Teachers' Images and Narratives of Good Teachers: An Interpretive Inquiry

Abstract

Despite significant amounts of rhetoric and research on the importance of good teachers, little attention has been paid to how practicing teachers conceptualize what it means to be a good teacher. Using a research process informed by philosophical hermeneutics, this study explores the experiences of practicing teachers in order to better understand the phenomenological aspects of being a good teacher. Although the phrase good teacher continues to defy simple definition and was even actively avoided by the participants, their stories of classroom experiences begin to reveal how the concepts of flow and Bildung might provide helpful language and concepts to frame the intuitive, often wordless experiences of teachers. By focusing on the images and narratives teachers used to describe their understandings, the reflexive notions of seeing and being seen, reading and being read came to the fore. These ideas contribute in new ways to the ongoing conversations about teacher assessment and teacher self-assessment.