Design: Real-World Research

The value of adopting a real-world design for exploring teacher expertise is two- fold. First, real-world research is better suited to investigating applied—including teacher—expertise. Second, real-world settings are more relevant for exploring gaze.

7.3.1.1.Design: Real-World Gaze

Vision researchers have recently been calling for real-world studies (Risko, Laidlaw, Freeth, Foulsham & Kingstone, 2012), underscoring the difference between real- world and simulated gaze (Schilbach, 2015). The difference between schematic drawings of and images of real human faces is significant, as shown by Hietanen and Leppänen (2003) who used both types of stimuli as cues for gaze direction. Human adult gaze follows the direction of schematic faces more readily than images of real faces, which authors suggested is due to the additional social ‘noise’ present in real images. The viewer is distracted by subtle features in the image of the real face—the potential age or ethnicity of the viewed person, for example. Whilst laboratory processes are useful for factoring out such ‘distractions’ of the real-world, applied research into professional behaviours like classroom teaching need to take into account the many dynamics that will always be present. Greater ecological validity is therefore more relevant to the present thesis. In support, viewers are more likely to detect emotions in videoed faces than in static images of the same emotion (Schultz & Pilz, 2009, 2010; ), echoing the efficacy of greater approximations of real-world experiences of social gaze to obtain true responses in each given directional or emotional scenario. Furthermore, mimicry—or learning—responses in the brain take place more readily in response to dynamic faces than static stimuli (Sato & Yoshikawa, 2007).

Laboratory and naturalistic settings also yield different gaze patterns. In one study, university students were individually asked to walk along a designated path while wearing a mobile eye-tracker. During this time, a pedestrian passed them by (‘walking’ condition;

Foulsham, Walker & Kingstone, 2011). The following week, participants returned to be shown a video of a pedestrian ‘passing by’, while their eye movements were recorded by the desktop (i.e., static) eye-tracker (‘watching’ condition). Authors found that students distributed their gaze across a larger area and gazed at each target—especially the pedestrian—for shorter durations in the walking condition. The difference between the social gaze—viewing other people—in the laboratory and in the real-world was thus obvious: the potential for one’s gaze to make an impact on the social situation in the real- world is absent and irrelevant in the laboratory. Teacher attention necessarily involves gaze towards other people, namely students, and must be expected to differ in the real- world compared with the laboratory. Therefore the value of an investigation into teachers’ real-world use of eye gaze is clear.

The real-world is also the most representative setting for exploring communicative gaze. The ease of designing and simulating procedures resembling attentional gaze is demonstrated by the availability of such studies. However, simulating full interactions— in which communication, or information-giving—takes place is more difficult to

represent. In the real-world, people adjust their messages, verbal and non-verbal,

according to the morphing cues and reactions given by their audiences. That is, while we are talking (giving information), we are all the while observing (seeking information), monitoring whether and how we should be conveying new information or amending the manner in which we deliver our message (cf. Hietanen & Leppänen, 2003). Indeed, Hietanen et al. (2008) found the presence of a real person to activate whole neurological systems of motivation, whereas the image of a person did nothing at all. It is clear that it would be extraordinarily difficult to simulate the whole classroom experience that is central to teaching in laboratory conditions.

For expertise, a number of researchers have highlighted the importance of going into the real-world context in order to examine professional expertise. Dreyfus and Dreyfus (2005) define expertise development as the appropriation of one’s behaviour to the real-world situation. In this view, isolated laboratory experiences do not accumulate to bring—and do not constitute valid experiences for exploring—genuine expertise.

Correspondingly, Sternberg outlines the prototype view of expert teaching by citing strictly real-world examples to illustrate each point (Sternberg & Horvath, 1995).

Ericsson (2014) defines expertise as being domain-specific, emphasising the need for full reproductions of tasks in a profession for a genuine investigations of expertise (Bédard & Chi, 1992; Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996; cf. Dipboye & Flanagan, 1979; Ilgen, 1985; Levitt & List, 2006). Hence the extensive expertise investigations into chess, medical imagery and musical sight-reading—all of which can be fully simulated in the laboratory—where much expertise research has taken place, but little on complex professions such as

classroom teaching. Related, all teacher expertise research has been conducted in the real- world, much of which has been qualitative and case study based (e.g., Livingston & Borko, 1989). What laboratory research has been conducted have utilised real-world stimuli, such as videos of classroom events that themselves took place in real-world classrooms (e.g., Wolff et al., in press).

The real-world is too complex for laboratory processes to be likened to performance of the same task in naturalistic settings—and teaching is a notoriously complex profession (e.g., Berliner, 2001) which is best explored within the context of the profession (i.e., real-world classrooms; Rich, 1993). As such, teacher expertise has a particular need of real-world investigation for a valid map of teachers’ classroom

behaviour. Moreover, since intuition has proven to be one major facet of teacher expertise (e.g., Berliner, 2004; Rubin, 1989), and if intuition is synonymous with tacit (i.e.,

practical) intelligence (Wagner & Sternberg, 1985), then one must explore this practical- level of teacher behaviour in the practical arena, namely the real-world classroom. Related to the greater intuition that expert teachers have is their stronger decision-making compared with novices (e.g., Fadde, 2007). Accordingly, part of the decision-making literature has long taken their research into the real-world, in order to obtain a valid and representative problem domain. In particular, Gary Klein has led the Naturalistic

Decision-Making movement (NDM, since Klein, 1993), which is characterised by pursuit of what expert decision-makers do on a process-level (i.e., the stages of decision-making and looking beyond the aggregated, ultimate decision made), in-situation and in-context basis (Lipshitz, Klein, Orasanu & Salas, 2001). Moreover, the NDM framework

acknowledges and emphasises the fundamentally different decision-making processes of the complex, time-pressured task in contrast to the simple, slower and more ponderous tasks (Klein & Klinger, 1991), with the former requiring an entirely different research approach: this applies to teaching.