the kind of home the child comes from as the primary factor. However, one teacher constructs her practice on the basis of the functionality of this second site, and the control that comes from strong parental demand, whilst the other explains the failure of learners to attain competence as a consequence of the dysfunctional nature of the second site. Here, in the working class context, there is weak external demand on the teacher from parents, and a reported absence of supplementary pedagogic activity in the home.
Teacher A in particular shifts the locus of control dramatically to the home. Perhaps this is partly explained by the fact that she has considerable responsibility in the face of enormous odds: she has a class of 57 students; there is no remedial support or specialized services in the school; there is inadequate curricular support; and promotion policies do not ensure that the majority of learners in her class are ready for grade 3. Once the responsibility for the pedagogic performance of the learners is removed from the teacher by shifting the locus of control to the home, the urgency for learning, most explicitly viewed in terms of time and how it is spent, is removed. Things slow down, time is filled by other things. The teacher’s internalised ethos is weakened.
CONCLUSION
There are striking differences between the way teachers in the two schools use time. One key difference deals with the way in which time is specialised and utilised for learning in
Time to Learn 273
TABLE
- Instructional practices and external framing
Teacher A
Disengaged Weak Weak
Strong internal
Weak external Collectivised
School A
instruction
pacing differentiating framing with respect framing
peer group ethos
predominates
pacing
to pacing
Teacher B
Engaged
Strong Strong
Weak internal
Strong external Individualised
School B
instruction
pacing differentiating framing with respect framing
peer group ethos
predominates
pacing
to pacing
274 U. Hoadley
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Iamvery grateful to Paula Ensor and Joe Muller for the helpful discussions and generous critical comments during the preparation of this article. This research forms part of a research project ‘Pedagogy, Identity and Social Justice’ supported by the National Research Foundation under Grant Number 2053481. Any opinion, findings, conclusions and recommendations expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Research Foundation.
NOTES
[1] Edgar Stones assisted in abridging and editing the article (in the style of the journal). [2] Morais and Pires (2002) usefully explain what is meant by ‘making the evaluative criteria explicit’ thus: It consists of “... clearly telling children what is expected of them, of identifying what is missing from their textual production, of clarifying the concepts, of leading them to make synthesis and broaden concepts and considering the importance attributed to language as a mediator of the development of higher mental processes” (p. 8).
REFERENCES
BARR,R.&DREEBEN,R. (1983) How Schools Work (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press). BERNSTEIN,B. (1971) On the classification and framing of educational knowledge, in: M.F. YOUNG (Ed.) Knowledge and Control: New Directions of the Sociology of Education (London, Collier- MacMillan). BERNSTEIN,B.(1990) The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse: Class Codes and Control , Vol. IV. (London, Routledge). BERNSTEIN,B. (2000) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research and Critique (Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield). DURKHEIM,E. (1933) The Division of Labour in Society (New York, MacMillan). ENSOR, P., DUNNE, T., GALANT, J., GUMEDZE, F., JAFFER, S., REEVES,C.&TAWODZERA,G. (2002) Text- books, teaching and learning in primary mathematics classrooms, African Journal of Research in Mathematics, Science and Technology Education ,6, pp. 21–36. MORAIS,A.&PIRES,D.(2002) The what and the how of teaching and learning: going deeper into sociological analysis and intervention. Paper presented at Knowledges, Pedagogy and Society, the Second International Basil Bernstein Symposium, University of Cape Town, 17–19 July.
Time to learn: Pacing and the external framing of teachers' work 1
Course: Business Research (BBC 4980)
University: University of the East (Philippines)
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