The Web of Pre-Conceived Notions about Expected Answers: Pre-Service Teachers’ Struggles

Abstract

The root of the web of pre-conceived notions of teachers about the answersexpected from the learners may be located in the Herbartian lesson-planning. The repetitive, inflexible structure of the Herbartian lesson-plan may be suitable for the content delivery and instructional frameworks of learning. But, this Herbartian model of designing teaching-learning processes has its own limitations, if we are thinking about developing culture of science in the science classrooms. The web of pre-conceived notion about the expected answers is weaved not just by the Herbartian lesson-planning. These notions might develop due to various other factors. These factors include (but are not limited to) the pressure to complete syllabus in specified time-frames, the notion of science represented in the textbooks and reference books, the fixed notion about nature of science, societal view of science to be exact and precise, personal views of teachers and learners about scientific concepts, tools and techniques of evaluation, interaction gap between realscientists and teaching-learning contexts etc.One of the researchers from this team worked for more than eight years developing an alternative to this Herbartian framework. The learning strands framework described in the introduction part of this paper helped him giving an alternative way to write specific objectives in place of much celebrated Bloom’s Taxonomy.  In the present study the teachers have planned their classroom proceedings this framework which allows for strengths of informal environments to be used in formal classroom settings. The study focuses on preservice teacher’s natural dispositions towards “Could Come Out of the Pre-conceived Notion of Expected Answer”in terms of Teacher's Gender, Nature of School Management and School Type. In the study relevant graphs related to this focus have been drawn and interpreted. ‘Statistical Descriptives’ of the same have also been interpreted as part of the study. The study did not find any significant difference in pre-service teachers’ response to “Could Come Out of the Pre-conceived Notion of Expected Answer”in terms of Teacher's Gender, Nature of School Management and School Type. During the earlier attempts to explore the alternative framework to Herbartian lesson-planning there had been research gaps. The research gap related to some factors affecting teachers’ attempt to “Come Out of the Pre-conceived Notion of Expected Answer” has been explored. The present study contributes to the understanding of this aspect in the specific context of the alternative framework to Herbartian lesson-planning developed by one of the researchers of this team and applied in eighteen schools.