1-Introduction

Our Conception of Teaching

The practices of teaching, counseling, institutional leadership, and the other service professions in the College of Education are complex. Each of them has been referred to as an “impossible practice” (Cohen, 1988). These practices are “impossible” for three reasons. First, the definition of success is always changing. New insights, political winds, and other things contribute to new ideas about the desired outcomes of these professions. Second, the success of these professions is predicated on the performance of its clients’ recognition that there is room for improvement. Third, human improvement is regularly difficult and always requires mental and emotional energy and effort. Practicing each of these professions involves dealing with their uncertainties and, to paraphrase Cohen, to “practice adventurously;” that is, to create an individual conception of good practice through reason and reflection and act upon that conception of good practice in our daily work. The development of adventurous practice can only be accomplished through a thorough recognition and understanding of the complexity of a practice, and the ability and willingness to make difficult decisions and act upon them for principled reasons. Although we use teaching as the primary lens for focusing thoughts in the framework below, we believe the triadic relationship between provider, client, and goal exists for each of the helping professions and that the same relationships guide practice across education-related professions.

In the Aims of Education, Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “What you teach, teach thoroughly.” (Whitehead, 1929). This short sentence guides the development and implementation of the teacher education program at Winona State University. We use this statement to guide the creation and assessment of teacher education programs and to guide faculty in the course of their own teaching. We take teaching seriously, model our dedication for our students, and expect them to develop and demonstrate traits and dispositions associated with quality—thorough and adventurous—teaching. But what do we mean by teaching something thoroughly? Hawkins (Hawkins, 1974) suggested teaching can be described as a triadic relationship between teachers, students, and content. Historically, those three things have been studied individually. The power of this model, however, lies in the interactions among these elements, not the elements themselves (Lampert, 2001; Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005; Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005). Figure 1 shows a modified version of a model presented by Lampert (2001) in which she presents the relationship between the three elements of classroom instruction.

Figure 1



Teachers’ interaction with and understanding of content, their interaction with and understanding of students, and students’ interaction with and understanding of content, as well as their understanding of instructional and assessment methods, all contribute to a thorough understanding of teaching. And when teachers can bring them together in a coherent, thorough understanding of teaching, they can forge a practice of teaching that fully reflects its complexity. To help us present our conceptual framework we have labeled these relationships the intellectual, psychological, social-moral, and pedagogical dimensions of teaching.

When we speak of teaching thoroughly at Winona State, we speak of our mission to help students in our professional education programs understand the influence of each dimension upon learning and teaching, from the perspective of both their current learning process and their future practice. Having labeled theses dimensions separately however, we strive to be continually mindful that they are characterized by interaction much more so than by separation. For we also hold that the practice of teaching and learning is by its very nature dynamic. Much like the legendary butterfly that flaps its wings in South America and creates a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, a change in one dimension will almost always affect other dimensions within a specific context as well as influence long term conceptions of teaching practice.