Ideas from philosophy, developmental psychology, cognitive
psychology, and teacher education are molded into a description of
exceptional teaching. Especially important for establishing a model of
exceptional teaching is Habermas's (1970) theory of knowledge-constitutive
interests. Specifically, Habermas's three knowledgeconstitutive
interests (technical, practical, and emancipatory) are
expected to define wisdom in teaching. By adopting technical, practical,
and emancipatory knowledge as the basis for a model of exceptional
teaching this study will extend some current descriptions of exceptional
teaching (i.e., Berliner, 1986) that define exceptional teaching as
expertise. Evidence for this conclusion stems from the results of a
principal components analysis on respondents' ratings of descriptors of
"wise" teaching, as compared to the results from a principal components
analysis on respondents' ratings of descriptors of "expert" teaching.
Wise teaching seems to involve all three of Habermas's ways of knowing,
whereas, "expert" teaching involves practical and especially technical
ways of knowing. Therefore, the difference between "wise" and "expert"
teaching seems to be in what Habermas has called emancipatory knowing. A
second set of findings supports the above findings by showing that
teachers hypothesized to be closer to the prototype of a wise teacher
(department heads) utilize their "wisdom" in response to two general
questions about education; whereas, a sample of teachers who were not
department heads and a sample of student teachers do not utilize these
three ways of knowing to the same extent. The difference between the
three samples of teachers was primarily in the use of emancipatory
knowledge by the department heads. In a third set of findings a teacher
hypothesized to be "wise" was observed to determine whether or not
Habermas's three ways of knowing were evident in her teaching practice.
This was found to be the case. The general conclusion from the present
study is that a comprehensive description of exceptional teaching seems
to be possible based upon people's everyday conceptions of what it means
to be a "wise" teacher. Thus, an empirical model is provided for future
research on exceptional teaching. This empirical model seems to best fit
into a developmental framework based on constructivism because the
essence of constructivist descriptions of exceptional teachers (e.g.,
Arlin, 1993; Lee, 1993; Prawat 1992) correspond closely with the present
description of exceptional teachers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/8866 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Mitchell, Jeffrey Lorne |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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