Bridging the Public and Private in the Study of Teaching: Revisiting the Research Argument

In this essay, Rachel Schachter and Donald Freeman present the familiar problem in studying and improving teaching: how to connect what teachers know and think with what they do as they teach. They outline how research on the public and private worlds of teaching has become bifurcated, with the private side of the work often disconnected from observable practices, and contend that focusing on how public actions and private reasoning are connected is crucial to more fully understanding teaching. They revisit stimulated recall as a research procedure that connects the public and private in teaching, reviewing how it has been used in studying teachers' decision-making and questioning assumptions that generally frame the procedure as a means of data collection. This critique distinguishes stimulated recall as a procedure for collecting data from the claims and the justifications on which it is based. In shifting the basis of the approach, Schachter and Freeman argue that the procedure offers a practical vehicle for researchers to use in both connecting the two worlds and repositioning the role of teachers in the study of their work.