About half of the stories these teachers told were warning to others about various aspects of
classroom teaching. Cheryl, for example, states that “Other students…warned you about it ahead of
time.” These warnings were embedded in discussions of things that happen in classrooms. Stories that serve this function include “Scary kids,” “Funner,” “ Ant Bites,” “ Please Not Today,” “ Just Thrown In,” “ An Issue of Security,” “ Unexpected Behavior,” “ Sometimes It‟s Not the Kids,” “ No Help,” and “The Fish Died.” There were no partial stories that seemed to warn about classroom challenges. All of the
appropriated horror stories and most of the personal horror stories identified in the structural analysis seemed to serve this function. Characters in these stories included classroom teachers, beginning teachers, parents and children. As one would expect, most of the teachers portrayed in these stories are incompetent. Only the classroom teacher in “Unexpected Behavior” is portrayed as competent. Not surprisingly, the topics for these stories are primarily classroom management with a hint of instructional concerns in “Funner” and “The Fish Died.”
The reason these stories were identified as warning was that when these stories were told, there were reactions from other teachers that indicated surprise or disbelief. An exchange between Hannah and Betty after Hannah has shared her story of “Unexpected Behavior” demonstrates this:
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Hannah: There was one boy who she really, really adored. He was really a good student. Always made straight a‟s and never had a b. And she has a behavior log and when you do something really bad, you have to sign the behavior log. And this really good student, one day she was talking to someone else, and this kid belches in the other kid‟s face. And she goes that‟s too much, just go sign the book. And the kid like drops on to the floor.
Betty: Are you serious?
Hannah: And she said that happens sometimes. That’s what a classroom is really like.
(group interview, lines 176-182)
Another example of this is when Cheryl relates “Scary Kids” and Hannah reacts to it:
Cheryl: I told the teacher, like we discussed it with the teacher. And the other person that had the gun group, she showed the papers to the teacher and actually they had another child today in another group that did the gun thing. The teacher talked to them about what was appropriate to do in school and what wasn‟t appropriate. But to tell them do their fantasy world and then they draw a big gun shooting at somebody, that‟s kind of scary.
Hannah: Yeah, that makes you think.
Cheryl: Yeah, that’s kind of scary. (group interview, lines 52-58)
The fact that these stories are serving to warn others about teaching problems is important because researchers believe that functions such as this provide insight into how these teachers are evaluating their beliefs concerning schools, students, and teaching practice (Armstrong, 2007; Bullough, 2007; Connelly & Clandinin, 1999). This is significant because Downey (2008) found that pre-service teachers display a confirmational bias during their field experiences because they tend “…to search for or interpret information in a way that supports existing beliefs while at the same time ignoring or
reinterpreting disconfirming evidence” (p. 2). The following comments indicate that these teachers may be engaging in just such a practice when making sense of their experiences with students:
Cheryl: …They throw you into a school with children who all have some kind of special need. And it‟s not a regular classroom, it‟s not a realistic setting that they provide for you
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to teach in and it’s very hard to get used to something like that. Especially when you
weren’t taught that way. You weren’t taught to go into a school like that. You weren‟t taught to teach the way they want you to teach…Most people agree with me and find it very, very hard. I mean I like the fact that I only have three kids to a group but those three kids, it‟s like you have to constantly get on them and say pay attention. Do your work. Pay attention. Pay attention. Jeffery, stop. Wesley, stop trying to shoot me with your pen. It‟s hard.
Donna: I think that goes along with, after you get your degree, you need to make sure of
the whole school philosophy that kind of you fit into it, cause if you don’t agree with how
they’re teaching something, you’re going to be kind of lost in that school.
Sally: You’re not going to fit in. It takes time to learn what's going on.
Donna: And because their thing, I think they‟re trying to push their whole method of their school on you, like their method that they‟re using in their school is the best and that you should go teach there. You should try to adapt your style to their style. And I don‟t think
that‟s right. I mean, if you don’t agree with a certain teaching style (Alice: yeah) like I
said before, you even shouldn’t go fool with a school like that. (group interview, lines 94-
114)
At another point in the interview, Donna offers “…like one methods teacher, she taught in another
state and different places like that and she‟ll give us stories about what they did there. I don’t plan on ever
teaching in another state. If I move, I‟ll never teach there” (group interview, lines 382-386). Similarly,
Betty states, “But that was like a shocker, you know, cause I don’t want to deal with parents who come in
to beat up a child” (lines 451-452, group interview). After Betty makes that statement, Cheryl adds the following point of view:
She gave us a lot of info on like, diversity and stuff, that I never had to deal with cause I
went to a very mixed school, public school. And I never had to deal with any of that. So
it‟s like the stuff she was trying to tell us and trying to teach us, the case studies we would get, I felt was useless to me because I never had to deal with problems of diversity. I never had that issue. So it‟s like that that story she told us about um, it was a
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predominantly white school or something and they had a little black child that was going there and he got beat up at the bus stop or whatever. And his parent went to go beat up the child that beat him up. And it created this whole issue of security and all of that stuff.
