Intentions, Problems and Dilemmas: Assessing Teacher Knowledge through a Case Method System

This paper grew out of a concern for the discrepancies that currently exist between what we accept as evidence of teacher knowledge on teacher tests and what we are learning from cognitive science and ethnographic studies of classrooms about teacher thinking. We are recognizing, as never before, that teaching is extremely complicated. It is not linear. Teachers draw from many sources of knowledge they have acquired in many ways throughout their lives to make sense of classroom life, to take deliberate action, to create intentions, and to respond to problems and dilemmas. We know that both students and teachers mediate the understandings (both students' and teachers') that emerge from mutual efforts to learn in classrooms. We know that teachers have intentions for learners, both individually and collectively, that go beyond the acquisition of information about, or even true understanding, of subject matter. Although subject matter is important to teachers, so is the personal development and social responsibility of their charges. We know that teachers must be concerned with questions of morality, ethics, and social justice and often attempt to foster an understanding of these matters in their students. We know also that teachers may give up their intentions, or modify them drastically, as they are confronted with problems and dilemmas that may emerge from the competing and often conflicting demands of the classroom. Knowing how to teach a topic effectively does not ensure that one has the capacity to do so while pursuing multiple and often competing goals and responding to the daily events of classroom life. I am reminded of an analogy drawn by Duffy (1982) when he returned to classroom teaching during a sabbatical from the university. He likened teaching in an elementary classroom to "fighting alligators." Building on the then-popular poster that said, "When you're up to your elbows in alligators, it's hard to remember that your original objective was to clear the swamp!" he noted the difficulty of enacting "best practice" when confronted with the spontaneity of classroom life. The mark of truly competent teachers is their ability to respond to problems in ways that are consistent with original intentions in the face of the alligators. Rather than responding in fragmented ways and being diverted from their original intentions when they confront instructional problems, such teachers use classroom events as occasions for reconstructing their goals in order to achieve multiple intentions for learners. Teachers have a variety of strategies for achieving their intentions for students--over time. That is, they understand that individual lessons and units of instruction provide