Appendix C: The reflective practitioner
third grades. Their interest in students’ out-of-school experiences grew out of three more basic questions
about teaching, which they phrased like this:- How can curriculum remain open to children's unique experiences and connect with the world they know
outside the school? Too often, the official school curriculum lacked meaning for children because it seemed
cut off from the rest of the world. The result was unmotivated students and poor learning. - Why is imaginative experience the best starting place for planning? The teachers felt that imaginative
experiences—make-believe play, stories, poems—provided access to children's lives outside school—their
make-believe play, or their stories or poems. Perhaps somehow these could be connected to the goals of the
official curriculum. - What happens when teachers break down the barriers between school knowledge and real knowledge? In
drawing on children's outside experiences, would children actually become more motivated or not? Would
they take over the program, and fail to learn the official curriculum goals?
To answer these questions, the teachers kept extensive diaries or journals for one entire school year. These
became the “data” for the research. In the journals, they described and reflected on their daily teaching
experiences. The teachers also talked with each other extensively about classroom events and their significance,
and the results of the conversations often entered the journals eventually during the research. In their journal,
for example, the teachers recorded an experience with students about ways of telling time. In preliminary
discussions the students became interested in how a sundial worked. So the teachers and students went outside,
where they created a human sundial, using the students themselves. The teachers' journal kept a chronicle of
these events, and noted the comments and questions which students developed as a result: - If you stood in the same place for a whole day you would see your shadow change places because the earth
changes position. - Why is my shadow longer than I am in the evening, but shorter at noon?
- Clouds can block the sun's rays so sundials won't work on rainy days.
- How did people start to tell time?
As the year evolved and observations accumulated and were recorded, the teachers gradually began to
answer their own three questions. They found, for example, that connecting the curriculum with children's
interests and motives was most effective when they could establish a personal bond with a child. They also
found that imaginative expression helped certain children to feel safe to explore ideas. They found that
blending school-based and personal knowledge caused children to learn much more than before—although
much of the additional knowledge was not part of an official curriculum. With these conclusions in mind, and
with numerous examples to support them, Clifford and Friesen published their study so that others could
share what they had learned about teaching, learning, and students.
The study by Clifford and Friesen is interesting in its own right, but for our purposes think for a moment about
their work as an example of action research. One of its features is that it formed part of the normal course of
teaching: the authors were simply more systematic about how they observed the students and recorded information