So it‟s like I thought, I mean I thought it was interesting but for me, it wasn’t realistic
because I never experienced that. (group interview, lines 453-461)
From the second personal interview, the following comments reflect the assertion that what they university teachers are telling will not match what they anticipate happening in their own classrooms as well:
Cheryl: They (the stories) don’t match what you’ll probably be doing in your classroom. I
don‟t think I‟ll ever be working with students like some of the ones I‟m working with now so I don‟t think those stories will help me directly but I might come across something just like it and it may help me a little bit. (personal interview, lines 26-27)
Hannah: Things that don’t match my philosophy I tend to ignore. (personal interview, line
50)
Some researchers contend that sharing stories in settings such as these, however, are essential for exploring such beliefs (Amobi & Irwin, 2009; Baker & Shahid, 2003; Butler et al., 2006). Gregory (2009) maintains that “…raw experience unmediated by reflection, theories and thought can teach us little” (p. 49). Gudwin concurred and offered that “It was unmistakable that the sharing of student teaching experiences in weekly sessions, coupled with debriefing, made an impact on the subjects” (2002, page 29). This is important because Marks (2007) found that initial beliefs were the biggest barrier to pre-service teachers‟ transfer of learning from the university to the classroom.
What is troublesome about this, however, is the fact that so many of these stories do not demonstrate successful resolution to the story dilemma nor do the teachers indicate that they have sought ways to resolve these dilemmas. In all, three warning stories were contradicted (“Scary Kids,”
“Funner” and “Now They Respect Her”), two warning stories confirmed one another(“Please Not Today”
and “The Fish Died”), the topic shifted after three warning stories(“Ant Bites,” “An Issue of Security,” and
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that, for the majority of these stories, there was no attempt to solve the management or instructional issues presented.
What is interesting about these stories is that some of these teachers seemed to want to engage
in such discussions. When Cheryl related“Scary Kids,” for example, Donna countered with“Creating
Suspense”to explain what Cheryl was observing. When Betty related“Just Thrown In,”Alice shared a
story that paralleled the structure of Betty‟s story but had a different ending (“Now They Respect Her”).As
noted earlier, none of these teachers indicated that they participated in specific debriefing activities in their university courses but these interactions seem to indicate that pre-service teachers would engage in such discussions if given the proper environment and opportunity.
This could have an impact on the storyteller‟s sense of efficacy because Witcher et al. (2002) maintain that to change pre-service teachers‟ beliefs, teacher educators must create situations that allow them to experience success with desired methodologies. These researchers go on to point out that “Efficacy influences educational beliefs, interventions that appropriately increase or decrease levels of efficacy may lead to desired shifts in educational belief” (p. 21). Based on these stories and the conversation that surrounds them, it appears that these teachers are not experiencing success in their field teaching and are not exploring these challenges in any meaningful way in the university classes. In other words, they have these stories but no place to process them in any useful way. This is not to say that the university teachers are not attempting to do this, but rather that the teachers do not seem to perceive the connection between such university activities and these stories of experience. Instead the teachers are engaging in reflective activities with peers who may not have any answers for their
problems.
This is significant because researchers have found that it is incumbent on the teacher educator to facilitate this process (Amobi & Irwin, 2009; Baker & Shahid, 2003; Connelly & Clandinin, 1999; Richards & Gipe, 1998). When teacher educators fail to address these issues, the pre-service and beginning teachers are left to interpret classroom events in ways that may be counter-productive.
Britzman, for example, found that when beginning teachers do not confront these challenges, they usually resort to “the ideology of blaming the victim and ultimately promote a simplistic understanding of the operation of power in educational life” (2003, p. 237).
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So these warning stories reflect critical issues these teachers are dealing with in their field experiences. The most important finding is that these teachers do not seem to engage in systematic processing of these experiences in a way that helps them begin thinking more productively about teaching.