A reflective ? analytic teacher education device fosters changes in representations and teaching performance in activities related to children´s comprehension and production of narrative

MANRIQUE, M. S

Harvard - Massachussets

Encuentro; Proleer Annual Meeting; 2013

Harvard University - Center of the Developing Child

A pedagogic device was designed and implemented with the double purpose of studying: 1- teachers´ learning processes and their relation with changes in their representations and performance and 2- the pedagogical device that promoted those changes. The device dealt with elementary teachers´ competences at promoting children´s comprehension and production of narrative discourse. For four months, 14 teachers and three headmasters from two low ? income elementary schools in Argentina took part in the device. The device had two instances: group and individual. The group activities focused on providing information related to the psychological processes the children carry out to understand and produce narrative and the way in which they learn these abilities, and on training teachers´metacognitive competence:the ability to analyze their own comprehension process when reading in order to be able to pose adequate questions to guide children´s meaning making process. The individual instance pointed at training teachers´reflective and analytic competence: through the watching and analyzing of their own performance in class at story reading and retelling of personal experiences (which had been previously video-taped). The process of change of one of the participants´representations and performance will be presented, described, and analyzed. All the activities she took part in were filmed and recorded, and transcribed in detail. A qualitative analysis over the individual and group instances was carried out employing an abductive method. To analyze changes in performance, the activities of story reading and retelling of personal experiences previous and posterior to the device were compared.The results showed changes in the teacher´s performance related to instrumental and social dimensions (time devoted to particular participants to develop their narrative, turn assignment, task assignment to different participants, type of questions asked, focus on process). Changes in the teacher´s representations were also registered as regards the meaning she assigns to the activity for the children´s learning and her role in it. Last, some hypothesis are drawn up to explain aspects that might have made these changes possible.